Jan stares at the sharply warped sliver of stone smithereen he had flyquick snatched from the flood of floor in secret before scurrying off to his one chaired hell. He pushes it carefully around his palm – slowly, gently: shh, don’t say a word.
-What an unusual arrangement of solidness; what a solid arrangement of unusualness. Uselessness. Unusefulness. Jan says, parodying Luke’s highfaluting, endlessly synonymic and gratuitously dialectical way of saying. But Jan knows he is only partially playing at parody, for Luke’s way of words crawls insidiously through the shallower waters of Jan’s own prattlings.
A small bird is stapled to Jan’s broken table with its chest pinned open wide to its wings, half-alive and half-dead. Jan drags his chair to the table, sits clumsily, edging his head near to the bird, and whispers:
-What do you suppose he eyes in these insides… these guts? No, not guts… flesh – skin; but dead, like meat, meat without intricacy or purpose… precisely like meat. Marbled through with nothing more to do with itself.
-More like ban is that stan,
said the bird to the man.
-Why, don’t be absurd,
said the man to the bird.
-Ssshhh. Half-dead half-alive birds shouldn’t have the wherewithal to… but… of course, bone.
Jan sits up rigid in his milky chair, pushing the fat of his thumb against the point of the slithery slither.
-I suppose… in a sort of obvious way. Stooping closer to the broke little sparrow, bones an’ blood an’ all. But, what do little half-dead half-alive birds know anyway? Jan hisses.
-A splinter of bone, or, a splinter of skin? In texture like bone, holds the world up, holds its own, Jan says, jabbing the point of the flint into one of the bird’s opal eyes. This bastard is uneatable.
-Inedible, says the sparrow.
-My grammar need not be corrected by more dead than alive bastard birds. I Mean what I say. I can eat what I damn well please. Jabbing a little harder at the black point-of-bird’s-eye-view. It is not like bone or meat or skin or anything. It is not like anything. It’s all surface and no substance. What does Luke see here, in these insubstantial, slippery, surfaces? So slippery that thought can slide off it in all directions.
How on earth does this sorry little stan catch my eye? Where does it begin? Why? This stone, this fractional, fuzzy, stone is cold and not cold, is dry and not dry, is one and two, and three and four… and Jan gets himself lost along a Lukish loop of words and not-words.
