Stephen Breen

Waking from a night of sorrowful countenance he fell upon itemizing his thoughts. Arranged according to consonance, and taking into consideration sibilance and vocal quality, he made a list of things that occupied his thoughts upon waking. Having dawned on him that his waking thoughts were occupied with such things as how big ones head would grow if one watered it or why cows have two stomachs and goats didn’t, variables he seldom gave much thought to, he determined that upon-waking thoughts were much smaller than the ones he had during the remainder of the day. Taking this into consideration he itemized his thoughts according to what thoughts he could and would have upon waking should he remain abed with his eyes closed. Comparing the two he came up with a list that took into consideration what thoughts he would or could have were he to stay abed with one eye closed waking a full two hours earlier. As neither consideration appeared to alter what thoughts he had or would have, he rearranged his hat collection safe in knowledge that any thought he would or could have, both eyes open or one closed, changed very little about how he went about his day. Other than adding a sibilant lisp to his consonant tenor, which he could dispense of verily with an Epsom gargle, whether he awoke earlier or later mattered very little. Is it all a suicide of reason? A pittance to pay for safe passage into the otherworld?

He met Stephen Breen at the Bleeding of the Lamb, both men admiring the low cut of the harridan’s sister’s skirts. Apostolidès the flâner, a courthouse jester, was at that very moment prying a sliver from his thumb, a spurt of blood corkscrewing into the still bazaar air. Turning to Stephen Breen he said ‘the man’s a menace; always bleeding when he should be greening’. Realizing that a pun was being made against his name Stephen Breen turned a red cheek and said ‘green or red it’s all the same to me’. ‘anyone can bleed red, but only a giant of a man can make it green’ said Apostolidès the flâner pinching off his thumb. ‘and with such élan’ said the harridan’s sister tugging at her skirts. ‘yes élan’ said Stephen Breen. ‘green or red, with flair indeed’. Sitting on the highest branch in the biggest tree in the courthouse yard the littlest dogman played his chest like a Domitius lyre, Stephen Breen, pricking up his ears, trying to follow the tempo.

There was a rumour spreading that Stephen Breen, fellow of the Brethren of Philistines, having been in attendance at the last assemble of the Brethren of Heretics knew the whereabouts of the missing whore’s glove. They ferried him across the Libby, the punter thrashing passers-by with his elbow, the paddy waggon caroming from paling to balustrade. Cunts always think a dead man deserves the right-of-way. Hobnail ‘em. That’ll show ‘em. Never take the right-of-way for granted. The dead are dead. The living get the right-of-way. Philistines!

Heretic’s Hospital

They came from Botulfsson and Savonarola, from Pistorius and Wendelmoet, by oxcart and mule waggon, in groups of twos and threes, some lagging behind like lame dogs, others charging ahead grasping at imaginary straws; they came and they came until the streets were swarming with heretics. Casement wore a Congolese Headdress festooned with partridge feathers and a fiery red cockscomb, making him the first full-fledged heretic to refuse to wear a Sattler Mitznefet. ‘pillory me if you like but I will never wear a miter. Never I swear!’ I swear I never laid a hand on him! Must have fell over backwards over the breakwater wall, little peeps cooing and going out of him. Save my own life by a hair. Leave it to God or the devil. Heretics Fork brings the best out in a man. Keeps the chin from getting flabby. Yank ‘em up by the throat. Reserved for regicides. Makes a man out of a Brazen Bull. Semi heretics aren’t worth the bother. Lead sprinkler is usually enough. Has ‘em begging for you to pull the stopcock. Which we won’t. Never! Split knee easier on the pulling arm. Makes boiling seem like a trip to the ferries. Blindfolded. Can’t tell who’s who. Buggerer’s get off Scott free. In his left-hand pocket he carried a poem penned by Ramihrdus of Cambrai:

the embalmer’s hands
weigh the body in ounces
employing an age-old science
that separates the body
from the heavenly

On his last visit to the Heretic’s Hospital the etherist pumped him full of aryl halide, his chest ballooning out like a sow’s belly. ‘No need to worry my boy it’ll escape out your anus and through the pores in your neck. Give it a few days, you’ll see’. The orderly wheeled him out in a Chèz Woulant, Eusebius, brother of Caleb and Sophronius working the stopcock like a Black Friar. He was prescribed a mild epagogic and told not to remove the bandage until the wound had scabbed over; then he could scissor it off and throw it into the trash bin behind the Waymart where a man would retrieve it and dispose of it properly; burning it to ashes then dispersing them into the aqueduct. He was to discover years later that the man who retrieved the soiled bandages was none other than Čerenkov the dwarf, then in the employ of Stephen Breen who paid him in heretical names and aryl halide.

Botulf Botulfsson

Hold her head so she doesn’t fall four words: Bi i dho husht. Easier when she’s clamping. Always on the bend performing the Noble Provision. Lay a fiver she’ll get a mouthful. Like spoiled cream. Bite down hard; like shredding kip sausage. Jaw gets all stiff and mangled, barely open it a peep. Should have known better. All mangled. Turn him off for good. Poses a problem with sitting. Have to crap standing. Comes out in pips. Mangled from the inside out. Easier when she’s ajar. Slows down the provision. Ladle the boil. Good for the simmer.

He lay abed until his neck ached, his head full of hornets. Rising, slowly, his feet scarcely touching the dirt floor, he assembled his things, three pairs of socks, a scarf, his favourite boater, a reissue of Popular Mechanics, the June 27th issue with an article on Rolfing, and nimbly wade his way out into the glowing sunlit afternoon. He had a meeting with Dejesus to discuss the likelihood of the sky falling Thursday next; the last time before the next full moon. The last time the sky fell before the full moon the Semiheretics put on a knees-up on the front steps of the church, a thousand or more semi and full heretics taking over the grounds of the sacristy. Ramihrdus of Cambrai, Peter of Bruys, Gherardino Segarelli, Marguerite Porete, Botulf Botulfsson, Antonio Bevilacqua, William Sawtrey, John Badby, Jan Hus, Jeroným Pražský, Thomas Bagley, Pavel Kravař, Girolamo Savonarola, Jean Vallière, Johannes Pistorius Woerdensis, Wendelmoet Claesdochter, Michael Sattler, Patrick Hamilton, Balthasar Hubmaier, Jörg vom Haus Jacob, Richard Bayfield, James Bainham, William Tyndale, Anneke Esaiasdochter, Maria van Beckum, Patrick Pakenham, Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, Thomas Cranmer, Dirk Willems, Diego López, Kimpa Vita, Maria Barbara Carillo and Saint Joan of Arc in attendance either in person or by proxy.

Stephen Breen kept the docket listing all the full and semi heretics in attendance that day; itemizing each according to means of torture and execution: full heretics: lead sprinkler, hanging, flaying, burning at the stake, boiling, flaying then boiling, hanging and flaying, flaying, boiling and hanging and set ablaze inside a Brazen Bull with a stopcock to release the built-up steam; semi heretics: crocodile shears, reserved for regicides, the Spanish Tickler, flagellation, sawing, Judas Cradle, the Pear of Anguish, foot roasting, the Heretics Fork, knee splitting, pillory, toe wedging and branking.

Bi i dho

‘Unfortunate wretched woman, trotting like a poodle. Bi i dho husht, says he. That bloody old fool!’ Astride he stood, the cuffs of his tan trousers bagging round his leg stumps, buckled and held aloft with a Yeomen’s garter. ‘Husht ye gamy bastard! A leg up is all he’s after’. Unfortunate wretch brings tears to my eyes. Seen her dog lapping up pools of it; tongue swelled up like a cirrhotic liver, all irony and bluish. Has a pawn owing on an engraved headstone, wagering she’ll live well into her hundreds. Shriner’s’ll pay the balance on monies owing if she breaks a leg or catches her death from a cold. Carry her across over in one of those miniature cars; easier if she sets sails and doesn’t look back. Price of petrol has tripled in two weeks! Diesel cost twice as much as regular petrol even though it makes the engine crank clank and sputter. Someone’s making a profit and that someone isn’t me. Cost less to embalm a corpse. Can get by with a smaller miniature car too. Don’t have to rely on coasting. Hills are a rarity, most people want to go up not down. Less time-consuming. Barely raises a hair on your neck. Hot mock chicken steam cooked with newly baked jam puffs; brings out the pepperiness. Can get by on a smaller pot if you can keep the steam from escaping. Bathe your face in steam bath steam, brings out the shine and does away with the blackest blackheads. Red as Mandrill’s ass. Good for courting and praying on the weakly. Seen him holding her chin aloft, leg stumps buckling, swiping flies with the knob-end of her cane. Costs less than a chèz woulant’s. Don’t have to add to someone’s profit. Save up monies owing. Carry the balance over without penalty or hedging. Interest only in making a dime on your sorrow. End up pawning the pawn. He awoke to a gallfly buzzing like a hornet’s nest above his head, its tiny crude wings flailing madly. I’d suggest a mustard poultice to ease the stinging. Grandmamma’s recipe: cloves, castor oil and molasses boiled in a coffee tin.

Luceafărul the Middling

Every night before turning in the legless man soaks his stump-ends in rosewater, wrapping the pruned stubs with a castoff handkerchief or shirt sleeve. Tucking the bed linen under his hipbones he falls to sleep thinking of ways to make his pushcart go faster. When he was a boy his mamma scrubbed him all over with a wire brush, the smell of cropped skin filling his thoughts with foot roasting and persecution by flaying. She fed him boiled prunes to soften his stool and spruce-beer to settle his stomach. The Street Sweeper's Daughter danced in the streets like a mad maiden, her feet barely touching the pavement. The Street Sweeper's Daughter salaamed up the street like Avshalom’s concubine, her maidenhead flapping like a washerwoman’s rag. On Saturday afternoon Glostrup played Nardshir with the Street Sweeper's Daughter’s uncle, a frightfully timid man with a nervous tic that made him look like an encephalitic on the brink of fainting. The Street Sweeper's Daughter fell plummeting to her death from Quim’s Span, Jerome Ahasuerus, middle brother of Caleb, Eusebius and Sophronius, catching a glimpse of her undressed maidenhead before she was swallowed up by the outgoing tide. ‘surely she’ll be eaten by pilot fish’ whispered Ómaigh Sizars, fearing that he too might lose his footing and fall plunging into the aqueduct.

