Flash Fiction

Quack: Fast Fiction

Quack
Bistro 18

Previously published on CommuterLit.com

I tug my grandfather’s sleeve and we leave the bowling and walk along the sands towards the swing boats and the merry‑go‑rounds. He stops, holds me with one hand, and points with the other to a space beside the sea‑wall.
“That’s where the quacks used to put up their stands when they came to town.
“What’s a quack, grandpa?”
“Well, a quack’s a salesman who sells patent medicine. Watch now,” my grandfather stands in front of me. “I’m a miner, see, and I can hardly talk,” his voice changes as he speaks and the words limp out all hoarse and scratchy.
“Now I’m the quack,” he takes three steps to one side and his words emerge strong and healthy. “Good sir, I see you are in need of my aid,” my grandfather draws an imaginary bottle from his coat and holds it high for all to see. “Pretend you’re the crowd,” he whispers to me, “you have to hiss and boo.”
“Hiss and boo. Boo.”
“That’s right,” my grandfather smiles, then he speaks again. “Now, sir: just take a sip of this patent medicine and your voice will be restored,” he hands the bottle into space, strides across the gap, and the miner holds out a weak and palsied hand to receive the offering.
“Thank you,” the miner croaks, “will this help?”
“One sip, good sir, and all will be well.”
“Hiss,” I shout, “Boo.”
The miner puts the bottle to his lips, closes his eyes, drinks, and his glorious voice pounds out a hymn: “Changed from glory into glory / till in heaven we take our place.”
“Hiss,” I go and “boo.”
“No, no,” says my grandfather, “this is where you cheer.”
“Hooray.”
My grandfather becomes the quack again: “This marvelous potion is yours for a silver three penny piece.” He bows, nods to the crowd, hands over imaginary bottles, and places coins in his invisible pocket while I clap and cheer.
“This performance,” my grandfather tells me, “never failed to sell a great number of bottles.”

Decisions

Decisions

We make them all the time: what shirt to wear, jeans or dress pants, black of brown shoes, loafers or lace ups, sandals … socks or not … and then there’s breakfast … tea or coffee, cereal or toast, sugar or honey … most days, we don’t even realize we are making decisions. We certainly don’t need to write out a page of pros and cons in order to choose between coffee or tea …

Then there are the big decisions, like where to go next on this blog. I have been weighing up the pros and cons and I am finally getting close to a decision. My blogging possibilities include Literary Theory … Writing about Writing … How to Read … Revising Older Texts … Reading Don Quixote Online … Writing New Texts … Preparing Books for Publication Offline … These are much more difficult decisions but I must think about them and make them.

Literary Theory sounds good. But what do I know about it? Nothing but the dry academic literary theory of an abandoned academia that wasn’t really very interesting anyway. An occasional question arises in the blog world, one on which I feel competent to comment, and that for me, is the way I go with my literary theory: a quick response. All that academic literary theory is money in the savings bank that I can draw on if I, or anyone else, needs to access it. But to access it on a daily basis and pontificate my way to the limbo of a blogger’s boredom? I don’t think so!

Writing about Writing also sounds good, but in many ways it is a poor person’s literary theory, rather like literary theory without the long, obfuscating technical terms. Again, if the need is there, I can contribute; but it’s not the way I want to go, not here, not on this blog, not on this particular watch.

How to Read is a subject on which many books have been written and I recommend that all people not just read, but learn to read deeply and properly. In some cases, depending upon the quantity of material that crosses the computer screen (it used to be the desk), speed reading is essential and I recommend speed reading for everybody except poets and those who love poetry. To speed read a sonnet is not the way to go. I would love to sell the film rights to some of my sonnets, but apparently, that’s not the way to go either. Ah well, we can’t have everything …

Revising Older Texts is another excellent way to run a blog. The material is always there in one form (old) and the reworking of it into another form (new) is regular, instructive, and creative. I have done that on this blog with At the Edge of Obsidian > Obsidian’s Edge and loved both the process and the result. However, at least three of my commentators, Al Lane, Chuck Bowie and Kevin Stephens, suggested that the past is in the past and should remain there, while the future lies ahead of us and needs to be created. After much thought, I have come to the conclusion that Al and Chuck and Kevin are right. I will put older material up on the blog, but I will no longer review it for future re-publication, except in exceptional circumstances, and these are yet to be determined.

