Hogsheads and Swollen Ankles

This is what the harridan bought at the Groceteria: two peaches, one bosky one Argentinean, three heads of cauliflower, four peaches, eleven pomegranates, a bundle of leeks, three maybe four (its hard to tell as they were all bunched together) heads of lettuce, a bagful of seedless grapes, red, again Argentinean, and a bottle of Drano. She fed the Drano to the rats that lived beneath her floorboards, mixing it with pomegranates and stirring it with a paint stirrer, and made a lovely vegetable and fruit salad, which she ate balancing a head of cauliflower on her own head. She, the harridan, generally, or as a rule, the two often go undifferentiated, ate by herself, listening to the rats chewing on the floorboards and joists below her feet, which were slippered and in constant shuffle. She smoked a roll-your-own cigarette, twisted at the free-end, or where a filter tip would be had it been a tailor-made cigarette, which she held nimbly but firmly between her thumb and index finger. She overheard one of her neighbors, an unsightly woman with pebbly skin and swollen ankles, from sitting all the time, so the harridan figured, telling her friend that she knew this other person, who had no friends, as she was schizophrenic and had moles, who ate rats cooked in a broth, or consume, that she rendered from beets and hogsheads.

She Brilloed the floorboards and swept the shavings underneath the sofa, a floral patterned futon, or seabed, the one often being mistaken for the other, but different just the same, to the trained eye at least, and resumed smoking; she had left the barely smoldering cigarette in the ashtray, or the candy dish she used as an ashtray, where it sent billowing smoke signals to the ceiling, streamers of blue-grey smoke breaking with the windowsill and across the back of the sofa and into the bathroom, where it again broke with the bathroom ceiling and darkened the mirror, making it look like it was hung back to front, the silver side facing out.