James Aloysius Augustine of Clongowes, born 2 February 1958, stood admiring his reflection in the Seder Grocer’s window, the sun glistening off his tonsured head. Augusta, now there’s a snivelling cunt if I ever saw one; plays the feint-hearted victim when the chips are down; never once seen him levy a round, ‘I’m skint’ he says, or ‘the Misses won’t allow it’. Soddy bastard lives off the charity of others. Cunt’s soaking me blind, and on His Clongowes’ birthday! Throw ‘em to the sharks; pilot fish chewing the fat off his gums. The last time Poldy saw James Aloysius Augustine of Clongowes he was dancing a jig with the Street Sweeper's Daughter and turning a blind eye to the fiver he’d levied off McTaggart on the second to last furlough. Never trust a gambolling man; there only in it for themselves. Sweet Jesus but its hotter than the Blazes in here; never know when the cunts going pull one over on poor ole Paddy. Seen him crossing over the Libby in a straw handsome with McGibbon, Clive and Ollie. Wife’s got a fine pair, ‘cept for the sores and panting blisters. Seen her snap crystal; her under-drawers losing their elasticity. But he of course turns a blind eye; rather pull the commode chain than come face-to-face with the cuckolding bastard. Seen him Thursday last buying a bar of McCabe’s Finest, lemony scented and sure to raise an eye or two. Says its easy on the complexion, razes away all the blackheads and raised spots; known to bring a shine out on a cuckold’s face. On a whim Luceafărul the Middling ate an entire bar, could blow bubbles out of his arse like a Shriner. Some say he could sink a frigate with one clench.

Awaking, his clammy bedclothes weighing him to the cot, Poldy felt a rumbling in the smithy of his soul. He dreamt that he was closing in on the scent of the missing whore’s glove and that if he could only pull himself free of his daily routine, see things more clearly, with more perspicuity, he would find it there, right under his nose, waiting to be found. But as this was not to happen, his bedclothes discouraging him from rising upright out of his cot, he fell back to sleep with a resounding thud. Word had it the Luceafărul the Middling had arrived in town Thursday last, bringing with him an oxcart full of leather goods, sow bellies and tripe. Luceafărul the Middling set up a table of sows’ bellies, leather goods and stomach linings in the empty lot across from the Church of the Perpetual Sinner and waited, the rector eying him from the balcony. Vrije Bielefeld stood admiring a cockroach floundering in a puddle of dog piss. ‘and what a drowned little boy you are’ said Vrije Bielefeld unzipping his trousers and pissing on the cockroach. ‘I hear say he can drowned a frigate and blow bubbles out his arse like a Shriner. Says it’s good for the complexion; razes all the raised spots and blackheads’. Awaking a second time he fell back to sleep with a resounding thwack, his bedclothes clammy with piss. Barely able to raise his head from the pillow he fell back into saturnalia bliss, his bedclothes chilly with dog piss and sweat.

Breithlá Sona Duit, James Augustine

Čerenkov

Laying under a fichus swatting midges with his hat O’Rourke reads the Organon, the sun hardly climbing above the treetops. “So much at least is plain on all these points, viz. that the faculty by which, in waking hours, we are subject to illusion when affected by disease, is identical with that which produces illusory effects in sleep. So, even when persons are in excellent health, and know the facts of the case perfectly well, the sun, nevertheless, appears to them to be only a foot wide”*. Swatting a midge, his hat flopping side to top, O’Rourke reads on. “Now, whether the presentative faculty of the soul be identical with, or different from, the faculty of sense-perception, in either case the illusion does not occur without our actually seeing or [otherwise] perceiving something. Even to see wrongly or to hear wrongly can happen only to one who sees or hears something real, though not exactly what he supposes. But we have assumed that in sleep one neither sees, nor hears, nor exercises any sense whatever”. *(Aristotle, On Dreams 350 BC, translated by J. I. Beare) ‘I dreamt the dream I was dreaming was dreaming me. Greeks, always mixing up one thing for the other’. Standing, his legs buckling inwards then out, O’Rourke threw the book into the bushes behind the fichus, the sun scaling the sky like Japanese ivy.

Poldy first met O’Rourke at the Bleeding of the Lamb, both men standing to the right of the altar. O’Rourke, engaged with a transubstantiated crack in the ciborium was watching dewdrops of Divine Water drip onto his unshod foot, the rector eying him with disgust. Čerenkov the dwarf, great-nephew of Čerenkov the Giant, pulled down his trousers and let go with a trumpeting fart; a fat woman midway through lighting a votive candle fainting like a malarial missionary. ‘the woman has no sense-perception’ whispered O’Rourke. ‘everything appears to her as if it were only a foot wide’.

Chiming like a tinsmith’s anvil the church bells clanged throughout the night and into the morn. The mob disbanded, some southwesterly some northeasterly and some down the middle of the street like cows to the slaughterhouse hammer. Her head bobbing from side to side like a ragdoll Glostrup marched up the sideways, her defiance matched only by her heartless reproach for anyone or thing that got in her way. Earlier that day, well before the mob arrived in the streets, Ms. Glostrup, toting a pike festooned with nails shouted ‘Be there any man, big or small, who thinks he is stronger than I may he stand forth now!’ A freckle-face boy holding a top raised his hand and shouted ‘I will’. A Hetaerist, his Midrashim’s cape flapping, pushed past the boy and stood eye to eye with the almighty Glostrup. ‘Stand aside; there’s no need for a boy to do a man’s job. I will thrash this despicable whore!’ Looking on with a mixture of terror and enthusiasm, as they were well-acquainted with the Hetaerist’s ruthless demeanor, having witnessed him tear a man limb-to-limb for calling him an encephalitic, which he was, his head three times the size of a man of matching deportment, Cinecittá João, Ubaldo, Ribeiro, João and Guimarães Rosa took cover under the Seder Grocer’s awning, Ubaldo cowering like a frightened child. With one blow the Hetaerist brought Glostrup to her knees, Ubaldo yelling ‘stupid cow…that’ll show you!’ Straightening the hem of her skirts the harridan’s sister let out a sigh, safe in the knowledge that today she would not have to fight off the vagrants and Nair-do-wells that followed Glostrup like pilot fish or worry about the sky falling, plummeting onto her head.

Church of Thélème’s

His booted feet kicking clumps of earth Jesús Juventud stood staring at his reflection in the window, the grocer swiping at him with a broom. ‘shoo or I will smite you with my broom!’ cried the grocer. ‘malcontent!’ Jerome Ahasuerus, middle brother of Caleb, Eusebius and Sophronius, sat behind the Church of Thélème’s chewing and reading a pamphlet he’d found under a shrub, the sun burning a tonsure into the top of his head. ‘brother, hand me your eyeglasses, this print is awfully small’. ‘are you getting a headache?’ asked Jesús Juventud fiddling with a handful of green twigs. ‘not yet…it’s the print; it’s putting a strain on my eyes’. ‘perhaps it’s the poor quality of the ink...the kind they use for sheet music and poor people’s bibles’ said Jesús Juventud squinting. ‘perhaps…but I’m more inclined to think it’s the poor quality of the paper…the kind they use for wrapping meat and poultry’. ‘I could see that’ said Jesús Juventud squinting one eye then the other. ‘what’s that? asked Jerome drawing the pamphlet closer, the print dissolving into an inky black splotch. ‘I could see is what I said’ said Jesús. ‘see what?’ asked Jerome his hands shaking from the pressure he was applying to the corners of the pamphlet. ‘never mind’ said Jesús, a hint of hurt in his voice. ‘either way you can’t make heads nor tails out of it can you?’ ‘but I will! I surely will!’ said Jerome Ahasuerus defiantly, the pamphlet pressed tight against his nose. ‘yes surely you will’ said Jesús Juventud. Leaving behind a stack of twigs arranged like tiny logs hued for an infinitesimal miniscule cottage, Jesús Juventud went his way, the sun splotching everything under its glare.

This is not how it was suppose to be; things got out of hand, the sane went mad and the mad sane, what was inside turned outward, the centre no longer in the middle but cast asunder floundering in no-man’s-land. Deasey, now there’s a swimmer: can make two lengths of the aqueduct on one lungful of weedy air. Saw him do it twice: once for taking the Lord’s Name in vain and once for swearing during morning prayers. Eyjafjardarsysla from on Tyne but now living in Glossop, attempting to swim the aqueduct drowned midway under the Quim’s Span, those cheering him on watching on horrified as he sunk to the bottom like a stone. Ómaigh Sizars wears a top hat summer, winter and fall, reserving his rattan sou'wester for those gray drizzly days between deice and blossom. That day the day of the drowning he stood astride Quim’s Span recouping his trouser, which having dropped below his ankles, exposing his Mongrel pale legs, debarred his ability to cross across to the other side. Looking down below the frayed hems of his trousers, beyond the sprained tendons in his ankle, he exclaimed with unusual alacrity ‘my God, someone throw the poor man a rope!’ not a sole moving an inch. ‘Can’t you see the man’s drowning?’ he cried out. Raising his voice above the din, his face a bad apple rotten to the core, a boy replied ‘Yes, and we don’t give a damn’. ‘Let the bastard drowned’ shouted a second boy hoping to impress the first boy with his brave uncowardly tenor. ‘Have you no mercy!’ shouted Ómaigh Sizars, the first boy watching the second boy poking a dead worm with the lit end of a cigarette.

Juan Tenorio

Ro Gallegos Cruz, an encephalitic, stands in front of the Seder Grocer’s admiring his reflection in the window, his goutweed jaw working a stick of peppermint chewing gum. Taking hold of his arm and yanking don Juan Tenorio puts an end to Ro Gallegos Cruz’s dullard’s engrossment, a loud crack issuing from his head, his ears dripping spools of brackish water. ‘Hurry!’ he yells yanking harder. ‘before the mob overtakes us!’ The mob, cheek to jowl, close in rounding the corner, the head nurse wailing. Off in the distance a siren blares. Then the bells in the church tower begin to chime, a tinny ear surrendering to a cold medieval chorus. Ro Gallegos Cruz, breaking free of don Juan Tenorio yells ‘to hell with you! On her face!’ The head nurse yelling ‘How dare you, and without my permission!’ don Juan Tenorio charging past her screaming ‘to hell with it, I’m going home!’