Reading Don Quixote Online has been in my wish bucket for a very long time. It is something that I would love to do one more time. I have already done online readings on several occasions. I have twice taught DQ in an online hybrid environment: hybrid — an online portion and an in-class face to face portion –. To return to DQ is, for me, to return to academia, an academia that I rejected several years ago. No: much as I would like to re-formulate this project and to lay out online my definitive This Is How To Read Don Quixote, I feel in so many ways, that this is not yet the time to do so. I want so much to turn back that particular clock, but I know how much work, reading, and commitment is needed and I am not yet ready. Perhaps, like the Flowers of Scotland, those days are past now and in the past they must remain. We’ll see. I checked my DQ notes last night … they are all there, ready and waiting … and I can set out on that adventure anytime … alas, through the mists of time, I can hear those bagpipes playing Will ye no come back again? I will, my friends, but not just yet.

Writing New Texts is fun. This is a new text and it is helping me to focus on what I want and do not want to do. There is always room here for new texts. But new texts need revisiting and revising. Maybe some of my creative texts just aren’t ready for publication yet and yes, online writing is a form of publication. Thankfully I can revise these texts, and I may yet revise this one; indeed, I will probably come back both to this text and to these decisions. And maybe I won’t and that’s another decision for another day.

Preparing Books for Publication is where I am right now in my offline life and I think this is where I want to be online as well. I have two texts in preparation: Bistro (Flash Fiction) and Echoes of an Impromptu Metaphysics (poetry). I have thus far shared 17 pieces from Bistro on this blog. There are another 17 to go. Each time I prepare a piece of Flash Fiction for publication here, I re-read it, re-think, re-frame it, re-structure it, and re-write it. Those of you who know me offline are well aware of the nature of that re-processing. Sometimes the pieces are merely sharpened and polished; often they are totally re-written. And yes, when flaws are pointed out or doubts expressed, the texts are changed. I deeply value the comments of my below the line commentators. Echoes is the other text I need to re-write. I will share that online as well. The sharing will be difficult … Echoes is a difficult and very personal text … but it will be done.

Decisions have been taken and my thought process has been shared. There will be no turning back of the clock even though I am always looking over my shoulder. Here, then, are my decisions, but remember, they are always open to revision.

I will re-publish on this blog Though Lovers Be Lost, one of my favorite poetry books. I will do this as and when necessary if I need more time between blogs with my re-writing.
I will finish publishing the other stories from Bistro online on this blog as I prepare it for offline publication.
I will start the re-write of Echoes online. I have been away from this book for about eight months now and re-reading it earlier today I saw how and where it could be improved.
I will add in literary and philosophical commentaries when and where I see the need to do so. I consider this particular article to be a literary commentary with philosophical connotations, or is it the other way round? As an academic, I could prepare a treatise on the question; as a blogger, I can leave that question in the capable minds of those who read and follow this blog.
Vale!
Et vade mecum!

Obsidian’s Edge 29

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.
When reason sleeps, monsters are born.

Francisco de Goya.

