Fox in a Cul-de-Sac

Fade in:

Fusty living room. Crepuscular light. 

Loud swelling radio chatter, multiple frequencies: reports of war, a horse race, cricket scores, market updates, easy listening music, someone reciting maths. 

A woman affecting classical statue poses. A man sitting on an easy chair reading a newspaper.

W: What did the news have to say today, dear?

M: There were poems received from cyberspace. They popped up for two seconds and were cantilevered out of sight to another spot for later reckoning.

W: What? What are you on about, dear?

M: The poems came at the seating of the regent… underneath her rococo underpants… there was gaseous effluvia…

W: Are you ok, dear? Are you not feeling yourself?

M: Oh, the court was stoic while the noxious twankery spread through the room. But who was keeping count, the farceurs? They were arrivistes!

W: My goodness you’re running a fever.

M: Leave me be! Where was the Count? Oh yeah, mounted on the lady in waiting.

W: My god! What are you on about?

M: Oh, yes! Wading in the darkness behind the draperies! How to gruntle her highness — with her head in a sling — when like a fox in a cul de sac she’s hounded — penned in like a boar between arches — to the end of the line she dons her monocle without that paterfamilias aplomb! She croons! She croons a Bing Crosby scat-a-tat bo-see-do.

W: Nevil! Sit down! Put that back—

M: Oh, do make some sense?! You flatten my patience with that utter garble of yarbol warbles. Please, please, please let me get what I want—

W: What on earth do you want? Sit down, and put that back in your drawers!

M: Some sense from you! A semblance of balance — a discernible emprise! Don’t be a silly wicket, spewing snubberdigibblets of nonsense and frou frou foo!

W: Nevil! Pants back on!

M: Don’t be a slugabed, you say! Oh, don’t be a sluggard… Or! You’re a braggart all drugged up with words… well, I’m free to walk about without pants, without fear of brigandage and without your loquacious bagpipes of babble!

W: Stop.

M: Won’t stop.

W: No, stop.

M: I won’t.

W: Well. Don’t.

Fade out.

What I’m Reading:

My hair loses its atoms.

My body glows

in the dark.

Planets are smashed

into oblivion,

stripped of their power

to name things.

— Joshua Jennifer Espinoza / “This Is What Makes Us Worlds”