From his perch high above the mob, the bell tower cricketing under the weight of its colossal chimes, Poldy waves his hat like a cowboy, the mob yipping and hollering him on. To his left the Witness, a splinter-group of mobsters kicking at him like a piñata, struggling to stay upright, to his right the littlest dogman, his chest puffed out like a courting pheasant, pelting the mob with rotten cabbages and directly below, his pushcart upturned, the legless man, a galley of halfwits and imbeciles clubbing him over the head with makeshift cudgels and bats. ‘yip yip yippee!’ howls the mob, the legless man, his head swollen like a melon begging them to stop.

Chèz Woulant

Poldy put on his favorite hat, laced his best pair of shoes and strode out into the glaring sunlit day. It was hours before the Feast of Tierra de Nadie and everywhere he looked there were people scampering about getting ready for the first gorging of the New Year. Heerlen stood about-face, his feet unbuckled from his shoes, a sea of people hissing and churning like an unruly crew. Swaging like a Rabelaisque Gargantua the mob moved down the street, stopping in front of the Church of Thélème’s, the harridan’s sister, her hair done-up in a hag’s knot trying to sweet-talking them into to buy a placemat or a Pop-icicle boat, past the Dogman Deli, the littlest dogman crouching behind a stall of oyster hams playing his breastplate like a xylophone, to the front of the Church of the Perpetual Sinner where the rector, his face three shades of red was airing out his surplice, the mob coming to a full stop. Suddenly, unexpectedly a second mob appeared around the corner, an army of halfwits and imbeciles, the lame and ambulatory, some on stretchers others wheeling themselves in chèz woulant’s, led by the head nurse from the Overnight Asylum. ‘Heathens!’ yelled the rector. ‘sit on my face!’ yelled the head nurse. ‘on her face!’ yelled the mob. ‘to hell with you all!’ scowled the rector.

Juan Miguel Padilla

The ogress retted her feet, tethering the corresponding foot to the analogous ankle. ‘Una tumba sin nombre, beneath my feet’ said the ogress pointing at a mound of fly-thick manure. Digging with her fingernails the ogress scraped shovelfuls of fly-thick manure hoping to find the missing whore’s glove. ‘he assured me it was buried here, in this very spot’. The ogress tilted her head and crowed like a rooster in a cockfight. ‘god’s awful god-awful hole! It’ll take all night!’ A burdel of whores sashayed into the streets, each wearing identical red supper gloves. The lamplighter, wick-lighter in hand, jumped from atop his ladder, the clang-clank of steel and knuckles filling the night with a tinny pitch. ‘look out’ shouted the alms man. ‘they’ll run you over’. The lamplighter threw himself like a dog hit by a truck into the Seder grocer’s window, the glass mizzling into a thousand pieces. ‘what next; the sky falling?’ said the alms man raising himself up on the heels of his hands like a sideshow contortionist. Neck boils. Get all roughed up in shirt collars. Hurst like the devil.

The following Juan’s are known to have been in possession, at one time or the other, of a red whore’s glove: Juan Alvarado, Juan Miguel Padilla, don Juan Tenorio, Juan Bautista, Juan McQueen, Juan Carlos Salazar and Aguja Juan Rodriquez. Like a dog hit by a truck the lamplighter rolled along the cobbles hollering. ‘for the love of Jehovah what next; the sky falling? The moons of her fingernails eclipsed by manure, the ogress continued to dig, the smell of salt-rub reddening her cheeks. Poldy, his shoelace, the aglet crumbed like a sawed-off stump, threaded through the wrong eyelet, watched from his perch above the overlord’s banquet, all of the fat people cramped under a small disc-shaped tent, the fattest pushing his way forward hoping to be the first to be fed. Under the disc-shaped tent, surrounded by fat people gnawing and chomping, a cockfight was going on; guts and quills flying everywhere. A potpie chicken fought a barnyard rooster. The crowd jeering and hooting, the barnyard rooster pinning the potpie chicken to the sawdust floor.

Maribor

He met Maribor Brezovica in a cattle car heading north into the grasslands. As the cattle car rattled headlong into the night, doors clanging, the floor shifting beneath their feet, the two men stared at one another. Suddenly, as if awaking from a yawning slumber Maribor Brezovica said ‘rattling ride’. ‘what?’ said the Witnesses’ father. ‘rattling’ said Maribor Brezovica. Wendell L. Espuma sat next to the Witnesses’ father picking at a scab on the heel of his right foot, his left foot taken by gangrene years previous. ‘death’s door’ said Maribor Brezovica pointing at Wendell L. Espuma. ‘pick pick pick, soon he’ll have no foot at all’. An abattoir of viscera (entrails, bowel and tripe) lay festering stacked like cord wood in the corner, a disease that needed slaughtering. ‘it stinks in here’ said Maribor Brezovica holding his sleeve against his mouth. ‘it’ll get worse’ said Wendell L. Espuma rolling a crumb of dead skin between his thumb and forefinger. ‘the death of us all, you’ll see’.

The Witnesses’ father had been summoned by the standing council to bring an end to an outbreak of smallpox that had killed half the townspeople. Long before he devoted his life to the Church the Witnesses’ father was known far and wide as a conjurer. Long before the birth of his son the Witnesses’ father lived the life of Reilly, concocting harebrained schemes about how the world could and would be if people only paid heed to his outlandish ideas and notions, some of which verged on the abyss of outright madness. He fell in and out then in again with an unsavory mob of hooligans, many of whom wore stockings on their heads and went about shoeless; all the better for kicking the crap out of anyone who mistook them for snivelers or creamery workers. This was long before he found God, leaving behind the life of Reilly for a life of faith, fidelity and sacrosanct devotion.

Jugglers and Hagglers

‘Liar!’ yelled a woman in a purple skirt with matching runaround lace. ‘He’s the devil his self!’ shouted a man holding a walking-stick. ‘His mother has the crazy disease!’ shouted the woman in the purple skirt. ‘Let’s Kill him!’ shouted a boy throwing a tantrum. ‘and send him back to where he came from!’ added a second boy with a mane of fiery red hair. ‘Stop!’ shouted Poldy. ‘leave the poor man alone! He’s done no wrong!’ ‘let’s kill him!’ shouted a boy pointing at Poldy. ‘no, this one!’ said the other boy. ‘like we planned’. ‘kill every last one of them!’ said a colossal man with a dwarf on his back. ‘then burn them’ said the Witness addressing the mob. ‘in Hell Fire’ screeched the boy at the top of his lungs. Off in distance the legless man could be heard yelling ‘With my own two hands! Now get out of my way or I’ll run you over! I swear I will!’

He stole his way past jugglers and hagglers, past the post-digger and his assistant, past a man advertising pork bellies, a gory display of entrails and viscera, bowel and tripe, he stole his way past everyone and everything, a twinkling in his eye. I will I swear I will I swear! Lela watched as the man collected his things, placed them in a satchel and walked away, the sun shining like a roaring lion, his steps ferrying him across the wet glistening streets like a broken metronome. I will see him again, sometime, I know I will she said to herself. I may pass him in the street or see him placing his things in neat rows on the ground, the sun barely risen, stars holding the night at bay. I will I will, I will see him again, of that I am sure.

Onion Cloth

Tubbercurry Creamery mark every jug of cream with an X, signifying the resurrection of the cross. The cooper’s assistant bungs every jug with bees’ wax and onion cloth, guaranteeing a taut indissoluble joint and deterring lice and ants from laying eggs in the cream. Lela overheard a boy with a freckled face ask a man with a weary face why he looked so sad, the man answering ‘because my house burned down last night and I have nowhere to sleep’. ‘you can stay with my mamma and me’ said the freckle faced boy. ‘thank you but no’ said the weary face man. ‘why?’ asked the boy, ‘why won’t you come live with me?’ ‘because I have a disease that makes me crazy’ said the man. ‘so does my mamma… and she shakes worse than you’ said the boy. ‘so it won’t matter, not a bit’. Lela felt a shiver corset down her spine. Her mamma too had the crazy disease. The weary face man turned and walked away, the freckled face boy shouting ‘she’ll do whatever you want… anything… I promise!’

It takes an hour to walk from one end of the city to the other; a day if you have no legs to speak of. The legless man punts the streets like a crazy devil, his pushcart jumping curbs and medians. Get out of my way! Can’t you see I have no legs to speak of? They fell off! I had no say in the matter! They just fell off! I could care less! I have this machine to get me where I have to go! A good sturdy machine! I made it myself! With my own two hands! These! Now get out of my way or I’ll run you over! I swear I will!

Tubbercurry Creamery

The Unificationists pelted the crowd with crabapples and unripe pears; one of them, an odious-looking boy with a fat face and matching nose grinning from ear-to-ear. ‘God save the King!’ hollered a boy in knee-britches and a candy-striped nightcap, ‘and the Queen too!’ hollered a second boy, his sickly yellow face riddled with pockmarks. Lela made her way along the icy balustrade that ran like a Chinese Wall from one end of the town to the other, the thump of the drums vibrating in her ears. She walked past Monument Creameries, the heavy oak doors creaking on their hinges, an ashen face cooper sliding the quarter hoop into place then tamping the head hoop round the chime, cherry wood barrels of fresh cream saddled onto the back of ox-driven wagons destine for house and home, then past a stray dog pissing on a dead dog, the pissing dog leaning into it furtively, Lela pulling her muffler over her mouth, the dead dog grinning from ear to snout. She passed by a woman and a wailing child, the woman’s face red with fury, the wailing child sucking its thumb like an icicle candy.

She walked and walked, stopping only to redress her skirts, which owing to the clamminess in the air wouldn’t stay flat against her thighs and buttocks. She walked past the bust of King Olaf, his figure looming over the commons like a regal courtesan, his feminine side, something he was disparaged for as a young man, fief and serf alike mocking him for his womanly manner, outstripping his masculine side, past a sandbox where a boy and a girl were building a sandcastle, the boy throwing handfuls of sand in the girl’s tear-stained face. She walked and walked, her legs aching like whittled sticks, her feet as tender as milk pudding. ‘wait up!’ yelled a man in a overcoat beguilingly. ‘I have something for you’. ‘shove off I’ll call a cop’ said Lela firmly, her eyes fixed on the man’s face. ‘that’s certainly no way to talk to your great uncle, now is it?’ ‘my great uncle is dead’. The man smiled and went his way, his overcoat billeting in the wind, a crow riding the thermals like an acrobat signaling the end of days. ‘damn scoundrel pigeons…Call it domestication…keep them in rooftop hutches…skin and boil them with radishes and field greens, saw a peddler griddle cook a dozen on a sidewalk grill, juices spitting all over his boots…sold them two abreast, slat-rubbed and quartered, pick your teeth with the leftover quills’. Her great uncle died from overexertion, collapsed on the street like a whipped horse, flies laying eggs in the whites of his eyes. She past a man making the sign of the cross, an X marked with ash rubbed into his forehead.

