The Edge

For the world is a cube and I have touched the sides...

The sun set, then rose again, then set again, then it did a little slow dance around the sky before setting for a good half an hour. No one on the entire planet could account for the sun’s bizarre movements and many tried to explain it. Always, though, the same conclusion would be reached: "Stop bloody asking me! I don’t know!"

It was the same for all sides of the cube. The truth was that the cube, sorry, Cube, spun erratically without managing to shake off all those pesky life forms that roamed its surfaces.

The majority of people were unaware of the others sides of the planet, each thinking that they lived on a flat world. But there were those who knew that the world was a cube and some of those tried to reason it away in the general terms that give metaphysics a bad name.

One theory holds that the world is a vast dice in some celestial game of craps which, they reasoned, explained everything. Another was that when the world was created God realised that the sun wouldn’t reach all the places it should so he put the planet in an erratic spin in the ultimate act of kindness. Yet another theory was that the creator spun the world into an erratic pattern because he was having a laugh and wanted to see how many people would throw up and how often. The best theory came from the Funky Philosophers who reckoned that the sun was just some big bright bug, man, and like it just kept on, sort of like, flying around, and stuff, and wow, man, did you see that cloud? It was shaped almost exactly like an ice cream cone…wow…

The skinny man, with the loose fitting pastel-shaded garments and the semi-platted straggly beard and long partially dreadlocked sandy hair, stopped his thoughtful wanderings, rested his old guitar against his right leg and rocked gently upon his flip-flops. He squinted into the distance until the sun was thoughtful enough to move out of his line of sight, then he gave in to a vacant smile.

‘Chicks,’ he sighed. ‘Yeah, man, camp full of chicks.’

He took but one step forward in the direction of the women but had to stop as a horrible scraping sound really bummed his senses. He looked down to where the sound had come from and berated himself.

‘Aw, man, my guitar, man…’

The trusty instrument was duly slung across his shoulder and he was once more free to go and check out the gorgeous ones.

‘Down, you fool! Get down!’

The man looked around slowly, saw no one, shrugged and continued.

‘Are you insane? Hide!’

‘Who there? Who you?’

The world suddenly shot up, either that or he was falling down, and the guitar made that sound that guitars tend to make when they have been dropped.

‘Be quiet and shut up and don’t say a word, okay?’

‘I can understand that of which you speak, man, but can you say why?’

The skinny man carefully retrieved the guitar, which held all of his worldly possessions, and viewed the uptight guy through blood-shot eyes. A description suggested itself to his over-worked thinking bits and it went along the lines of: Guy’s got, you know, curly hair, like. Sort of serious looking, man, bit kind of, you know, could be bit sort of, you know, dangerous and stuff. Like, the guy is hiding in a ditch copping a look at a bunch of chicks, man.

‘They,’ the uptight guy pointed in the chick direction, ‘are the most dangerous and deadly and most violent and bloodthirsty tribe you will ever, ever meet in the whole of your life, such as it is and would be a very short lived life indeed if you were to continue in yonder direction.’