5:00 AM

… bright flowers of penance purchased for a pittance finger knitted spider webs of silence spun into wrinkles between stars and evensong while an old film shadow boxes black and white photographs and a rowing boat lurches over the waves as if a soggy brown cardboard box had dropped down on a moonbeam to pluck the mote from a one-eyed jack-in-the-truck who surveyed his road map for the dead days lying in ambush next to the sudden bonfire that flared on Guy Fawkes night and ignited the world like a Jacky-jumper vaulting a Roman Candle as Catherine spun on her wheel and a sky full of stars wheeled round the North Pole and slid down the Big Dipper’s handle to launch a long white scar of lightning that scared night’s velvet mask and plucked a diamond feather from the peacock’s tail as it strutted through the garden of bifurcating paths where Borges left his summer footprints at low tide in the sandy grief of the autumn leaf that the red fox dripped and dropped as he fled in vain like blood sizzles drizzling from an open vein and observe I say the play of light as it glistens on the voices of young children reaching to pluck the church bells as if they were ripe fruit dangling before us in our dreams and the world is a handkerchief so small it is and now not so clean and so we dream these dreams and pluck this unripe apple from the eternal branch where it lay hidden kicking and struggling up like the float that bobbled then sank through deep water and memory bent itself into two like that fragile reed dead in the water lying as straight as a bowing string at a crazy angle at the pillows edge where mouths flap open as shadows walk and talk and we slide back into sleep’s dark waters where there are no dreams and nothing from those dark depths is ever recalled …

6:00 AM

a clicking of claws
needles knitting outwards
towards dawn’s guillotine

the alarm clock shuffles
its pack of sleeping hours

the church bell
lurches into action

IMG_0140 2.JPG

We have come full circle and the sequence of rewrites that I have dedicated to At the Edge of Obsidian / Obsidian’s Edge ends here, with the start of a new day in Oaxaca that will be very similar to the old day that has just passed us by. For those of you who wish to read the full sequence, in its correct order, it will appear (some time soon) under Obsidian’s Edge at the top of this page.

I would like to thank all those readers who have accompanied me on this journey. In addition, I would like to thank all of you who lent your voices to this sequence either below the line with your comments or, and I refer specifically to those who are close enough to know me in the flesh and blood of real life, with your verbal comments and telephone conversations.

I hope this will be the first of many journeys that we make together. My best wishes go out to you. I trust you will consider joining me in my next verbal adventure on this blog.

Obsidian’s Edge 28

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.
When reason sleeps, monsters are born.

Francisco de Goya.

4:00 AM

… scrabble of agile ruminants goats their basket weave ribs alive on the grass roof of the neighboring azoteas or wandering these cobbled pathways with knife-edge stones and broken all ten of those sea-faring bottles that managed to reach this land though they came floating from a distant shore each with its message lost now and he waded through the incoming waves this god-like ghost emerging from his white-cap snow bank to stagger in the moonlight where a child’s world lay buried like a bone as sharp as this black knife that slices the mind into two twin towers of tall sunflowers trapped in this wet clay rag of a body that binds itself in a fine film of glacial fire where incarcerated birds strut in the rib cage their robin red crests as distant as the light of a hurricane lamp in that moment of silence before an opening door snaps its sudden match of light and the tick of the death watch beetle gnaws at the beams of the worn out house that the earthquake cracked into a thousand pieces though one wall stood still and the alarm clock over the fireplace clicked a death mask for that anonymous face that raised both hands and threaded the black lace of the mantilla through the golden wedding ring as a finger nail of moon shredded the clouds and the body’s house slowly broke down in an unending dance round and round the garden where the teddy bear trod on his partner’s toes and the undergrowth tickled the china doll’s fancy but the garbage can intervened and dust stained the vagaries of a brutish existence both sharp and nasty as a devil’s scissors severed angel wings and tangled this skein of wool that pulled the church bells pounding their celestial hammers into a sea of wind while the sea parrot spoke in a tongue thick with anonymous flames that flickered a trigger of song while flashes of sound sparked twigs from the tree that flamed a joyless overflowing river of unknown light while the brown bear danced to a pipe and drum dance across bamboo marimbas that shimmered and shone and lay fine layers of music and dust that grew beneath bare feet as new flowers stoked a confessional of dust and gave it new life in a resurrection of the body into a world where everything is remembered and nothing is forgotten or forgiven … for how can we forgive if we cannot forget … or forget if we cannot forgive …

Obsidian’s Edge 25 (revised)

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.
When reason sleeps, monsters are born.

Francisco de Goya.