Óglaigh na hÉireann

Poldy Magyar set out into the snowy streets, his toque pulled tight around his ears. On the other side of the snow-white street, the collar of his overcoat cinched up around his ears, stood Dejesus admiring his reflection in the Seder grocer’s window. Further up, beyond the snowy hedge that had formed alongside the taffy-pullers shack, beyond the Waymart, beyond where the sun fell like a golden shadow upon the earth, he saw the legless man punting across the wet uneven cement, the sleeves of his coat dragging behind him. ‘make way!’ piped a man clad in full Óglaigh na hÉireann military dress. ‘make way, damn it!’ Plowing through the snow-white snowy streets, past Dejesus admiring himself in the Seder grocer’s window, past the taffy-pullers shack, past the legless man punting across the wet uneven cement, marched the Sligo Armory, the Cork Constabulary hot on their heels.

He saw the world as if it were upside down; everything floating on a snowy white plateau, the sky a great troubling sea, waves crashing, the sun, yellower than any buttercup, sitting on the ocean floor, his senses replicating, doubling, until he imagined his head would fracture into a million worlds, each world rupturing into yet another and another until there was nothing; only a white glowing light: the godhead, the beginning, nothingness. Advancing, flags flapping in the midday wind, a band of troubadours moved up the sidewalk, the lead singer, a diminutive cantor with a headscarf entwined round his thickheaded skull, for indeed he was in possession of a un-gauntly large head, shouting out the count: one, two, three, four ‘stay in line, damn you!’ five… ‘left, to the left by God!’

Cork Constabulary

The Wren Boy Procession made its way up the street, drums pounding. Tam tam tam tam went the pecking wrens. With Christmas eve on the quick the Wren Boy Procession came out of Kilmainham Jail and marched down Inchicore Road, a small group of onlookers giving them the once-over. ‘here they come’ said a woman in a Kerry scarf, ‘and in such a neat orderly line’. Alongside the barricades dressed in full regalia the Kerry Women’s Auxiliary tossed nosegays of daffodils and carnations and bluebells and marigolds and frothy half-pints of chocolaty brown Guinness into the streets, the onlookers roaring with enthusiasm.

Peeping slyly from behind the bust of King Olaf, his chest puffed out like a Spring pheasant, the littlest dogman watched the procession march by. A woman holding a sign that read “A godless person is like a public woman to whom everyone has access” (Witold Gombrowicz, Bacacay) charged to the front of the procession, her face a medley of consternation and bliss. ‘mark my words!’ bawled the Witness, a waif, his tongue stuck out like a red Pop-sickle, tugging on his coattails. ‘out of my way!’ bellowed a tugboat of a man, the prow of his belly cutting the crowd in half. ‘make way for the Óglaigh na hÉireann!’ piped a man clad in full military dress.

Standing in the middle of a lottery of broken plates and dishes, the aftermath of an all-out brawl between the Cork Constabulary the Sligo Armory, the man in the hat watched the Wren Boy Procession make its way through the icy streets, the blue sky above his behatted head turning centenarian gray. Tomorrow is another day, he thought, and then another and another, until the one is indistinguishable from the other. A week, a month, a year, the days following one after the other, like sheep to the slaughter, dancing like dervishes under a whorish yellow moon, his father smiling, counting the day’s take: tomorrow will be a good day, a fine day indeed.

Nollaig Shona Duit

They came by what they come by dishonestly. Salty bastards! Ben Nachtaí and James Nollag live the life of O’Reilly. No more dishonest two, thither or thon, are there to be found. Upon their backs haversacks they carry, pleasing cur and hag with nosegay and candy, Nachtaí and Nollag wander a tithe to a hither. Her da told her the tale of Nachtaí and Nollag one Christmas eve, the shutters clapping and the wind howling like a sanitaria dog.

Her great great uncle, deceased and exhumed by worms and wood tics, lived the life of O’Reilly, pillaging and raiding and spending the evenings in compotation with his marauding brethren. Sad but true: sadly so sadly. Astride the cattlements he heads for home on the backside of a bull. Never delimit the cosmos, he would say, his chaps hipswaddled round his legs. The morrows another day, believe you me. So mount up; the suns lowing and the winds blowing and the sky is red as hickory. The insurance man said he’d have the tuque in the mail by Friday; Saturday at the latest. Can’t trust those cunts, always got something up their sleeve. Puffed up notions of righteousness and high merit. Impressive: I dare say nay! Cat-o-nine-tails across the back makes a man into a lowly crumb. Her da made candle-wax heads, spiking the tops with spent matches and that damn sulfur smell. No matter what she did she couldn’t get the paraffin stink out of the sofa cushions. Had to sleep with her head at the bottom of the daybed, her new hairdo lousy with grave worms. A sight for soar ewes. All that bah-bahing and jumping one over the another. Her da said things could only get better, when what he really meant to say was needs some more butter. Can’t stand a dry flapjack on a midwinter morn. Sticks to the eaves of your mouth, he’d say, his eyes trained on the brown sugar bowl. Cows all lined up like toy soldiers waiting to be shipped out; never can tell which is which: the cows or the toy soldiers. Saturday last Thelma cashed in her diner’s card, got more than she bargained for. Two free entrees and a side-plate of mash. Never did ask why she didn’t ask for the butter. Might have got it mixed up with salad. Mixed greens; smell worse than spent match heads. All that sulfur and burnt wick smell. Do better with a plate of griddle-cakes. Tastes like mamma’s homemade cooking, except for the gassy smell coming from the oven. Can hear the clapboards cricketing. Lives under the hydro electric towers, the buzzing in his ears a constant consonant hissing. Like burnt wick and sulfur but louder. Can’t stand wet things on a dry summer’s day.

Sniveling like a scolded child the Witness threw pamphlets into the gathering mob. ‘there will be hell to pay, I assure you that!’ ‘fuck you!’ yelled a man from the back of the mob. ‘go back to where you came from!’ yelled a second. ‘sack of shit!’ yelled a third, and a fourth ‘eat shit pamphlet man!’ Puffing out his chest like a windsock in a hurricane the Witness bawled ‘mark my words; the wrath is near!’

Junkhouse - Shine

$27½

When her great uncle wasn’t beheading cows he bowled for the Boondocks’ Brachycephals. Every Sunday they played 27 wickets, 27½, weather permitting. Her great uncle was known for his overhand bowl; launching the cork orb like a meteorite, the batsman stepping out of the wicket like a man fearing for his life. His mother watched seated on a blanket in the stands, her eyes too weakly to see beyond the end of her nose. Oskar Lynch Kokoschka edging closer slops potato pot pie gravy onto her blanket, his great uncle bellowing ‘perro cuerpo, fucker!’ the cork orb ricocheting off his head. Of course none of this is true. Her great uncle was a tinker’s assistant, not a slaughterer. He never once held a cricket bat or bowled a cork ball. He was a fearsome man with uneven eyes, one a half a centimeter higher, a port-stain birthmark and a three-fingered hand; two fingers having been mistakenly severed by a knife-wielding maniac who mistook him for another man. Oskar Lynch Kokoschka I made up to amuse myself. Which he/it did. (Authorial note: it’s what I do, make things up, so please please don’t harangue me unduly; it’s in my Nature).

He fell from such a substantial height his arms and leg looked like corkscrews, the missing one aching like mad. His great great uncle suggested he use a cricket bat, jimmying it to his stump-end with leather straps and baling wire. Seeing this as a sign of his uncle’s misfortune, a mule waggon accident rendering him uncollectable and rivetingly small, he thought he’d give it a try, tamping the metal snip in place with a soft-wood mallet. Of course this reminded him of his great grandfather who’s missing leg was mistaken for his gamy leg, the bad one rankled with sores and pustules, and severed at the joint by an overconfident intern with thick horn-rimmed spectacles and globules of salty sweat on his forehead which the nurse swabbed off with a green and yellow surgical napkin. The litigation ended with his great grandmother receiving a cash disbursement of $27½, payable to her from the conceited bespectacled surgeons insurance company. Give her a Hogansberry soda; with a straw, by God, a straw. Astride the battlement he strode, his funereal clothes tarred and fathered. He was a sloppy fellow prone to fits of nervous tics. A tic tick here and a tick tic there. He likes België waffles with Maple syrup for breakfast and for supper.

Bullwhip Black Porter

That morning the sky broke like an egg, the sun filling the horizon with a yolky glaze. Lela walked the battlement that crossed the aqueduct and met up with the path behind the Waymart, her eyes fixed on the yolky yellow sun. She heard that the dogmen slept three to a bed, four if they shared with the littlest dogman who slept at the foot curled up in an eel-basket. She dug in her heels, the straps and buckles of her shoes creasing the skin around her ankles, and watched a clamshell of gray clouds move across the blue sky. A swan swam across the surface of the aqueduct, its neck twisted into a Midshipman's Hitch. You can see the funnels from here... there, out beyond the breakwater she said pointing. A man kicking a hedgehog, the hedgehog curling up in a ball, the man kicking it again and again, crossed in front of her, the man hollering ‘that’ll show you! Never underrate me! Never!’

Lela felt sad for the lowly hedgehog, the man forcing it, underfoot, to walk a faster straighter line. She thought of her great uncle, his ham-fisted grip on the sledgehammer, swinging it over his shoulder and across the head of the cow; felling it as it stood, a mass of cowhide and hamburger spreading out on all-fours on the switch-room floor. Her mother said it was man’s right over Nature: to kill or be killed; to eat or to starve; to go around coatless or to be dressed in the finest leather garments. Her great uncle was doing us a great service; maintaining the lifestyle we had all become accustom to. But what of the disservice to the cow? Was it not deserving of life and limb, a trough full of hay and leather coat? If it was her great uncle was doing the cow a grave disservice; treating it as a means to an end, not an end in itself. But really, she could care less; cows were ugly bovine brutes, and as her mamma said, open season for well-dressed fat people. As for her great uncle, well he had other things in mind; things so ugly and ghastly he never spoke a word about them, in polite or impolite company.

