She understands nothing. She tries, squint-eyed, to turn her brain over. Without spark, the ignition doesn’t catch.
She sees herself, monochromatic, on the screen of her childhood 1974 Panasonic TV. Her father talks globular in this most rectilinear city. Her father, a sick man, made connections obliquely— and spoke in harsh transient bursts.
These hyperphantasic memories consume her from all dimensions. She needs raiment for the soul but finds defenestrated appliances and tatters in desolate mounds in their stead. She walks a bray of winces in piles of miles of monticular hunger.
Nothing for the stomach and nothing for the next life. She quanders in squandered lines of obtuseness. A sign up ahead reads:
“Squelch and Skronk, $2.99/lb. Best deal in South Florida!”
She makes a beeline for the whole ball of wax — a hive of astute astringency on loan—from a god lost in this corner of the universe …
She’s lost in the reticular coldness of the attenuating picture—a cathode ray tube snow (fuzz from her childhood, circa 1974)—a muzz of voices echoing from the exhaust vent above her head. She’s one with the toilet seat now, one with her pins and needles thighs, and uncomfortably prescient.
That man from the sewer, the St. Jude statue kicker, outside her hotel room door—which is disquietingly close to the bathroom door—for hadn’t she last night passed one door where she swore she heard a fugue of wet untethered flatulence, and walking by another door heard wretched retching and moans?
Why did the man outside her door continue saying “Every day and in every way, I feel better, better, and better!” And just what was that infuriating accent?
She understood nothing.
“Shit!” Her hamstrings cramping, she limps away from the toilet—“Why have I woken up so stupid?”
She steps to the door and looks through the peephole and in one fluid motion bangs on the door: “get away hog man, get back to hog land, hog man! Get away!”
A wide-eyed sunburnt face turns mutton chop and exits viewfinder left — revealing grandmother strabismus, carnival-lipped, mouth agape, shocks of tight red curls (something akin to afro puffs, she thinks) staring into her left peephole pupil, and trailing: “Wake up to the word. Control your mind, and the world will follow.”
She saw the outline of his legs seared into the hotel corridor wall. He was braying down the hall toward reception.
She trembled and added a codicil to her note for the next guest:
“don’t stay on the ground floor of the Temptation Inn in this southern city again …”
and …
“Why did I come? How in the hell did I end up here?”
She spotted him kicking the St. Jude statue installed outside the Melkite Church on the corner. It was the same dirty and desultory man who approached her the day before.
The sky was a swirl of hazy cross-oceanic Saharan dust again. The humidity clung to her exposed skin like a hot anole’s tongue.
She wanted nothing more than to avoid him and his rants above all else. She cut down a little used access road between the two luxury bayside buildings. When she stopped and turned to insure he hadn’t seen and followed her, she fell into an underworld through the loose manhole cover she stepped on—the world ascended out of her sight into an absolute darkness which welcomed her with a jolting fetid thud. All was black and remained in oblivion for a full minute.
The smell hit her first and then the warmth of the liquid she sat in—she dry heaved and gripped her stomach until she recovered, and only then she saw the faint bioluminescence seemingly arrayed in perfect geometric shapes along the curved walls. She realized she was in the sewer.
Then she heard his voice echoing from above and beyond her line of sight—the high key dust light streaming in from the gaping maw she fell through.
In an instant his face and torso filled that vacant space, and his cackle echoed down to her and filled the dark in the sewer.
“Ah, missy,” he said. “Welcome to my town. Welcome to my home.”
He jumped into the darkness with her.
“I climb knowing the only way down is by falling. Police paved a concrete square to catch me, men wait with high-powered hoses to spray what’s left of my body down.”
— Natalie Scenters-Zapico / “The Trick Is to Pretend”
Someone said to her: “Are your avocados in the oven?”
To which she said: “Excuse me. Do I know you?”
“You are very angry, aren’t you?”
“Again, do I know you, sir?”
He moved about her in a drunken semi-circle and professed: “I am a visionary, missy. I see things you can’t imagine. Hexagons. Bike routes to heaven. Heathen paths to perdition and desolation.” He adjusted the rope he wore as a belt and riled himself up for a jeremiad, but she turned and walked away.
Clarity would wait another day. Another day in the southern city. Clear as a cross-oceanic Saharan dust storm—which are becoming regular fixtures of this anthropogenic age.
“We’re seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.”
— Elizabeth Kolbert / The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
A reverential moment passed unheeded— Post-diluvian effluvium— Forced to move aphantasic Wire weevil wonder wye Tilak-covered blind third eye
She rages wild at seeing A world bereft of meaning Muddle-mucking in the south Trapped so near the grinder’s mouth Wire weevil wonder wye
Why?