1:00 AM

… threshing from side to side panting and pouting mouths open at pillow’s edge with tongues flapping fiercely as the sharp hook pierces the dry upper lip and drives its root canal into the roof of the mouth where shadows walk and talk to silk worms wrapped in their ghostly cocoons and memories race through tumbledown alleys where shuttered windows wave white hands with silver rings sparkling on gnarled arthritic fingers and doleful uncertainties rush upwards in a cloud of bubbles to cover the sun and blot out daylight as dark descends and grief lies still on dawn’s distant altar where long-forgotten crimes stir and return each night to hunt and haunt the poor and pour fierce tears as a tap pours water and offers subliminal ablutions as the victims on their knees wear wild widows’ weeds as they kneel at each hand-carved wooden station where that dark cross flourishes with its black beads dangling from outstretched nails as necklaces clack and rosaries gnash the falseness of teeth that are white and bright and spotted with fool’s gold that reflects in a counterfeit mirror of surrogate corpulence with fleshed and bloodied hands handcuffed like some rabbit in the headlights of an oncoming crash and the car’s bones lie beached like great white whale bones on the bleached shores of an illusion that moves in time to the continuous clicking of claws and the clacking of needles knitting outwards to build a monstrous guillotine topped like a dictionary with red bonnets that move in the air as a knife edge carves night winds that slice the body’s earthbound cage of skin and bone and strip it of the fur that the white rabbit sheds as it climbs its golden staircase back to the moon from which it descended on this night of nights when sleep is a mystery revealed only to initiates who have mastered their duties and milked this market where a caravan of camels humps its way skywards like dark gibbous moons that burrow a tunnel and seek the fly’s high-pitched note with its angry black mote stuck to the cobweb that nests in whatever brain awaits the wind’s clean broom that wipes the slate clean of wild words and wars that are waged across scars that hack tracks and cross roads over this wilderness wherein we are all star-crossed and lost …

Obsidian’s Edge 27

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.
When reason sleeps, monsters are born.
Francisco de Goya.

3:00 AM

… often the imprisoned heart pinned like a butterfly and chloroformed into silence like a resurgent Guy Fawkes sitting on his bonfire and waiting for the universe to roll its coloured dice a captive and that heart singing as the dark rum of freedom bites into its jackdaw dreams of bright silver rings married to a bird’s leg and the round open eye of a cat staring at a Queen of Hearts as champagne bubbles burst in the mouth and dash on the tongue as they wash against the tooth’s white rock as it waltzes with the white caps that crest into broken ghosts who shuffle in and out like a pack of cards filled with knaves and the joker is belled with a red fool’s cap and a bladder on a stick as a tom cat’s tom fool grin melts in the mirror when the moon’s face skids and bounces off a snow bank where tranquil midnight mysteries trap trembling worlds in hand-blown glass bubble dreams that distort all distances clasped beneath clutching fingers while the crystal raindrops serve as an eye to behold the crimson glory of the hibiscus with its blood red stains where the baby fell from the rocking horse and confessed to a crime it never committed though speckled like a fresh trout it was drawn from deep water and blamed for the rainbow fire that flickered flames to the harsh crisp sound of the candle licking at its waxen jail where flower faces float framed against the white-washed wall as the wide-open staring eyes of the snowy owl speckle a yellow madness and its feathers are nails to be fired into a pottery tree in this harsh somniferous light that breathes fear and fire into shavings of dry bark and a beaver gnaws at the roots of the world as an accusatory beak points at the funneling snow and puffed up feathers plump out a body so thin it is unfit to fight these flames of ice or withstand these snow stones cast by blameless flint-eyed innocents who have never themselves done anything wrong though they spark at the trough with one eye clouded by a spider web of hate and the other a sharp sun peering through clouds condemned like a donkey to walk round and round crushing the heart out of the maguey in an interior world of dust and stone where the mote in another person’s eye is larger than the beam in one’s own and slant-eyed dogs eat dust and shadows of dust as they prowl through the courtyard and bark at the full moon blazing above this world that is sacrificed to a madwoman’s madness and an ancient flesh-devouring god who lives in a nearby volcano and is stoned all day on tequila and mescal …

Obsidian’s Edge 26

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.
When reason sleeps, monsters are born.
Francisco de Goya.

