My hands ached with the burdeon of the article. They hovered over the page like a pair of crows feet, splayed out painfuly, made lithe and surreal by the pilot light. Forced to creep across the cracked and flaying veneer of my work table. Absent mindedly I flicked the light on and off, watching my hands become something more than there temporary shape of corpuscules, straining to free themselves. There retreat terrified me, yet releived me; its return soothed me, palliatively, but came as a reminder of the resent I held for our world. Finally I allowed my hands to rest upon the lurid white of papermate looseleaf, and joined their dark doubles, linking together in a basket of catharsis. I slumped over my work, and let the white light hovering to my right envelop the entirety of my abdomen. Resting my head in the goblet of my hands, I peered sidelong, at my pitch black freind. I had heard for a while the chirping of crickets, the howling of wolves, and the elctronic voice, now chittering out a familiar message: Night has arrived. Night come to rescue these weary souls, all nuzzled together in barried substrates, some sleeping, some eating, or reading or crying. My hovel was a recommandeered storm drain, fitted with a plywood and laminate floor, inset lights, painted with my own hand. Because I was free here, isolated in solidarity with earths other inhabitants, I could do with the place what I wanted. And thus the walls were layered with oil paint sketches, jottings in ink, shadings of graphite. If I were ever to have a guest, they knew the place for its decrepit nature. They knew that the laminate bubbled and peeled, and curled under the force of the babbling brook. They knew that the flooring was a balancing board in a tube of rust water, beautifaly lapping and gushing, warbling as the sparrows once did. Singing songs of dying gutters and innards of citys and retension ponds. They saw their forms bowed over one another, curling to meet their toes, across the arc of the semi-circle. I picked up an empty mason-jar, and read the label in french and english. I like to do this to keep my bilingular state. Marmelade. The vitrial glass of the wide mouthed vessal showed no signs of age, but the lip sloughed ever so slightly, the glass unable to retain its solid state. I walked over to the broken porcelan protuberance to the left of my desk. Turning a valve, I held the jar weakly under the taps intermittent slew, and leased a generous helping of cold subterranean water into it. I peered through the water, clearer than I could honestly beleive. I saw a cheery looking young man, swarthy in his basketball shorts, and long sleeve shirt. He looked rather dowdy, but a man of his neatly good looks would have been allowed this small crime. Enigma trounces convention. This was not me, so it was the reflection of a freind transfixed within my own fair complexion and features. “Oh Tom!”, I exclaimed, “you scared me!”. “It wasnt my intention, and Im sorry if I did, but I did knock”. |