Moving onward up, the days getting longer and chillier, the shamble leg man entered a clockmaker’s shop in General Pacheco. He picked up a silver wristwatch, and winding the stem between his thumb and forefinger, the mechanisms spinning, said ‘…goodness, where has the time gone…?’ The clockmaker, his hands wet with linseed oil, saying ‘…and never too late…’. The shamble leg man left the clockmaker’s shop, a shiny new wristwatch in his pocket, and headed north, his feet skipping like stones across the pavement.
In the branches of a stoolie elm sat a yellow-eyed crow caw-cawing, the sun risen in a blue opal sky, then nothing, not a twitter or a caw, empty nothingness. Later that day the shamble leg man ran into Kamble Flanagan, a mutineer who wore his hair in a tonsure, giving him the appearance of a dandy or a fop. After exchanging pleasantries both men went their separate ways, the shamble leg man to the southwest, Kamble Flanagan to the northwest, neither man caring where the other was going or why.
The grotesque grew, filling up the spaces and crannies between the beautiful and high spirited. Everywhere he turned, and turn he did, the shamble leg man came face to face with grotesque things, faces guilder with hatred and corruption, bodies like sad corpses, people with no faces, their identities chopped away with hatchets and pig-knives, the deformed and twisted, beguiled and forgotten, a dark patois of sad things, the grotesque of the grotesque.
In the branches of a stoolie elm sat a yellow-eyed crow caw-cawing, the sun risen in a blue opal sky, then nothing, not a twitter or a caw, empty nothingness. Later that day the shamble leg man ran into Kamble Flanagan, a mutineer who wore his hair in a tonsure, giving him the appearance of a dandy or a fop. After exchanging pleasantries both men went their separate ways, the shamble leg man to the southwest, Kamble Flanagan to the northwest, neither man caring where the other was going or why.
The grotesque grew, filling up the spaces and crannies between the beautiful and high spirited. Everywhere he turned, and turn he did, the shamble leg man came face to face with grotesque things, faces guilder with hatred and corruption, bodies like sad corpses, people with no faces, their identities chopped away with hatchets and pig-knives, the deformed and twisted, beguiled and forgotten, a dark patois of sad things, the grotesque of the grotesque.
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