2:00 AM

… waves of people wandering the streets a hammer blow falling on an echoing anvil and the cracked church bell lurching into its hourly cry of grief dogs barking at the fleshy red crest some playful deity has placed on the heads of domestic fowls and other gallinaceous birds beaks digging for the dawn in parched earth with thin cracks spanning out from its egg shell crazy paving the yellow yolk of sunshine creeping out from cobbles and the Russian egg cup doll after doll unfolding as the hammer’s silver spoon descends on egg shells as thin as a shattered dream of moonlight raked from a pond with its life blood filling a crystalline goblet with a thick rich callous liquid as fierce and sweet as sunshine sacrificed on a branch as rain from the clouds speckles the tree with radiance an arco iris with its semi-circular scarf this deer head mocking pulling back velvet lips white teeth grinning through the wind screen’s shattered glass and man a string quartet of flesh and bone created from a ball of dough and baked in the oven in an earthenware dish with currants for eyes a raisin for a belly button lemon rind for a mouth orange peel for hair while white storks with swaddled babies are scared away by thrown stones and the man in the mirror his hand held up to trap the wind as a falling leaf settles in the secret web between index and thumb puzzles bind like a bird bound in a metal cage the sparrow’s mighty choir chirping at the roof of the circus tent and animals running wild all gone and the smooth grass brown with its withered distorting mirrors of stark staring eyes driving through black paintings of Satanic witches spooning soup between wrinkled lips dark open holes mouths and eyes gouged in slatted wooden faces and Anonymous Bosch’s bourgeois hell of furnaces and factories swarming with sparks of black imps falling from the heavenly meadow and the devil impaired on his black wooden horse …

Peace: Flash Fiction

Peace
Bistro 17

His cold hand squeezes a broken razor blade between index finger and thumb. His fingers remember how the blade slips along the grain of the balsa wood to carve the ligament and bone that builds the airplane. Using the same technique his fingers invent new ways to test his wrist’s pale flesh. Pins and needles dance their electric shock along a cold cut of sliced skin. A red rivulet seeps to the surface. Lips pinch. Teeth clench. The blade sinks deeper. An icy fire: the cold that burns, the heat that freezes, fire on the flood, and the red blood spurts.

… fear in the gut … an animal urge to surge to and fro and run … feet trapped in mud… dragging through deep sand … crabs’ claws clinging and drawing back … somewhere in his mind’s attic in the scramble of flotsam lining the beach a grey rat scavenges … dry bones … blunt snouts snuff the candle that once brought him a glowworm of hope …

Cold sweat flows, thickens, then dries. A voice inside his head cries out to the emergency numbers on his frozen cell phone but his fingers no longer respond to his mind’s dark urgings. Is this the beginning of the end? Is it the beginning of a world without pain, amen? A century of centuries flash through what’s left of his mind in a single second.

Eternity: that long, dark, endless, winter night — no stars, no sun, no moon, no spark, no hope, just this eternal cold that holds all motion suspended.

Somewhere, within his rib-cage, his heart is a caged animal raging against the white-bone bars. It sees. It senses. It smells the fear that falls to his feet and flows out from his armpits. Nostrils flare and stiffen in a bestial desire that flesh holds for fresh torn flesh. A black velvet band binds eyes, ties hands at the wrists, and pulls itself tighter and closer across his chest. His heart, a stone now, cast into an icy pond. As it descends it bumps into the bodies of vestigial memories that have been here before.

Somewhere in this Arctic night white pads shuffle as sleek feet move across the snow. The polar bear’s snuffle is a whimper of hope that his end will come swiftly in the bright light of midnight descending, all red in tooth and claw. The nightmare draws closer, ever closer with an acquiescent shuffling of feet. Face to face, present and past are ambulant tenses that foretell no conditional. He has no future, let alone a future perfect. A dislocation of infinitives stretches into an intangible infinity.

Lips move and promise an end to heat and cold. Here, they say, is darkness without memory; here is sleep bereft alike of nightmare and dream; here is oblivion; here is the cessation of strife and struggle; here is peace.

