Gustav Klimt Goldfish (detail)

Gustav Klimt Goldfish (detail)Salvador Dali TigerSalvador Dali The Sacrament of the Last Supper
FAREWELL, said Bill Door solemnly, and left.
Simnel shut the doors after him, and leaned against them. Whew. Nice man. of course, everyone was talking about him, it was that the spanner sheared in two, as though it was made of bread, several inches from the edge of the blade.
He wondered if something could be so sharp that it began to possess, not just a sharp edge, but the very essence of sharpness itself, a field of absolute sharpness that actually extended beyond the last atoms of metal.
‘Bloody hell ‘
And then he remembered that this was sloppy and superstitious just that after a couple of minutes in his presence you got a pins-and-needles sensation that someone was walking over your grave and it hadn’t even been dug yet. He wandered across the oily floor, filled the tea kettle and wedged it on a corner of the forge. He picked up a spanner to do some final adjustments to the Combination Harvester, and spotted the scythe leaning against the wall. He tiptoed towards it, and realised that tiptoeing was an amazingly stupid thing to do. It wasn’t alive. It couldn’t hear. It just looked sharp. He raised the spanner, and felt guilty about it. By Mr Door had said - well, Mr Door had said something very odd, using the wrong sort of words to use in talking about a mere implement. But he could hardly object to this. Simnel brought the spanner down hard.There was no resistance. He would have sworn, again,