Wednesday, June 08, 2011

Hades

The Ferret brothers, called so because they resembled ferrets, the middle brother more so than his brothers, both of whom, though ferret-like didn’t have the stripe that singled out their middle brother, moved outside the five-mile to raise free-range chickens and pigs, the pigs corralled to keep them separated from the chickens who, featherless, wouldn’t have a chance in Hades against free-range swine. Of they the brothers we will talk no more as they are of the author’s imagination, made-up, compiled and culled together, and rarely does imagination come close to the world of reality and things.

Lela, her fingers worrying the hem of her skirts, sat under a waning blue sky beneath the Seder grocer’s awing, the threat of rain and children splashing in puddles making her feel morose and gloomy. Having lived for three years outside the five-mile she knew that a rainy day on that side was decidedly worse than one on this side. Either way the moroseness and gloominess continued, eating away at her like a gonorrhoeal sore, the itch between her legs widening her posture. She remembered how her mother would fan her face on those hot fuggy afternoons in July, the coffee tin next to her overflowing with still smouldering cigarette ends, her lipstick leaving a perfect O on the filter tip. Trussing the analogous foot to the opposing ankle and tying off with a sheepshank her mamma primped herself to leave for the evening, her date a podgy barber who owned a hair salon and pedicure shop, the latter a tax shelter for the former. Her mother spent most evenings out with the barber, his assistant, a wan pale boy with a discouraging overbite, discouraging to her mamma who preferred cunnilingus to intercourse, and whomever was willing and eager to frolic with a middle-age housewife, leaving her daughter alone to fend for herself, her daughter’s feistiness encouraging a rather unorthodox reaction to loneliness and isolation from the outside world. By the age of five her daughter had learned how to thread a needle, turn on and off the flatiron, fasten and unfasten her mother’s lockbox and live in a fantasy world she shared with dolls and a boxful of sand.

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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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