Moose

Moose

Who has nailed summer to its autumn cross? Sunbeams dazzle in the wind, footsteps follow, or is it a shadow’s shadow flickering its year’s end dance on a twisting path? Beneath our feet the painted leaves lie still. Bottled sunshine abandoned now in rusted flakes, who will replace them in the tree’s discarded puzzle? Footsteps crackle along the trail and, as they draw closer, our cold breath hangs a question mark on the air before us. Yesterday, the salmon danced on their tails. Lettuces went to seed and built tall pyramids up to the sky in a world all yellow with the sun and blue with the sea. Primrose and bleu céleste, this stretch of Fundy, where the islands are large black beads, threaded together by tiny strings of ducks and geese. Today, going home, a bull moose thrust his head through the windshield of a speeding car. For an instant the trees caught their breath, the air stood still and a red fox tore from the trees like a runaway leaf, so quick, so silent, a shadow across the road melting into dark woods to lie silent in the forest. I can still see the occupants of the shattered car standing by the roadside, their cell phones in their hands, punching urgent numbers. Shock had rounded their snow white lips into an O for Operator.

Very surprised (and pleased and proud) to hear this prose poem from my book Fundy Lines read on Shift, CBC, this afternoon. Here it is in a more permanent form — the written word. Thank you Shift CBC and best wishes to all.

Bullfight

BULLFIGHT
Not So Fast Fiction

…at the beginning of the end, when more things have gone than are with us and the summer’s sun withers the grass and wrinkles our faces baking us bright red – como un cangrejo te has puesto, hijo mío, en el sol de Somo, como un cangrejo – and — pulpo en un garaje — you grasp at the new words, the new colours, the new delights, your tongue trapped clumsily in your mouth like a red rag doll and the midnight bull charging the spectators who gather and olé, au lait … as the drunken bullfighter climbs the bull and kills the post.

The red cape flutters in our memories as we go to the slaughterhouse now where the open body hangs loose like a flag and the red meat of him held out for all to see and some to share … and this is his body and this is his blood, sacrificed in a circle of golden sand for our drunken amusement … for whatever I did, I never visited those bull fights when I was sober … at five thirty, they began, and at 3 o’clock we would gather in the city centre and slowly wend our way from bar to bar, up the Calle de Burgos, past the street where you lived and upwards, ever upwards, towards the bull ring at the top of the hill, from bar to bar, I say, and the bota, the wine-skin filled and re-filled with that dark red fluid that will set us all baying for the bull’s blood, or the matador’s blood, it doesn’t matter whose blood, as long as someone bleeds and the bull is butchered, torn from this life by a man on horseback, armed with a lance, and he thrusts the heavy blade between the shoulders of the bull, the blood first dripping red, then gushing, a small stream over the rock of the