Meisce’s tavern drafts Bullwhip Black Porter, the aleman’s wife, Euryclea, scurrying from table to table, her apron, on back to front, revealing a bony white shank of knee. Her great uncle drank tankards of molasses thick Black Porter, the space between the tip of his nose and his upper lip frothy with head. The well-dressed cad at the next table, next to the commode, a two-seater with an onionskin seat, drank his cups like a man once denied a good hearty slake, his beard birdied with biscuit crumbs and salt, his nose up to the hilt of his tankard. ‘by Jove yes!’ exclaimed the well-dressed man. ‘you’re that fellow who likes sweet nutmeat biscuits’. Lela’s great uncle swabbed a moustache of frothy head from the space between the tip of his nose and his upper lip and said ‘you must have me confused with someone else, for you see sir I despise biscuits’. An angry-looking man with a broken arm got up from his stool, and turning to walk away said ‘perro cuerpo, hond se liggaam’ huis voice follón bejina hiñe lique a bar ámel. ‘by Jove what an uncouth fellow!’ said the well-dressed cad. ‘comes here every night to use the pisser. Always has something nasty to say on his way out’.

O’Casey’s Whore

His fader came across on a famine boat, captain Gorta Mór standing the helm of the Clachans’ like a man incorruptible of mind and spirit. His da was the first settler to set up a hiding and tanning shop, working the hides into high-grade leathers fit for a Lords Lieutenant or a Waterford fop. He ate his ploughman’s lunch astride the O’Connell bridge, a rusted out bicycle fender gasping for air in the bottle-green Liffey, a chiliadal waif throw crusts of black bread into the swales, a lone duck, the waves pushing it into the chalk-marked battlements, wings slapping like a shingle, treading the surge. ‘shove off!’ bellowed a tart, her heavy-weighed hips anchored to the Speyside balustrade. His fader came across on a famine boat, captain Gorta Mór standing the helm of the Clachans’ like a man incorruptible of mind and spirit. His da was the first settler to set up a hiding and tanning shop, working the hides into high-grade leathers fit for a Lords Lieutenant or a Waterford fop.

Cunts like him always want a free-one, don’t want to wear galoshes neither, the cunt. Like boots make the man. Rather have his cock in my mouth than up my skirt. Never know if the packers got the crabs; crawl all over you like the British fucking army. Lords Lieutenant gave me a dose, squeezed it out like toothpaste, saying he’d never been with a lady before. Said his da came across on the Clachans’, took the helm when the captain went starker’s. Had to lock the mad cunt in his cabin, tried on his graveclothes to see if they still fit. Found a fiver in his pant’s pocket.

Leftover from the last time he was ashore; probably got the whiplash from that fat tart on O’Casey, hear say she practically gives it away, waiting on the famine boats like an expectant mother. Got a mouth bigger than a man’s head; good for swallowing and spitting back up. Saw her with the gimp, practically sucked it off, poor bastard. Almost fell head over into the drink, held on with one thumb it was. Famine boats coming and going; some never making it past the breakwater, others crashing into the breakers by the funnels. See the little ones cutting their milk-teeth on runt potatoes, a cup of bilge water to wash it down. Sad sight for sad eyes.

She was twelve when her da first told the story, his face screwing up like a tight-knuckled fist when he got to the part about runt potatoes. He said he remembered swimming out as far as the breakwater, the funnels belching plumes of gray brown smoke, the engine master wrenching the bilge gate open, the tanks filling up with seawater. It’s all a lie; her da never learned how to swim. He couldn’t hold his breath or make flippers with his hands. Anyhow the funnels are chimneys, not breakwaters. Any other man would know the difference. Anyhow the British fucking army would put a stop to that; cutting them off at the docklands, guns emblazing. Stead’s bad for a so-and-so with a wiggly tooth. Bilge water up the arse I’d say. Makes a mockery out of an otherwise charming fellow. Her da held hold of the gimp’s arm, pulling him furlong into the drink, O’Casey’s whore splitting a gut. Serves ya right she bellowed, maybe next time you’ll come by it honestly!

Dolman Coats

Flanking the curbside a timid man with a stock-stiff leg stumbled. Lela knew this man; not so very long ago he stumbled into her as she strolled idly along the sideways, her favorite dress frilling and dancing in the midmorning breeze. Could it be him? Could it? No not him. The man she was thinking of lived beyond the five-mile and wore fishstockings, so no it couldn’t be. Anyways she hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him, nor had she given him much thought, really. He was a ghoul that lay quiescent in her thoughts; pushed back into that place where she kept memories that had frightened her when she was a formless child; a tot, her grandmamma used to say, her brow as tight as the hatband in her father’s cap. The Mormons kept a monkey in a cage hidden from sight behind the Kingdom Hall; its leper spotted coat infested with lice and wood tics. Bug-ridden and half-crazed the poor monkey scurried round and round the cage, its flea-bitten tail trailing behind it like a masochist’s whip. Lela recalled the day she first saw the monkey, one of the Mormon’s feeding it mashed up grapes, the monkey flinging itself round the cage like a furry acrobat, its eyes daring to be met. The Mormon, a cubbish man with a child’s chubby face and yellow-brown teeth, was talking to the monkey, warning it if it ever tried to run away he would wring its neck and throw its half-dead body into the aqueduct, where it would lay rotting until the Spring thaw. Then, if anybody gave a good damn, they’d scrap what remained of it from the oily green muddy bottom and throw it into the nearest trash heap, where it would unthaw and start rotting all over again. As monkeys don’t understand Mormons’, and even if they could they certainly wouldn’t care, the bug-ridden infested animal stared blankly at the stupid man crouching outside the cage, its eyes daring to be met. As this happened a long long time ago, before Lela knew the difference between a monkey and a dogman, she had mostly forgotten about the monkey; only now, standing in front of the grocer’s swatting flies off the picnic hams having an inkling of what she’d saw.

Above the screen door to the grocer’s was a sign that read: “If all my life and my being were judged by a few incidents it would rightly be determined that I was a complete imbecile”. (Felisberto Hernández) The owner, a cheat with caterpillar eyebrows and a sneak’s grin, sat on a wooden stool behind the counter counting the day’s take: $27 plus the two he stole from the old woman’s handbag when she wasn’t looking. ‘Not a bad day’s take’ he thought to himself stuffing the pilfered two dollar bill in his apron pocket, ‘the old biddy shouldn’t have nodded off… stupid cow. What’s a hardworking man to do?’ Turning, his brown teeth sticking out and upwards like walrus tusks, he locked the strongbox and placed it under the counter. ‘anyhow serves her right. Maybe next time she’ll be more careful, feeble cow’. He placed a crate of iced cowfish on the top shelf behind the counter with the hope that by the time he arrived in the morning it would be unthawed and ready to be sold. ‘cowfish for a cow’ he said to himself, his front teeth touching the end of his nose, and slamming shut the screen door hurried down the street like a burglar.

The West Ham Newham Glove Co., owned and operated by John J.J. Newham, manufacture Dolman coats, a one-piece garment with led pellets in the hems to keep the coat from riding up on the wearer. Above the cutting table, written in gargantuan block letters, by the hand of a behemoth, perhaps, or a hippopotamus, even though one hadn’t been seen in the vicinity in years, nay eons, was the following epitaph: "Everything is possible, everything, even the most sordid and undignified things." (Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten) His father, J.J. the elder, beat his mamma with the wooden skeins the coat cloth came wrapped in, his mamma shrieking and moaning like a wounded animal.

Og Fjordane

He wore his wooly rollups, cinching the tops round the basins of his ankles. On those dreary days when it was colder inside his lean-to than it was outside, which given his leaky roof and poor circulation was more oft than not, he warmed himself by the coil-flame that spluttered and gasped from the entrails of his hotplate, where, should he need he’d lay his socks and listen to the thread crackle and hiss like a yuletide log. Dog was a corpse sniffer; would snuffle the arse of a lamb were it in whiffing range. Fed it on drake and gander, goose the fowl smell out of it, hindquarters shaking like Ouija board. Not uncommonly common that a man of such low means should find pleasure in subordinate things: simple mind simple pleasures. Subordinate the ordinate, so to say. The more vertical the Y, the plumber the X; like a chalkline thwacked on a perpendicular. Born in haste, mamma pushing him out like a scalding hot oyster, placental entrails coiling round his neck, his mamma’s borehole gaping like a shucked clam.

Og Fjordane arrived on the back of a mule-drawn-carriage, the sleigh scooping and splitting torrents of undulating snow, some higher than a man’s shoulders, others no higher than a curbside, small enough to hop over without splitting a collarbone or shin. Og, as he was called by those of his acquaintance, dispensing with the formality of a last name, which connoted a snobbery indicative of high ideals and low temperance, came to town twice a year to purchase gifts for his wife; a mediocre looking woman with pale skin and uneven teeth who demanded extant chivalry from her husband, who given his line of work, a tanner of high-grade leathers and leather apparel, could afford to keep his wife ensconced in the lap of luxury. Leaping off the carriage he walked in a straight line to the Waymart, his overstuffed billfold weighing his gait to the left. ‘corpse sniffer’ he grumbled, the dog sniffing at his plantlet. ‘you’d think the mayor would have the common sense to rid the town of these shameful brutes’. He opened the front door and walked into the Waymart, his chin waggling like a fishpie, the doorman rubbing the tip of his nose with his ring-finger. Lela’s mother told her about a strange man who came to town twice a year to buy gifts for his duck-ugly wife, his wiggly chin bouncing off the prow of his mule-drawn-carriage. She warned her to stay away from this strange man with the fishpie-chin lest he entice her into running away with him.

Waggon Horchers

‘where’s the boy?’ he asked, his enormous head sinking into his chest. ‘I haven’t got all day. I’m a busy man you know’. His mother searched all through the house, from top to bottom, but couldn’t find her son. He must be hiding, she thought; or has simply forgotten that today is the day. ‘just a minute’ she said, her face reddening. ‘I know he’s here somewhere’. Tightening his belt, his trousers bagging round his socks, the Mohel cleared his throat loudly, a gravelly rasp like a steam-shovel scrapping a mined-out quarry quickening her pace.

