Settimo Torinese

When he was a boy the shamble leg man lived with his grandparents and a three-legged dog, his grandparents keeping the dog in an old refrigerator box in the basement. They lived in a three-room bedsit in Settimo Torinese, not far from the first settlement of the Inquisition. One day he saw a man riding a bicycle sniffing glue from a plastic lunch bag, his feet skipping off the peddles like thrown dice. Printed on the back of his shirt in squiggly handwriting was, Arusha Drycleaners, Only the Best Will Do. The plastic bag scrunched into his face, his mouth forming a perfect O, he breathed in through his nose, the bag collapsing with every breath. My, my, thought the shamble leg man, my indeed. ‘…there aren’t any answers in a bag of glue…’ he said, ‘…not today, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow…’. The man on the bicycle stopped peddling and stared up at the sun, the bag collapsed into his face, his feet pegged into the asphalt. The shamble leg man, unable to take his eyes off the man, said ‘…give ‘em a bicycle and he’ll make a glue trolley out of it, strange beast man is …’. The man, unaware that was being watched, pealed the bag off his face and stuffed it in his pocket, his hands trembling like windblown twigs.

‘…so this is what I have to look forward to…’. The shamble leg man threw himself into the world, his insides colliding with the outside, neither giving a damn about the other. His world only made sense when the two, the inner and the outer, were seen together as one, the world that he had little control over and the one he could euthanize with Chalmers Gin and smoked kippers.