Friday, August 22, 2008

Breadfruit and Zippers

The very next day the man in the hat bought a Churchill bowler with a buckshot hatband. He fancied owning a Churchill bowler, even if it meant spending all his coppers and small change. Come hell or high water he could count on the alms man, even if it meant having to listening to him brag about his ten-thousandth vision and yesterday’s rain. Every day after Ships Day was the very next day. It had been this way since the very first Ships Day held in nineteen twenty-seven, the day the first ship arrived in port carrying a orlop full of Breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis) and zippers. Jackfruit, unlike Breadfruit, has a bitter carob taste, so the ship’s captain figured a boatload of the sweeter Breadfruit was a far better stowaway. As for zippers, stow-crates of them, he felt they were part and parcel of a potable carefree life. The day the first ship arrived in port, the ship that harbingered all Ships Days to follow, the skyline was aflutter with sailor’s caps and unquenchable thirst.

The deaf mute Lela met the legless man and the alms man at the church bazaar one especially warm July afternoon. Clapping her hands together she tried to get the attention of the legless man, who was busy stropping the lead on his pushcart. ’…piss, mamma piss, piss…’ she whispered, ‘…mamma, piss…mamma…piss…piss…’. That day, the day before Ships Day, Lela bought a new feather duster and a nosegay of bluebells, chrysanthemums and dahlias. Her old duster, the one her mother gave her as a going away gift when she was twelve, had lost all its feathers; and a scullery maid without a full-feathered duster is as useless as cow without a tail. When Lela was a girl her mamma told her she wouldn’t amount to anything, and even if she did it still wouldn’t be nearly enough of anything. Because she was pushed out her mother’s hole too soon, one rainy, moonless night in August, she never heard her mother’s voice or a dog’s bark. All she could hear was the sound of her own breathing and the hiss of tyres on wet asphalt when she couldn’t fall asleep at night.

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"Poetry is the short-circuiting of meaning between words, the impetuous regeneration of primordial myth". Bruno Schulz
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