Lela stood in front of the Dogman deli staring at the reflection of a woman feeding her dog table scraps of picnic ham, the dog eating with ravenous indecency. An encephalitic making a trumpet of his ass, a dissonant heckling issuing from between his legs, stood watching Lela stare at the reflection of the woman feeding her dog, the dog eating with a gluttonous debauchery. Across the street a Chinese whore, her skirts wrestled around her hips, passed by, the encephalitic giving her the once over, his trumpeting ass lowering a pitch. The inviolacies of a monotonous world, where the unchanged changes in the wink of an eye, the doff of a cap, what was once there is now gone, what was gone reappears, grinning, reminding you that what ends begins again only to end again. Lela watched the woman and the dog until she couldn’t watch any longer, her jaw locked like a cobbler’s vice, blood spooling from the corners of her mouth and into the cleft of her chin.
He awoke only to fall back asleep, ferried back to the stygian nightmare that had waked him. Overcome with tenebrific wonting, the bed linen coiled round his legs, he struggled to stay calm, the storm that was brewing outside gnawing at the gunwales of his skull. He pulled himself from sleep, aiming for nine o’clock when the grocer’s opened for business. It was a slow process, taking all the unbridled strength he could muster, his arms and legs unresponsive, his eyes crusted over with sleep, the smell of yesterday’s misadventures clinging to his clothes like a syphilitic itch. He remembered leaving the tavern, rounding the corner and heading for home, his hat covering the bald spot that had encouraged such derisive heckling. A pug-nosed braggart, his shirttails hanging out his unbuckled trousers, wagging a drunken finger at him slurring ‘No man is a lion’ the treacly scent of wormwood and Absinthe prickling his face. ‘Not even God!’ This happened more often than not, resulting in a bloodied nose, his, not the heckler’s, who in his drunkenness didn’t feel the instigating blow, countering with a roundhouse and splaying his nose like a ripe tomato.
After they sawed off his gangrenous leg leaving him with one leg and one stump, his grandfather took to easing the phantom pain with quart bottles of Stout and disagreeable whores. Dr. Henri les Fauves amputated his grandfather’s necrotic leg with a circular saw, cauterizing the stump with a flatiron (etched on the handle was the following: Derain’s & Sons, Makers of Wound Sealers and Electric Car Jacks, ‘il miglior fabbro’) and trussing the hob with hospital greens and surgical string, the corner-stitch giving his stump the appearance of a chainless hawsehole. They were later to find out that the surgeon had substituted Jenkin's Rule for a loosely tied mattress stitch, claiming it would hold better and help drain the wound, his grandmother refusing on principle to pay for such shoddy workmanship.
He awoke only to fall back asleep, ferried back to the stygian nightmare that had waked him. Overcome with tenebrific wonting, the bed linen coiled round his legs, he struggled to stay calm, the storm that was brewing outside gnawing at the gunwales of his skull. He pulled himself from sleep, aiming for nine o’clock when the grocer’s opened for business. It was a slow process, taking all the unbridled strength he could muster, his arms and legs unresponsive, his eyes crusted over with sleep, the smell of yesterday’s misadventures clinging to his clothes like a syphilitic itch. He remembered leaving the tavern, rounding the corner and heading for home, his hat covering the bald spot that had encouraged such derisive heckling. A pug-nosed braggart, his shirttails hanging out his unbuckled trousers, wagging a drunken finger at him slurring ‘No man is a lion’ the treacly scent of wormwood and Absinthe prickling his face. ‘Not even God!’ This happened more often than not, resulting in a bloodied nose, his, not the heckler’s, who in his drunkenness didn’t feel the instigating blow, countering with a roundhouse and splaying his nose like a ripe tomato.
After they sawed off his gangrenous leg leaving him with one leg and one stump, his grandfather took to easing the phantom pain with quart bottles of Stout and disagreeable whores. Dr. Henri les Fauves amputated his grandfather’s necrotic leg with a circular saw, cauterizing the stump with a flatiron (etched on the handle was the following: Derain’s & Sons, Makers of Wound Sealers and Electric Car Jacks, ‘il miglior fabbro’) and trussing the hob with hospital greens and surgical string, the corner-stitch giving his stump the appearance of a chainless hawsehole. They were later to find out that the surgeon had substituted Jenkin's Rule for a loosely tied mattress stitch, claiming it would hold better and help drain the wound, his grandmother refusing on principle to pay for such shoddy workmanship.
No comments:
Post a Comment