tHOMAS' lIVER

Some people are fated with Thomas’ liver, sopped with Port and Paddy’s cure-all, a phonetic mess of dilettantism and Welsh bolshie’s, a portrait of the drunkard as a young dog: her liver the size of a soccer ball, bloated and septic with corpsegas, briny with carrion and lye. She drinks to assuage the tremors, the scourge of Saint John’s Wart: hogshead tripe with blood pudding, an earwig salad, a light vinaigrette on the side plate, not for the faint of stomach or kidney, renal failure and so-and-so. Her children sat in the squalor of her thoughts, reading takeout menus and other people’s mail. Linking sausage to sausage, Eaton’s sells blood pudding casing, twenty-five to the dollar, skillet-fried with bacon rind and allspice, a peppering of confectionary sugar to stave off the spoiling aftertaste in the scrotum of her throat, a banshee screeching in the pendulum of her sternum. The man in the hat felt neither pity nor sadness for the woman, as he had more important things to attend to, three-legged dogs and wingless birds, shelter soup and scum topped Jell-O. Perhaps, he thought, I will offer my soup to the shamble legged man should next we meet, and save the Jell-O for a late night treat, or save it for the girl with the hearing box haltered to her chest, as she deserves more pity than scorn.