-There’s a ladybird in my soup!
Jean crunches an ant under his thumb and screws its little corps into the table, cursing it in whispers of violence with each twist of his opposable terminal projection. The waiter scuttles from his hole in the wall, begging forgiveness.
-A new one! A new one for Mister Fontaine! Clapping his hands together, playing the waiter. Sorry. Sorry, Monsieur! He takes the bowl back to his hole in the wall.
-I don’t know why we come here, Jean says flicking ant limbs, blood and guts off his thumb. This is a bloody awful place.
Marcel brushes his finger around the top of his glass and sighs.
-You do realize you would have been better off with the ladybird.
-What do you mean! I’m not eating ladybird soup!
-We come here every day, more or less, and every day you abuse the waiter. Don’t be surprised if little aliens are found invading your fucking soup is all.
-Ridiculous! this place is infested!
Jean crashes his fist on the head of another ant just before it can crawl to the underside of the table. Marcel jumps and fumbles with his glass of wine… eventually it drops.
-Shit.
Marcel fishes between his legs and manages to retrieve the glass and put it back on the table. Jean rolls his eyes, swings around on his chair and stares out of the window: the air is sweet and tangible.
Outside spills through the sash-window, lighting up the restaurant’s organs, sweeping all the broken little shadows away under their feet. A crooked tree dies on the side of the road where passers by are dying likewise. Salmon blossoms cough on coho clumps of crumbling pebble dash. The afternoon paints the white walls melancholy. Jean snorts, slyly snakes his eyes over the room like a blanket of contempt and gobs on the floor.
-No, no, Monsieur Fontaine, please not on the carpet. The waiter crawls on his hands and knees, scrubbing the carpet with his cuff. Please, out of the window, Monsieur, the waiter says twisting his head upwards like some ghoulish hell-thing.
-That’s enough, Jean flaps his hands over the waiter and shoos him back to his hole. He wants me to gob out the window. Did you hear that, Prousty boy, out the window of all places.
Marcel raises an eyebrow at Jean’s reincarnated soup: “Better out the window,” he thinks.
Jean slumps off his chair and slinks over to the source of his ponderings, opens the window, coughs and spits onto the street. He leans his elbows on the sill, dangling his hands through the fresh air.
-Why do we come here Marcel? What happened? When did we become so… miserable?
Musca Domestica – revolting, waiting to suck on my mortal remains. From maggot to fly, from fly to maggot. Nothing more alien than the fly and no fly more alien than Calliphora dormitories: the very symbol of insanity. Rattling its broken back against the glass, manically chasing about the place aimless and violent like the unpredictable loonies in the asylum. Of course, the fear the bluebottle is the fear of being overcome or drowned in the world. The chaos of the blowfly exposes our impotent grip on reality; or, more accurately, its chaos expose reality’s impotent grip on us.
Jean violently claps his hands together in front of his face: “missed!”
-Where’s Pierre? Marcel asks. I haven’t seen him for days.
-Check the gutters; usually drunk there, Jean answers, strolling back to his chair and deflating all over it.
Marcel rolls the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows revealing small indecipherable patterns framed by tiny rectangles expanding and contracting as he fidgets to get comfortable: “he bears all his grudges with a thousand tiny stabs of black smudges.” He methodically, mathematically, gradually, eventually, takes the straw hat from his head and places it on the table.
-He musta kept that hat on for days; slept in it if I’m not mistaken, Queen Jane says in her black and white cinema tone of looking as she sticks the bar with her pointy elbows. That fella sure makes good poems with his hair, she stretches a shattered, crenulated, smile from ear to ear.
-Ignore her. You look… BUGGER! Jean leaps up. We must leave right away.
Marcel flashes a distasteful glance at his empty glass and groans in the back of his throat. Needing no further reason or explanation he shoves his head back into his hat, his chair making Morse code as he stands and follows Jean out of the stain glassed exit: the entrance to the world.
-Your wine monsieur! The waiter runs to the door. Your wine!
-Offer it up to the gods! Jean sings back.