The day began anew; the sky opening like a perfectly cracked walnut, revealing a buttery yellow sun. ‘now hold on, boys in his position tend to squirm’ said the Mohel, his goatskin skullcap shifting on the top of his head. ‘grab him round the hips… that’s it, now push down… !’ Loosening his belt then tightening it again the Mohel coupled the boy’s testicles in his right hand, and with his left pinched the tip of his fleischig, the boy squirming like a fidgety baby. ‘stop that you little ganef!’ hollered the Mohel, ‘you’ll only make it worse!’ Snipping off the orlah with his scissors, the boy’s mother covering her face with her shawl, the Mohel bent over the boy’s privates and drew the blood into his mouth. ‘it’ll heal quicker if its exposed to the air… and for the Love of YHVH don’t play with it!’

The Waggon Horchers arrived two abreast; the left one keeling rightward like a failing kiss. Reining in the horses, his teeth clenched like a farrier’s clinchers the leftward Waggon Horcher slowed the waggon down to a stop, the rightward one pulling in behind him. Qabbals, for that was his name, bestowed on him by his father, jumped from his waggon landing irrefutably on his arse. ‘quickly, pull me up from this godforsaken fen’ quipped Qabbals, his upper lip quavering. The second Waggoner, a lithe, lissome man who went by the name Squibs hurdled from his waggon landing squarely on his two sturdy, albeit flat feet. The Mohel, his goatskin skullcap tilting like a windmill, hurried up the sideways, his Mohel’s bag pinched under his arm. Unable to see more than an inch in front of him, his locks, untrimmed in abeyance to Rabbinical law, covering his eyes, the Mohel ran amok into the first Waggoner’s waggon, his Mohel’s bag skidding sideways under the waggon. Lela, who happened that day to be sitting atop the hill just outside town watched on as the Mohel tried to un-upend himself, her eyes fixed on the lead horse who’s bridle had become entangled in the legless man’s pushcart; the alms man, sitting on his patch of cardboard in front of the Waymart, laughing to split a gut. And that was that.

Jean-Philippe Pringles, Coronel, his smart gentleman’s hat perched atop his full-head of hair, slivered an ivory toothpick between his eyetooth and his incisor, no one within earshot paying him any notice. For you see the Coronel was in town to visit a dear friend, and if time permitted, buy a toothpick placemat from the harridan’s sister, who that afternoon could be found with the other hawkers and peddlers in the basement of the church. Old Pitschobed wanted a Dolldy Icon and was willing to part with a day’s wage to purloin it. He had heard say that a hawker, one who barks and vends handmade goods, had a table in the basement of the Church of the Perpetual Sinner, alongside a woman who vended Pop-siècle placemats and gravy bibs. Old Pitschobed (born in Oalgoak’s Cheloven to a Barbary whore and a tinsmith) collected Dolldy Icons and women’s silk supper gloves. He fell down the stairs to the basement of the church, his tumbling caroming body going kun-ruhtnenedroohoohootnwaksnwanuohrravortnnuhtnnoutnnorrennotnnorbnnoknnorranimmakathgarahgladababab!

70 Wilmersdorfer Straße 141

She sat on top of the hill just outside town, the very same one where she sat years ago waiting for the jugglers and acrobats to arrive, the snorting of ox-driven carts filling her heart with expectant joy. The sun that day filled the sky with a buttercup yellow flame, the trees and high bushes surrounding the neighbor’s yard in full blossom, the sweet nectar of rosehip and lilac filling the soft afternoon light with a gossamer scent, like her grandmamma’s handkerchief drawer or the perfumer’s shop where her granddad bought tiny green bottles of Eau de Cologne called toilet-water, but not the same kind she flushed after making her commode each morning, that was different, not something you sprayed on your neck to entice eager young suitors or another man’s husband.

That Christmastime, gathered round the Menorah his great grandparents brought over from the old country (they lived at Kaiser-Friedrich-Straße 70 Wilmersdorfer Straße 141, the apartment next to them occupied by a strange fellow who scribbled tiny verses on the back of postcards and scraps of odd-sized paper) placed in the window and festooned with every Hanukkah decoration imaginable, they slit the throat of his penis, heralding in his ascension into manhood. The Roscommon Women’s Auxiliary, which convened every Sunday afternoon after church and was renowned for its allegiance to making Roscommon a place of haute couture, a stopover for travelers and the peripatetic alike, organized the fifth annual the Gorging of Friedrich-Straße, to be held the day following the Feast of the Lamb, the day after if it snowed. Lela attended the first Gorging of Friedrich-Straße held on the second day after the Feast of the Lamb, as it snowed the first two days, much to the surprise of her mother who was expecting rain. Belly-swollen Lela walked the dirt road home, the sweet doughy aroma of oven-baked bread kindling memories of simpler times when a young girl didn’t have to wear her heart on her sleeve or pretend she didn’t care when the boys called her names or made fun of her hand-me-down dress. The Mohel arrived by car, his goatskin skullcap covering the tonsured bald spot on his head.

Jējūnus

A discomfited man, prone to impetuosity and overgeneralizations, he sat staring blankly at the ceiling, each individual tile providing relief for the one next to it, a mosaic overlay that generated its own plane; equidistant, yet flaring out in plinths that created a Zoroastrian composure, a mesmerizing jējūnus that marveled the eye. ‘fuck the dog and the horse it rode in on’ he exclaimed, his face turning three shades of red. The constabulary wrestled him to the ground, his face smeared like a stain into the sidewalk. Kick him… kick him in the head! Harder… HARDER! …PUT some effort into it MAN! What do you think this IS? …we’re the CONSTABULARY!...!

‘get off my foot or I’ll smash your face!’ Dashing sideways like a punter hell-bent on laying a fiver on the last race of the evening, the off-track betting window three blocks away, he kicked up a few pebbles here and a few stones there, dragging his coattails behind him like a shredded windsock. ‘Aviate ahoy! he hollered, ‘ahoy I say: aviate!’ As no one could make heads nor tails of what he was saying, and even if they could they could care less, for you see they loathed anyone who hollered for no apparent reason, those closest to the back of the queue threw themselves flying out the window and into the streets, Lela’s mamma, pulling on her arm like a ragdoll, swearing a blue streak at the nerve of some people. That winter, a cold cruel wintertime, Lela found a glove hidden among the odds and ends of her mother’s things; things she kept in a lockbox stowed under the stoop behind the house that led to the woolshed where her granddad chewed shredded tobacco, his mouth, or was it his lips, ringed with black resin, or tar, yes tar; it was his favorite cob that left a circlet of resin, the smile a child gets after eating a stomach full of Easter chocolate.

Jenny and Johnny - Scissor Runner

Deeshy

Deeshy ordered a taggeen of Ballyhooly and returned to his stool at the opposite end of the bar. A queer bosthoon, known to spend umpteen hours counting ceiling tiles, his trousers and coat, threadbare both, begging a seamstresses’ attention, spent his evenings eavesdropping in on the chatter and hullabaloo that filled the tavern with a buzzing din. The two woman next to him, both regaling one another with tales of misfortune and love gone bad, were sharing a package of Saltillo Crisps, made and packaged by the Coahuila Tortilla and Flatbread Co. 27 Avenida de Zaragoza, Paco Grande Texas. Cunts, he grumbled to himself, his nose twitching like a dog’s tail. The salt will surely make them drier than a empty well, pity their husbands, like fucking a sandshoe.

He order another Ballyhooly and sat ruminating over the recent loss of his favorite hat, the one with the red and black hatband. Majeklejohn’s a real boozer, chugs back a 40 ouncer every other day; every three on a leap year. Not one for the Ballyhooly, claims it brings the worse out in a man; makes him into a headcase. Not that Deeshy gives a pile, makes a counterclaim: a taggeen a day keeps the bedbugs away, cleans out the whistle-hole too. And a man with a clogged up whistle-hole is a man on the verge of collapse. Can’t inhale and exhale; goes up down the wrong tube. He first met Deeshy at the Feast of the Lamb, Deeshy having come to pay a visit to his sick aunt, a woman of uneven temper who had contracted syphilis and was unable to pry herself from bed.

Having no other reason to acknowledge him than to ask him to move, for you see he was obstructing his view of the Lamb, he exclaimed ‘you, you stupid oaf, can’t you see you’re blocking my view?’ Deeshy replying in kind ‘get off my foot or I’ll smash your face!’ An awkward man he seldom spoke, worrying that a sentence would come out missing a preposition, or worse, in a language he didn’t know. Careworn with ticks that caused him no end of embarrassment, if he came upon a acquaintance in the street he would cover his face with the cuff of his greatcoat, replying to a solicitous hello with a muffled good bye, scurrying passed like a man hell-bent on meeting the noontime train.

Kick the Bastard

Lela stood in front of the Seder Grocer’s admiring the reflection of the person next to her, his greatcoat coattails hanging in tatters. The man, as indeed he was a man, perhaps a gentleman, had a hardnosed look on his bewhiskered face, the face of a journeyman or a jailor. She troubled with asking him if she might pull on his coattails, realigning them with the jib of his wooly trousers. But soberer thought told her that she best mind her own business and let bygones be. But why not, she thought? A man, any man, would be grateful to have a complete stranger, someone altogether unknown to him until today, draw attention to an obvious and glaring impropriety in personal attire. Not wishing to appear untoward, or worse, a troublemaker, she turned and walked away, his reflection sutured in her thoughts.

The following day, a day much like the day before, yet in and of itself an altogether precedential day, Lela awoke in a foul and uncharitable mood. Had I a mind to I’d give him a good talking to! Not clothing oneself propitiously is a sin. By the age of twelve Lela had already read A through P of her grandfather’s Funk and Wagnall, consigning to memory those words she felt she might need when she grew older. She twirled a braid of hair round her middle finger, the moon laurelling her head like a birds’-nest halo. Kick the bastard in the teeth, send his upper plate unhinging. The steeple of his head warding off lightening strikes, a common phenomenon when the temperature plummeted below 27½% Celsius, the man who’s reflection Lela admired in the window turned and skedaddled headlong up the sideways, his greatcoat tails rag-tagging behind him. She remembered how hot the woolshed got when her father banished her to think about what she’d said; the few sheep her granddad kept caked in shit and piss, the stench of mildewed hay bringing a sweat out on her forehead.

Niccolò Falcucci

‘Then that’ll be that’ said his da leaning over the table, his fork moving a mixed bag of organ meats and boiled things around his plate. ‘The end will come and wipe the slate clean; for all and once, my boy’. You mean once and for all don’t you da? ‘Shut your pile! Now move along, damn you!’ His da didn’t take kindly to sass. He was quick with a slap, swinging his hand like a fish mallet, his fist leaving a red weal on a back-talking face. You’re worse than the Inquisition! Prodding and pushing people round like desecrate Jews. Unburying whole families and burning their remains a second and third time. You’re a fucking menace!

