Feast of the Disfigured

The day the fornicatress Vysocina Chokebore arrived in town she was pale with puerperal fever. Félix Davisson, holding a pennant that read, ‘viva štiplavá’, arrived the next day. Then Morris Plaquenil, a tranquil yet in many ways contemptible man dressed in a checkerboard suit with matching socks; and on the heels of Davisson and Plaquenil, who arrived within seconds of one other, Plaquenil on the back of a dung wagon, Davisson in the company of two women in overflowing dresses, a stout ivory-skinned man with uneven teeth and a flaxen yellow jacket with a double-stitched pocket over his heart. ‘what’s in that pocket?’ asked one of the woman pointing disagreeably at his chest. ‘none of your business is what’ he said haughtily ‘now fuck off!’ As it was two days before the Feast of the Untainted, the Feast of the Disfigured convened and dissolved three weeks previous, the streets were overflowing with acolytes. There were hagglers and conmen, dough-faced children and dower hags, cheapskates and spoilsports, men dressed in black suits and women in red satin dresses, dogs and cats, chickens and roosters. Everywhere there were people shoving and jostling, some standing in crowds, others off by themselves watching on with awe and disgust. And flying overhead in the June-bug-thick sky a threadbare sheet with the words Zynischen Vernunft painted on it. His face clenched into a bloodied fist the Witness yelled ‘for the love of Christ, enough is enough!’

This can’t be. All this madness. There’s no need to agonize over it; it gets you nowhere anyhow. Diario de la Guerra del Cerdo, he’s a fucking swine! Plays stopcock the bung with the Aleman’s wife. Cunt’s like Himmler nickel and diming other sad cunts. Steal the food out of the pie-holes of babes… cunt. I’ll say! Enough to oblige a god-fearsome man to prayer. …watching on with awe and disgust. Happens before the sky falls catapulting I swear. June-bug-thick sky makes it hard to breath… dogs and chickens and roosters, what sheer joy! I swear it I swear an oath to it! Last time the Feast of the Disfigured a dozen, no two dozen beatings; rector beating assistant beating the lame and crippled.