The Prowler from Next Wednesday

Cats prowl as part of their essential being; humans prowl when they are up to no good; snakes don’t prowl: they slither, because prowling needs limbs with which to prowl. This is an instinct, rather than a semantic certainty, regarding the word ‘prowl’. ‘The meaning of a word is its use’, once said some famous philosopher…

Extending such an ‘instinct’, I wonder if I can prowl around this text, even through it, so as to explore the lexic undergrowth, testing the various letters’ own limbs, edges, corners, the openings into cul-de-sacs, the closed spaces within some letters themselves, the empty spaces between the end letters of consecutive words and the punctuating non-letters that text-prowlers often call slug-amoeba and dot-mites…

During the previous end-of-paragraph termite-ellipsis, I actually became such a text-prowler for real. I first found myself within the spiky long hedge of the title, reaching ‘Wednesday’ last Thursday, after much obsessive fondling of each letter: until reaching ‘Wednesday’: and it has since taken a long time till now to reach this point…

Now, suddenly, I meet a prowler — from next Wednesday, it claimed

“Are you prowling backwards?” I said, using a high-pitched, strangulated punctuation-tail rather than anything that arguably could be called a tongue.

“No, you are!” it insisted. The voice was like an abridged audio-book, as I remembered the rest of our conversation not recorded here. We indeed became friends and enemies and back to friends again during the course of two whole lifetimes, all within the space of a single paragraph. And we still play fast and loose within the tiny interstitial avenues of these very words we prowl…

I couldn’t recall which of us two prowlers first realised that the words we prowled were words about prowlers or prowlers themselves. Upon such sad realisation, we hugged as one, with a catlick-like kiss of love, before there arrived — along with a philosophically terminal termite — not only the next but also the last Wednesday…