She has the ‘French Disease’, the skin around her mouth as hard as a scabbed over knee. Her father read to her from Grünpeck’s ‘Tractatus de Pestilentiali Scorra Sive Mala de Franzos: Originem Remediaqu[ue] Eiusdem Continens’, [published by the in Nuremberg by Kaspar Hochfeder, 1496 or 1497]. When she began to show signs of necrosis, a surfeit symptom of the tertiary stage, common to advanced syphilis, her father summoned the Catastrophist from the village, a tunicate-fleshed man with a doctorate in zoology who was familiar with treatment by Salvarsan, discovered by Niccolò Falcucci and available at the conurbation library under ‘Sermones Medicinales Septem’. [Venice: Bernardino Stagnino, 1490-1491]. The abattoirist prepared the slaughter-room floor, skimming off the blood and intestines, some tied in bows, the pastime of men with minimal intelligence and weak morals, and laid down a double-sided oilcloth, then, with a wave of his hand told him to bring his daughter to the middle of the floor and lay her next to the trap. He did as he was told and stepped back, the Catastrophist stepping forward, his eyes glazed over like a honey cruller. The Catastrophist swabbed the infected areas with a mixture of ox piss and spirit gum, sourcing the contamination at the font, then applied an oatmeal plaster, tying off the loose ends with brass clips. He lay his hands on her forehead and closed her eyes, like one does to the recently dead, then pried open her mouth with a tool that resembled a bung-tapper, the brassy end riveted with past strikes, and cleaning any debris from her throat, which necessitated sticking his longest finger, generally the middle one, though in some the next to middle, given a mother’s excesses while carrying, dislodged a piece of half-digested meat, a roast of pork or mutton, clearing the air passageway for the trenching tool, which he held like a prognosticator’s wand over her head, and edging the tip of the tool down her throat yanked free the vile pox; the smell of rotting organ meat and bile filling the slaughterhouse air with an offal distemper.

The following day, awaking from plodding dreams, her forehead glistening with an oily sebaceous sweat, she lifted her head from the pillow and exclaimed, ‘I’m cured by Jove I’m cured!’ The dead die and the living die; the trick is in knowing which is which.

The Conurbation

His mother played pinochle with the gasfitter’s son; never once winning a hand. His da threw craps with the stevedores; rolling snake-eyes seven times out of eleven. His grandmamma tatted doilies with a whalebone hook, weighing her Gin in the barrows of her skirt, a look of deepest absorption on her hag-wearied face. His granddad spent Sunday afternoons sloughing the pump out back of the Hogshead, the proprietor promising him a slow pint and a package of saltine crisps, the stink of cabbage thickening the nighttime air, the unclipped hairs in his nose billeted with snot. He was born on the butcher’s block in the summer kitchen, the tiny hairs on his skull dewy with placental wash, the doctor stinking of saltine crisps and washtub Gin. His grandmother held the bottom half, his da the top, his mother squirming like an eel. His cone-shaped head was the first part of him to appear, the doctor callipering his skull with his grandmother’s corn tongs, then his shoulders, the umbilical cord twisted round his throat, his mamma screaming bloody murder. The doctor said he hadn’t delivered such a bad-tempered baby since he was held at gunpoint by the littlest dogman, his currish mother giving birth to a hirsute baby with gigantic ears and the remnants of a caudal tail.

The doctor delivered most of the children of the conurbation; many of whom grew impatient with life inside the tenements, leaving to find fame and fortune beyond the five-mile, only to return, cap in hand, to a city overrun with swindlers and cheats, a city on the verge of ruin and despoilment, where dogmen roamed the streets like packs of wolves and children begged for scraps under a yellow sky, their noses billeted with snot. The day the alms man was born his father swaddled him in burlap, loaded him into the back of his mule cart, and sent it caroming over the crags into the aqueduct.

The dream tells him little other than he is doomed to an unimpeachable dullness; a life of sorrow and debt. The dream: he is at home minding his own baseness, doing whatever the baseless do to wile away the time, when his older brother arrives on the doorstep, a squad of rowdies in tow. We want barbecued ribs! bellows one of the rowdies, what little hair he has on his head standing on end. Smothered in sauce! bellows a second. But how are we to spit them? asks a third. Why not use your brother? says a fourth. Yes, your brother says the second. We could push coat hangers through his shoulders. They’d make a fine spit. Fighting off the rowdies as best he could, threatening to stab his brother with a kitchen knife, he is overpowered by the rib-thirsty mob. While two rowdies hold him, the second and third pierce his shoulders with straightened coat hangers, his brother, a sibling grin on his bewhiskered face, watching on. They suspend him a pit of glowing coals, his arms and legs bound with basketball mesh, prodding and pushing him over the coals like a skewered pig, the hiss and sizzle of roasting flesh rivaling the heathenry of the Inquisition.

Reminiscences

His father wore the same blue shirt day in and day out, the collar ringed with his own filth. Had he a mind to he’d tell him off this is what he’d say, ‘by Lord father but your shirt is filthy dirty’. His father’s blue shirt was manufactured by the Barking and Dagenham Shirt Co. The Barking and Dagenham Shirt Co., owned and operated by the Barking bros. of Dagenham Council, are known for their haughty craftsmanship and eye for detail. Over the door to the cutting-room, framed in oak, the wood buttering in the dovetails, are the following two quotations: “I did not receive my visitors with boisterous rapture as the bearers of any gifts of profit or fame” (Joseph Conrad, Some Reminiscences, 1912) and, “. . . No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream—alone. . . .” (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1902). As neither brother knew how to read the quotations fell on blind eyes.

Were they able to read, able to make out squiggles and dots, the words would have leaped out of their wooden frames, calling to arms the brothers against the impunity of falsifying the story of one’s life; the battle, if they had enlisted, having ended in their ruin. For the brothers, you see, were numbskulls, incapable of making sense of anything more challenging than a brothel address or the embossed face on a coin, which they did by touch, not sight, making their competency fraudulent, calculating at best. Frank Goya, a first-rate embosser and clerical tailor, has the needlework contract for the Vincennes Glove Co. He is a scoundrel and a mountebank, and undeserving of charity or good will! He has carious teeth and ill-defined features; a tomblike smile and bloodhound red eyes. He is to be avoided at all costs! Pray tell who? More people peopling an over-peopled world. This must stop! {Author’s aside: you must excuse my overzealousness; confession, so the rector told me, is good for the soul}.

Let us begin again: The sky appeared and disappeared leaving behind a streak of blue. ‘can’t you see his head is crooked? Now cradle the back of his head in your arms; now push, gently… that’s it, now you’ve got it’. He didn’t know whether he should pull or push, the half-dead corpse mumbling something in Gudrun, a altogether unpleasant parlance of constantans and misplaced vowels. ‘cradle, now pull!’ Liphook stood over the half-dead corpse whittling the point of a stick. Having been rousted from sleep by his grandmother’s foot kicking at his slumbering head, which she did without fail every morning, he felt none too solicitous towards any thing or one.

Enscheda Apothecary

His grandfather bartered whole grain and rye seeds for Bocholt-made Limburg steel, convincing the blacksmith that his wife could use some vulgar flour for her biscuits. The blacksmith agreed, trading 27½ ounces of Bocholt steel for three sacks of whole grain, passing on the rye seeds which he said stuck to his wife’s dentures, “the insufferable cur”. There are coincidences in life that make your teeth ache. This, however, is not one of them. Cudgels were commonplace and found among all hooligan’s magazines, like battering rams and trebuchets, so making a claim as to their inimitableness is pure folly! The mercantilists are in cahoots with the industrialists, neither seeing the nonsensicality of their coalition. Nary a brainpan among them. Feel sorry for their children, probably haven’t eaten a decent meal in months. All embroiled in their coalition, making it hand over knuckle, sucking the lifeblood out of the gloving industry. The post diggers staged a strike; had to sidestep half-excavated holes on the way to vespers. Came close to turning an ankle! Left their shovels in a hurry to be the first at the union office. First cunt in line gets a saloon chit. Spend a dime on pale ale and pig’s-feet. Maybe a butter plate heaping with chitterlings, spleens, I hear say, are good for the heart and proper bone formation. Cunt Scheherazade eats ‘em like there’s no tomorrow, sucks the guts dry. Cunt doesn’t know the difference between lamb and mutton, uses the hotplate for boiling soaked bandages. Blood and chafed skin flying every which where. First one to the union hall gets a brand new hotplate, boil up a mess of oily shoulder. Old Overijssel lives above the Enscheda Apothecary with a blind dog, neither aware that the other is watching him. Though unable to see, the dog is sucking the lifeblood out of Old Overijssel. Before moving into the bedsit above the apothecary Old Overijssel worked as a fitter for the Vincennes Glove Co., retiring with a handshake and a cutout for the women’s red evening glove, the company’s top seller. Last one to the union office gets the dregs. Blue-fin eel, blacker than the ace of clubs. Don’t get much these days for a union chit. All hell broke loose. Dodgy cunts don’t know the difference between pork belly and Blue-fin.

Troy Scheherazade

A few boxes of raisins; bastard needs his ears lowered. Covered in pocket lint, sticks to the roof of my gob. Cat strangler, seen him wring a few feline necks, pushes ‘em over the cornice and into the river. Tails white with plaster. Sells them to the Asians, make a wonton or soft roll with the not so bad parts. The sun bled yellow egg yolk. His father told him that if he sat under the biggest tree in the forest an apple would sooner or later fall on his head. ‘That’s how we know we’re down here and not up there’ said his father pointing a resin brown finger at the sky. ‘there’s only the apple and the serpent’ said his mother scolding his father, ‘now get in the house!’ He lined up the toffee and raisins on the floor next to his bed. He counted until he couldn’t stand counting any more. Five pieces of toffee and 27 raisins, each in its own tiny box. Taking into account the plumpness of the raisins he figured he could eat one raisin and one piece of toffee a day, the entire cache lasting 27½ days, longer if he broke the toffee into smaller pieces. The writing on the side of the box said, The Tuxtla Bros. Raisin Co., Chiapas Gutierrez, Mexico. 'The finest plumpest raisins grown and sundried with lots of nice plump sunshine'. Each tiny cardboard box carried within it a handful of plump sundried raisins, some so plump they looked more like plums than raisins.

