Saturday, May 28, 2011

Freddy Jesus Sanchez

This is getting us nowhere. I dare say nowhere is better than somewhere, especially if somewhere is simply over there or nowhere in particular. Nowhere or somewhere, does it really matter? When all is said and done, which it never is, what we’ll most remember is the time it took to get from nowhere to somewhere then back again. Anywhere you go you end up nowhere. Remember that and you’ll never forget.

Stonewalling his way past braggarts and beggars, blowhards and bullies he made his way up the street, a wayward lock of hair setting his eyelashes aflutter, the sun rising ever so slowly at his back. This was not the first time, nor would it be the last that he found himself caught up in the senseless brutality, the madness and insanity, bare-knuckles and axe-heads at the ready, that turned the lunchtime streets into an unruly donnybrook. The world was changing, and try as he might there was nothing he could do about it.

A little girl, her eyes bloated with tears, came running down the steps of the church, the rector in hot pursuit. ‘stop my child… the Lord has a gift for you!’ Freddy Jesus Sanchez, waving an axe-handle above his head stood between the little girl and the rector ’leave the girl be!’ Taken by surprise, the sun glistening off his tonsure, the rector turned and walked back into the church. Wiping the tears from her face Freddy Jesus Sanchez whispered ‘you’re safe now my dear... we will never let them take you away, I promise’. This was not the first time, nor would it be the last that the rector had tried to steal a young girl; an old hand at abducting pubescent parishioners and young children, he was ordained by the church to snatch as many children as he could, hiding them in the basement with the Eucharist, hermetically sealed in bags of 27, each with an expirery date stamped on it, and kegs of unsanctified wine. The rector left the business of attending to the purloined children to his assistant, whose employ it was to feed and clothe them, dressing the girls in white diaphanous ball gowns, the boys in purple surplices with knotted rope belt, and ensure their cleanliness, scrubbing them down, on-mass, with a garden hose and lemony scented friar’s soap.

Woeful and woebegone the last of the marauders made their way home, the streets returning to their usual night-time calm. Fearing for his well-being and livelihood, the lamplighter, having watched riot unfold from behind the cabman’s shelter, collected his kit and himself headed for home, the last lamp lit just as the sun was beginning rise over the Waymart clocktower. ‘no-goods will learn their lesson... even if I have to teach it to them myself’ the lamplighter mumbled to himself, the smell of burnt wick and kerosene filling the air with a fireworks’ odour. Up the street a hand’s-length from the Seder grocers and three from the Dogman deli the rector was busy locking up the church doors, his tonsure glistening with sweat. Hervé Salamanca Henrique Boyacá packed up his boot and started his Vauxhall with matching drivers’-side ashtrays and a luminescent foxfire roof, the engine sputtering like a drowning cat and left; never to be seen or heard of again. People come and go, some never to be seen or heard from again, others returning ever ready to do what they had come to do the first time. Others, the lowly and broken, the fearful and cowardly, never coming or going anywhere at all, their deportment too sloth-like to get them past the doorframe and out the door.

The Pontefract constabulary wear cockscomb helmets with silver chinstraps. The York Black Guard wear Beefeaters with ear-holes for picking up on double-talk and shamelessness. Upon his coronation King Olaf decreed that anyone found slandering or badmouthing the throne would be subjected to the most horrendous torture and exiled from the fiefdom, left to fend for themselves among the disenchanted and murderous living on the other side of the five-mile.

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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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