bull’s shoulder, and down the bull’s front legs, to slither on the sand, and the bull still ready to charge the horse, and the bull’s head steadily dropping as the muscles in the back and neck are gashed and torn and there’s no purgatory any more so this must be hell, this gaping wound between the bull’s shoulders and the blood flowing freely and vanishing into the sand, the golden sand, once pristine, stained now with blood, and soon to be further stained with feces and urine, and the picador, his job done, walks his blind-folded, armored horse out of the ring, and the bull, un-armored, un-enamored of this process that turns his torment into a spectacle staged for our drunken delight, as we pass the bota round, and the blood red wine travels from hand to hand, and we squirt the bull’s blood squarely between our lips and it dashes against tongue and teeth and we swallow the body’s sacrifice hook, line, and sinker, as the banderillero runs in, harpoons in hand, waving his banderillas and plunging their arrowed barbs into the gaping wound that flowers on the bull’s back, and the bull stands there, twitching, wriggling, saliva and drool slipping down, sliding stickily into the sand, as the matador doffs his hat, takes his vorpal sword in hand and treads the light fantastique in his laced-up dancing pumps, his Waltzing Matilda feet so swift, so sure, eluding the lumbering rush of the charging bull, the load of bull, that tumbles down the railway track towards him as he stands there, the matador, poised like a ballerina, as stiff and as steady as a lamp-post around which the bull circles, a drunken man, staggering a bit, but still bemused by the red flag tied to a stick which waves before his eyes and goads him onwards, ever onwards, in his plunge towards a brilliant death, as he pauses, feet together, and the matador makes his move, one, step, two steps, tickle you under … and the bull lurching forward to impale himself on three or four feet of curved, stainless steel, and the matador immaculate in his reception of the bull – and what is happening? What will happen next? Sometimes, the sword pierces the spinal cord and death is instantaneous. Sometimes, the sword pierces the heart, and death is more or less swift, but definitely certain. And sometimes the sword pinches against the bone and flies from the matador’s hand, and the matador must bend, and pick it up, and try, try again, the red rag below the bull’s nose, the bull drawn forward, to impale himself, yet again, on the sharp end of the sword, and this time, the sword goes in, but the wound is in the lungs and the peones, the pawns, the workers, the drones, the little men help, turn the bull round and round in ever tighter circles so the sword will open and even larger wound, sever the main arteries perhaps, and the bull, blood spurting through nose and mouth, lurches now, then falls to his knees, and lies there, bleeding, and the matador chooses the descabello, that little sharp sword with the razor blade at the end and he tries to sever the spinal cord, there at the back of the neck, and sometimes he does, and sometimes he doesn’t, and if he can’t then it’s the little men again in their colourful sea-parrot suits all gleaming with sequins and stars and they carry a sharp little instrument, with a pointed end, la puntilla, that short, double-edged, stabbing knife which is plunged into the occipito-atlantal space to sever the medulla oblongata in the evernazione method of mercy killing, and the puntilla is plunged again and again into the bull’s neck at this atlanto-occipital joint, until it severs the medulla oblongata, and when it is severed, in this glorious neck stab, then finally the bull drops dead, and the show must go on and the horses come in, black funeral horses with colourful feathers on their heads and they loop a rope around the bull’s horns and away he goes, trailing blood, and urine, and excrement, all across the sand and other little men appear to sweep the sands clean, though if seven maids with seven mops, swept it for half a year, do you think, my neighbor, the local carpenter, asks, they’d ever sweep it clear, and I doubt it, says the little man on my other side who wears a large walrus moustache stained red now and purple with the wine that he has splashed about, and shaking the wine skin he finds it as not as full as it was, so he sheds a bitter tear, and since the death was slow, the crowd and my neighbours all whistle and boo the matador and his merry men, but when the death is swift and quick then the crowd is aroused and they wave white hankies at the presidential box and the president awards the matador an ear, a salty, smelly, sticky ear which the peones cut off the bull before he is towed away, and then the matador throws the ear in the direction of his current sweet heart, the fairest lady in the crowd although she be as black as charcoal or as brown as the beauties baking daily on the summer sand where the sea horses dance and there are no bulls, and no bull shit, and no seven maids with their seven mops, just the scouring sea, and sometimes the president gives away two ears, or two ears and the tail, dos orejas y el rabo, though this I have seldom seen, and what does the bull care that he dies bravely and well, for now he is dead he hasn’t a care in the world, and the butchers in the butcher’s shop are carving him away, carving him to the skeletal nothingness of skin and bone that awaits us all, the nothingness of this more or less glorious death, with our tails cut off and our ears hacked away to be pickled or smoked or other wise kept in the fridge as the butcher’s trophy … and who now will walk stone cold sober into that magic circle of sun and shade and stand there, unbowed, before the might of the untamed beast, the untamed bestiality that drives us wild as it wanders through our nightmare cities and our wildest dreams … and now the crowd call música, música and the band strikes up and martial music plays as the bullfighter and his troupe march gaily round the ring, their trophies held high for all to see then thrown to the ravening crowd who bay like dogs as they taste fresh, bloodied meat …

	lcomtois on From my window
	kentuckyangel24 on A Question for AI
	rogermoorepoet on A Question for AI
	kentuckyangel24 on A Question for AI
	rogermoorepoet on Neighbors