He wrecked havoc wherever he went, smashing and wielding the cudgel his grandfather made him from a sledge of grainy oak. He and Troy Scheherazade, an uncomely boy with jug-handle ears and an ungainly smile, vandalized and laid waste to anyone who got in their way, using their cudgel sticks as batterers and swords.

Pentland Mahaffy

…would have won a medal if it weren’t for the rum-fits. Had her all crippled and bent over. That winter Lela bought a pair of red gloves, the mercantilist offering to wrap them up and top off the package with a scissor-pulled bow. She chose instead to wear the gloves, clutching herself against the brisk weather on the other side of the belled door. The mercantilist lived with his ailing mother on the second floor across the hall from a woman who lived with a bluefish. Neither he or his sick mother ever saw the fish that it lived across the hall on the second floor with the big-boned woman. Taking their neighbor’s word for it who had seen the fish, they agreed that there was indeed a fish in the apartment across the hall, but as for anything else, anything of importance, they hadn’t the foggiest. Sunday mornings their neighbor took her cat for a walk, clomping up and down the stairs like a bull elephant, cat in toe. The owners of Plunker’s Market kept a dog in the crawlspace beneath the stairs, its snout, were one inclined to look, visible from the top of the stoop. The dog was called Temecula, named after the mercantilist’s wife’s mother. The woman across the hall from the bluefish was indifferent to the dog, climbing and descending the stoop in a hurry when she took her cat out for a walk. No one cared, not even the harridan’s sister who lived in the apartment above the mercantilist and his wife, or if they did they, did a fine job of pretending they didn’t. Everything was taken for granted, and those that weren’t were taken with a grain of salt. When he was a boy Poldy bought penny-candy from Plunker’s Market, each treasured piece placed one by one into brown paper sacks, the counter-person trying to pinch his cheek as he tried valiantly to escape through the belled-door, the ballooning sack clutched in his tiny hands. When he got home his da would take the jelly beans and mojos, redskin peanuts and licorice, leaving him the hard toffee and a few boxes of raisins. Over the door, fished in cobwebs, was a sign that read “for the corner boys who spit into the Liffey” (The Rev. Sir John Pentland Mahaffy) Remorselessly he set about the day a second time, his hat sleeved in his armpit, the corner boys gobbing, their youth belying their ignorance.

Esther Pivner

They came by oxcart, by foot and on their knees, people so grisly and depraved they left a terrible taste in your thoughts. His father had warned him of the coming of ‘the many’, the hordes escaping across the five-mile and into the cities. ‘The five-mile will not hold forever’ his father warned. ‘sooner or later we’ll be overrun with them, the same people we forced out wanting backing in’. His father squinted, his upper lip curling like a beheaded worm, splitting in segments. He never thought he’d see the day when being sane would be a shortcoming, as commonplace as silk gloves and woolen trousers. Coro Falcon wears knee-britches with candy-coloured stockings, the tiny hairs on her shins swimming in nylon. Father but why? My son, that you’ll learn when you grown old; like a puny stalk of celery. His father wore gray trousers, the inseams grayed with Hawken’s plug. Father but you’ll surely choke on it! Never you mind, (mijn zoon), I’m hardier than an oak; spinier too. Esther Pivner, big-boned and prone to fits of hysteria, lives above Plunker’s Market with a blue goldfish. His da used to lay-in with her Sunday mornings when his ma was busy cleaning the dust in between the pews. She used a duster with a silver handle; the kind used by street-sweepers and old-fashion charwomen. The kind his own grandmamma used to clean the ceiling and the bottom of the cupboards. She was prone to rum-fits and horse-coughing.

Mijn Zoon

Not the man in the hat (Poldy Magyar), nor the weekly fistfights held in Landesschule Pforta gymnasium were affected by these extraneous goings-on’s, it just was as it was, the rest of the world going about its business. His father felt the violation in his head, the talismanic beginning of the madness that was to plague him for the rest of his life. But father, the goose will surely shit all over the floor. Stop your bellyaching, shit is good for the milkman. Keeps him hale and hardly. Hardly what, father? Hardly worth the bother to give it a second’s thought. Father, you’re always goosing around, I can’t understand a word you say. It’s better that way my boy; you’ll understand it when you get older. But what if I don’t? You will, and you will enjoy it. He wondered how her sagging breasts must feel trapped under her blouse, hanged men swaying on the gallows.

Frederica Cárdenas wears shiny shoes with beanpole heels. Abel Rotwang hasn’t a pot to mik-chə-rāt in, piss yellower than buttercups trickling down the inseam of his trousers. My boy (mijn zoon) never underestimate the imbecility of people! Ja vader ja. Hij leefde in een twee kamer bedsit, de bank stijver dan gematteerd paardenhaar. He wondered if her legs rubbed together when she sat in church, the tiny hairs on the insides of her thighs chaffing against the pew wood. His grandmamma had oniony breath, the fine hairs on her upper lip sweaty with uiensap. Pinesap, that’s what it was, not uiensap. His father felt the contravention in his head, the tiny hairs in his nose clotting and twisting like tree branches. Onderschat nooit de domheid van mensen (mijn jongen)! He never forgot the terror-struck look on his grandfather’s face when he choked on a plug of Hawken’s, his throat squeezing like a boa constrictor, his eyes nearly popping out of his head.

The Henotheist Smith

The priest told the same lies over and over again, his altar skirt mulching up his hairless white legs. Afternoons when the church was emptied of sinners, a few stragglers hiding under the ciborium licking the pot clean, the priest salted his white hairless legs with chalk dust, hoping to bring a fine sheen to his once youthful gams. Hidden under the altar box, wrapped in sackcloth, was a copy of Ibsen’s 'When We Dead Awaken', the Henotheist Smith stealing into the sanctuary after vespers to read by candlelight. The Poitou-Charentes-Poitou children’s choir sing evensong, the youngest castrato devastating to pieces the chandelier over the Baptismal. ‘Never underestimate the stupidity of children’ his da said, his head pressed between his hands like soft cheese. The children’s choir wear burgundy robes and gray stockings stitched from unprocessed wool, corduroy overcoats and tare sandals. The youngest chorales’, a slight boy named Oporto, possessed such a piercing castrato the other boys called him Voz Alta, he with the high voice. Mr. Artsybashev, the leader of the Poitou-Charentes-Poitou children’s choir, though never married, was known to keep company with Greta Felisberto, the pianist for the girls’ chorus, a plump angry woman with oniony breath.

Los Peyotes - Bdaaa!!!

Hamlet’s Father

On Saturdays his father slept until eight o’clock. Upon awaking, which he did slowly, like a slowcoach with a sore tooth, he would order his children to line up at the foot of the bed, then taking a deep breath, his wooly chest rising and plummeting, tell them what he wanted for breakfast: skillet-fried liver with onions and garlic, which he expected to be served in bed. Using his barrel-chest as a table he ate like a ravenous animal, forking slivers of pinkish liver into his mouth, scabs of burnt onion and garlic slickening his lips and the gray stubble on his trebled chin. ‘Most people in this world are bit-players, so don’t expect much from them’ he would tell his children, the youngest sucking his middle and next-to-middle fingers. On Sundays his father admonished the priest for telling the same lies over and over again, the congregation too frightened to stand up for the priest or silence his father’s weekly tirade. After Mass his father would go hunting in the fields behind the woolshed, the crack and boom of gunfire besetting the calmness with agitation and terror. His father had no idea who Hamlet’s father was, and if he had, he wouldn’t have cared. Considering the deficit of most people, bit-players, rogues and hooligans, he had little to feel terrible about. Afternoons, when the stink of skillet-burnt liver and onions filled the house with an organ stench, his father went hunting in the clearing behind the woolshed, his little brother sitting in the corner by the stove sucking his thumb and next-to-middle finger. The hog pit behind the woolshed stank to high heaven, piles of dead rotting feces pickling the dry brown earth. The unfed hogs grunted and bellyached, the biggest one ramming its head against the pen, its eyes two black holes of rage. His father’s beard smelled of organ meat and diced onions. ‘Don’t expect much; your life will be less disappointing’ his father’s eyes two black holes of dirt and liver grease.

Dieter Kopf

The Absinthe burned like Hades, the taste of wormwood and cloves in his throat making speech all but impossible. Considering the paucity of most people he didn’t feel all that dreadful about the fact he couldn’t make heads nor tails of most things. Franz Alexander Platz and Dieter Kopf crossed the bridge (the rickety bridge; for this fact is duly important) that crosses across the aqueduct spanning the five-mile and no-man’s-land. Having both abandoned the Herstal Liege troop years earlier, they now travel by foot bringing their hodgepodge of pantomiming and dramatic asides to whomever have eyes and ears to listen with. The first time Poldy saw the Hans Lamprecht troop, for they called themselves the Hans Lamprecht troop so as not to be confused with the Hans Lampeel troop, who were hacks, the leader of the troop known for his dislike for Hamlet’s father, whom he felt was a bit-player, and as with all bit-players dispensable, he experienced for the first time that feeling deep in his guts that would follow him for the rest of his life. Considering the deficiency of most people he didn’t feel all that terrible about the fact he couldn’t make heads nor tails of most things.

ΒΕRLΙΝ ΑLΕΧΑΝDΕRΡLΑΤΖ 1 1/8

The Green Fairy

He thought until his head felt like it was going to split open, the bone spurs in his jaw aching. The spurs, a gift from a streetwalker with a garish hole for a mouth, who upon hearing him call her a cunt slapped him across the face with her purse, cracking his molar in two, a puss canker the size of a walnut effecting his speech, which now came out in half-vowels and constantans, his father’s hopes that one day his son might take up the opera or speak in tongues squashed forever. He walked slapdash idly up the sideways, his hat squeezed like a ripe orange under his arm, the brim folded over levering his armpit and bicep. ‘never again will I listen to an imbecile… after all any man worth his weight in salt knows that imbeciles can never be trusted, even a well dressed one’. Across the sideways the harridan’s sister let go with a loud commanding howl, his ears crackling like tinder. Unaware that he was sinking into a cesspit of despair, like a man resigned to failure, someone whom life’s lottery had missed over yet continued to encourage, he ordered a glass of Absinthe and sat dejectedly in the corner by the stove. I will overcome this, he thought, the corners of his mouth awakened by the Green Fairy.