“…when a true philosopher sits in a café and hears somebody say, ‘Let us debate this point a little bit!’ he jumps up and runs away as fast as possible.”
[Gilles Deleuze]
Archive for February, 2009
Jan floods the forest of floor slicing his trouser fabric and skin on the bent bloody nail that holds the floor to the world and the world to the floor. Ch… Ch… Ch… Christ almighty!
Luke is foetus shaped a-crying an’ a-moaning an’ a-shaking in the corner; eyes all pins and wide as windows; mouth slapped crooked open dribbling into his otherwise stone stuffed shirt pocket. Luke’s skeletal hand, knuckles white with hold-on-tight, strangles the lytel siolfor hamor against his chest. A tolling bell clatters in rope whips through the walls and the floors, through the seas and the shores, through Luke and through Jan, through the ants and the stan, through the screams and the moans, through the meat and the bones – through and through and through.
-What was it? Jan wraps his arms around Luke’s trembly shoulders.
Luke says: groans and moans, expressing all the horrors of unlifely rattles.
-A mongrel pig thing come in through the window?
-B… B… B… Bed. Luke manages a partially paralyzed stutter while slowly raising a shaky finger heavenward before turning liquid from rigid.
Jan gathers Luke up in a ball of flesh and fabric and drags him stairward pointing bedward; Luke all floppy and exhausted hangs from Jan like a cloak of soft lead, mouth still gapping and eyes a-rolling.
Jan flops Luke steak-like onto the bed – cold as a frying-pan – pulls off Luke’s dusty old brown shoes, and tucks him in.
-A fat… calliphora vomitoria. A real slimish selfy bastard. Luke says, slowly awaking from the dazey daze of rumbling aftershock.
-Er? Jan’s face is a question mark, full-stop mouth and curling eyebrows.
Luke pulls the wave of sheet tight over his mouth, eyes shifty, here and there, darting over the room like a thief.
-Has it gone? Luke asks.
-Has what gone? silly old fool. What? Jan says pulling a stool to the side of the bed. What? he repeats as he sits down.
-The windows must be shut, locked, bolted down, tied off, roped, lashed to the mast, closed closed closed! Luke says, his face briefly emerging from beneath the sheet then snapping back under.
-Its gone. Whatever it may have been, it is most certainly nowhere to be seen.
-Go check! Luke barks and bites at the sheet.
Jan disappears out of the bedroom door and reappears a moment after a moment later.
-Nothing. All gone. Jan says as he sits back down on the stool next to the bed.
Luke is sitting up; regained some strength and conviction within Jan’s moment of absence; pulled himself together; knotted together some self-respect and courage out of the tiny threads of hope that Jan had left behind.
-The windows must be shut – nastish things gets in those ways. There was I, all admiring of the ant machine when… no-no, no more of that. And where were you, ol’ cowardly Jan, my fair-weather protector?
-What window? There are no windows open. Jan says.
-What, Luke’s face falls off its brittle moorings, no windows open? Then still it lurks in the shadows. Luke’s face drains and turns white, stiff and still. It’s hiding. Go Jan! Leave! Kill it! Kill it! Luke says thrusting the point of a finger at the fearfully dark space that reaches through the door eating into the ribcage of shape and form, before he jumps back into his swathe of covers, fully submerged and shivering.
-Never fear I shall take the hammer and make mincemeat of the little bugger! Jan stops in his bloody tracks: ah… what was it again?
-A fly! A fly! Big offish, lunatic, bluebottle. Luke says poking his head out from the covers at the stool side of the bed and halfway down. Go on! head disappearing back into the muddle of bedclothes and pillows.
-The hammer. Jan says.
Luke shoves a trembling fistful of hammer out from the wooden sheets. Jan snatches sorry old hamor, fresh sparkling and siolfor, from Luke’s corpsish clutches.
-My turn to make smithereens, Jan la-la‘s, skipping out the bedroom door.
A god awful smashing an’ a-crashing an’ a-banging yells and whoopedy whoops rattle the ceilings and the walls.
-Is it killed? Luke says still trembly trembling under the bed covers.
-Dead as doornails. Jan sings with overflowing smugish trills. Dead as dead as dead! Chin up. He sits back on the stool shaped stool beside the bed.
Luke emerges from his nest warbling warbles and singing sighs.