“just as part of me fears that if you love me for my cleanliness i will grow filthy if you admire my elegant clothes i’ll start wearing shirts with sailboats on them”
She woke up dumber in the new southern town than she had been in her northern home the last time she fell asleep. The intellectual disparity over those few sleepless days was astounding, many folks would later say:
“How could someone become so stupid in six short days?”
Six days filled with the lurking of one imaginary great white shark that followed her around the world. The hallucinatory sequence ended in clear tropical waters. Even though she had no son, she ran out from the safety of the white sand beach into the clear, luminous, water (a water whose color was so entrancing it had no name, merely a color code number: #22BED9 — on that code everyone could agree).
In she went after the son she didn’t have only to find herself at the bottom of an enormous darkening aquarium filled with rock outcroppings, and many great white sharks lying inert on the sand. All of them waiting for the monstrous shark that appeared from the left and swam between her and the shore — now inexplicably a half mile away …
She awoke when she heard a voice lamenting the late hour: “5:45 in the god-damned morning!” Then something about “bagels… and crowds.” But the voice belonged to her father—now dead five years, so this could not be.
She felt unalterably stupid — imbecilic — like the Stooge that couldn’t even make it past the first cattle call of tryouts for the “Curly Joe” spot that needed filling sometime in the late 1950’s.
“My goodness, I’m a fucking dolt!” She said to the popcorn on the ceiling.
She picked up her phone, went into the bathroom and composed this note on the Werdsmith app while sitting on the cold toilet:
“Happy so and so… madness so and so… I’ve drawn and quartered the last day of my old life. First, I set it in stocks and forced it to reflect on its insistence on the passage of time. I denounced it as a heretic and forced it to abjure from the heights of the glorious strappado. I singed it a bit on the pyre. I rolled it on the rack. I pilloried it, used the cudgel, prodded its eyes with a red hissing poker, beat it with the bastinado, used the Spanish boot, and finally pulled and impaled its tongue until nothing remained if it.
This will be my annus mirabilis (she had no idea what this meant anymore, but she wrote it automatically): the one by which I’ll measure the rest of my life. The pivot point. There is my life before today, and my life after — this should mean something to me.”
“People, die everyday…” There is gothic organ music swelling and ebbing in the ether. There is someone muttering “bummer” in the next room. The smell of acrid pot is wafting in on a warm eddy of air blowing under the hotel room door. There are ochres and yellows on the walls and an overall orange mood to the room. Next door someone is repeating: “people, die everyday, die everyday…” There is something important here, but I can’t decipher it — not yet — but I will.
It’s comfortably warm now and a woman is moving about, beyond my line of sight, by the bed, with pleasant food on a white tray. I sense it but I can’t see her. This is an inviting place, I feel comfortable here. But I don’t understand why it’s a “bummer” and why someone continues to repeat: “people, die everyday, die everyday…”
“Mother apron smeared with blood and flour. Mother flower. Mother Florida, the wet bone.”
The southern city was full of all manner of curvilinear impediments and drop-offs. It led to a vertiginous sensation she abhorred—it seemed as if the angry sky and sea wished to become one turbid space. She saw cloud arms descending from a fanged sky—the world was tooth and mettle and the kidney bingo would not wait. She heard the northern city beckoning her back—but it would have to wait. Wait. Weight.
“A ‘mistake’ is beside the point, for once anything happens it authentically is.”
There’s something of the sybarite about her. She plays the lute too loud and with reckless abandon — popping strings here and there and singing haltingly about fucking.
About what?
Yeah, and she eats too many moon pies in one sitting and washes them down with half a dozen milkshakes.
My god, woman! Even the Village People thought twice about doing the shake.
This is appalling and I’m whining in a Terry Thomas sort of way: I say, old chap…
You have such a limited vocabulary, and no head for figures.
May I call you Pepi?
At half past four in the afternoon? Rather!
You have a passion for rotters —
I’m jealous.
Take thy clyster pipe, syringe, and love me!
You’re being very sentimental. I will. Off we go!
“All the virtues—loyalty, patriotism, courage, honesty, faith, compassion, you name it—are just social constructs, patches to cover the naked barbarism that is at our core…”
Get away hog man get back to hog land hog man dead end
“I remember writing a poem about killing my parents and reading it to my mother. She was not very happy but she always encouraged me nonetheless. I was 12.”
thee istsfor manity reader 