Savant or Genius

The Loudac twins wear the oddest clothes, jackets sewn from rags and scraps of soiled linen, trousers tied round the ankles for those fiercely cold winter nights, and shoes made from fichus bark and old string. The Loudac twins wear clothing worthy of a savant or a genius. Oddments’. Directly above overhead the moon glistened like a fresh wound, the Witness’ beggaring evoking neither God or beast. The Witness knotted his rosary and walked westward, his mouth a black hole of anger and disgust. ‘never again will I set foot in this place!’ he grumbled, the man staring at the sickly-sweet moon eying him out of the corner of his goggles. In his haste to leave the Witness left behind 27 pamphlets of assorted colour and pagination, a hand-painted pictures of Christ, a framed photograph of Pope Pius the 2nd and an etching of Herodotus dressed in the finest silk, a well-thumbed rosary and a half-smoked cheroot. ‘may God smote you lifeless, every last beast of you!’ Having witnessed enough defilement and despoliation the Witness left the way he came, skulking under dark of night, a lowly beggar who’s life had been made back to front, death arriving before the advent of life. Now he would take in the world from a distance as a bystander or a passerby, leaving the plunder and desecration to those who have sterner orders and braver hearts.