Simeon Enfield made up his own coat of arms. Not given much to heraldry and certainly no toff, he just wanted to embody himself in something impressive, something symbolic. The world as it was dragged him down with the trappings of mediocrity and now he wanted, even as a secret only he would know, an exotic emblem.
So he took words he liked, words that described him, and wove them into his alter ego, his knightly self.
Terse, cogent, salient.He was a man of few words. Didn’t have a lot to say. He thought maybe that was because he liked to think of himself as the strong and silent type. He feared, though, that he lacked imagination. Terse seemed to say it all: his few words, perhaps to the point, perhaps at a loss for more, covered up with impatience.
But cogent, he was that surely. Well, if he could muster an argument, it would be convincing. He could do that and seem forceful with it. The appeal to reason was always his strategy.
Salient, he felt, described him correctly. He had looked it up in Merriam-Webster’s and felt good about its meaning. He was, of course, not physically noticeable or striking, but he felt that he could claim some kind of relevance. In his own unobtrusive way, he mattered.
He researched and researched. Late into the night, he sketched and drew. In time, it emerged. Now he slept with it hung above his modest divan bed in his unassuming bedroom, in his middle-class apartment, in his quiet backwater cul-de-sac. Above his bed, watching over him in repose, his coat of arms. Unregistered. Unacknowledged. A complete invention. Satisfied, Simeon smiled in his sleep.
Argent on a fess sable, a salamander terse between a lion gules cogent with hippogriff azure salient.
© BH 2013
I wrote this for Andy McCallum Crawford's last call for writings. At the time, once I'd written it, it seemed, well, not quite the thing.
And yet, re-reading it, I had the sense of a sad, dysfuntional fellow searching for somebodyness. A self-portrait, naw: I've never longed for armorial bearings. Besides, hippogriffs is oot.
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