Coxswain's Shuttle

‘Sleep is for the sleepless, people with nothing better to do than catnap and lay hidden from the world’ thought the legless man sleepily. He slept beside his handcart with a blanket stitched together from odds and ends of cloth, a throw-rug beneath his buttocks to keep the dampness from creeping up the apse of his buttocks where it would lie like an icy pox in the kipper of his lower bowel. His alimentary canal was stilted with rot and cursed with crones, a disease he had picked up from a rusty tin of sardines that left a metallic taste at the back of his throat. He tried for weeks to rid himself of the offal taste, drinking gallons of Port and Sherry, but the tack and bitter aftertaste remained, traces of mariner’s oil and Castor biting like a chigger at the lining of his throat. The label on the can bespoke: ‘Cupper’s Finest Sardines, Man’s Best Friend on a Cold and Dreary Eve’. He tried swallowing skiffs of bread salted with brine, but the taste remained. He sucked on stones, quid-peat and briar-rot, but couldn’t rinse the offal taste from the back of his throat. He made a sluice out of rags, knotting the contraption together with bits of string and twine, and sleeved it down his esophagus, hitting the tag at the very back of his throat, which made him gag and moan like a mange dog. ‘Cupper’s Finest Sardines’, he said over and over to himself, ‘castor of feces and lye’. That night, the one before the last, he slept beneath the Seder’s awning devising ways to rid the world of aftertastes, and would have given a knot of hair braided into a coxswain’s shuttle for a moment’s sleep.