Masks

In Absentia 3

 

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In Absentia 3

Questions

I hear her voice, delicate, distant.
I run to the sound, jump on the table
in my usual spot by her play thing,
but she isn’t there. He’s there, damn it,
talking away. I can see him, smell him,
I hate him, his other sex perfumes,
but there he is and when he stops talking,
I can hear her voice. I move to his play
thing. A shadow, I can’t make it out,
then her voice again, my whiskers stiffen,
I lean forward and sniff, but no smell,
she has no smell, and scentless, I cannot
sense her, I bristle and she calls me, calls
me by my favorite names, and mews, I mew,
but I can’t smell her, and there’s no sense
of touch … is this the hell all pussy cats
will suffer … shadows on a screen, a haunting
voice, memories shifting and dancing,
no touch, no hugs, no sense of smell …
and nothing solid … just shadows and absence?

Existentialist Monkey

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Existentialist Monkey
(after Albert Camus and his Myth of Sisyphus)

Monkey watches Budgie tinkle the small bell hanging below
the yellow plastic mirror in which Budgie gazes in fascination
at his own reflection, nuzzling and nipping himself with his beak.

Black and white soccer balls cover the floor:
“Budgies for the Cup!”
A crimson ladder has another bell on top.
Budgie squeezes a soccer ball between beak and claws,
ascends this ladder, and pushes the ball upwards.

When he gets to the top, the ball slips slowly down.

It falls to the sandpaper floor.
Budgie descends the ladder,
takes a new grip on his soccer ball,
and steadily climbs the rungs.

Budgie is clever: he can imitate the telephone, the doorbell,
the pop of a champagne cork shooting from the bottle, the cat, the dog …
When Budgie whistles, the stupid dog leaps to his feet
and rushes, barking, to the door …

Budgie is two thirds up the ladder now. He pauses for a rest,
stretches his wings, and looks at himself in the mirror.

“There’s a pretty boy!”

“Il faut imaginer Budgie heureux.”

To be Welsh in the Rhondda

 

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To be Welsh in the Rhondda Valley
 
To be Welsh in the Rhondda Valley
is to change buses at the roundabout in Porth;
it’s to speak the language of steam and coal,
with an accent that grates like anthracite —
no plum in the mouth for us;
no polish, just spit and phlegm
that cut through dust and grit,
pit-head elocution lessons hacked from the coal-face
or purchased in the corner store at Tonypandy.

And we sing deep, rolling hymns
that surge from suffering and the eternal longing
for a light that never breaks underground
where we live out our lives and no owners roam.

Here flame and gas spell violent death.
The creaking of the pit-prop
warns of the song-bird soon to be silent in its cage …
… and hymn and heart are stopped in our throats,
when, after the explosion, the dust settles down,
and high above us the black crowds gather.

Teddy Bears FFF

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Teddy Bears
Friday Fast Fiction

Now they sleep in separate rooms in single beds each tucked in with a monogrammed teddy bear.
He likes to cuddle his, keeping it warm, tucking it carefully under the bedclothes. He calls it Ready Teddy, and his favorite game, especially in summer, is to hold his teddy bear by one back leg and say in a loud voice “Ready, Teddy, GO!”
At the word “GO” he hurls his teddy bear skywards and takes great delight in the fate of a sleeping fly, pinned against the ceiling and squashed. His delight doubles if one of the pointed waves of ceiling paint impales the fly and leaves it squirming there, buzzing impotently. This means target practice and he hurls Ready Teddy, “GO, GO,” skywards again and again until the unfortunate fly, falling like a condemned angel, tumbles back to earth.
She still follows the same ritual as when they were sleeping together in the same bed. First she pummels the pillows, fluffing them up with sideways movements of the hands. Next, she lays them on the bed and beats them flat. Then she picks them up and plays them like a concertina, pushing them together then stretching them out again. As for her teddy bear, she likes to discipline it, to beat it into shape. Once upon a time, it made noises and let out little squeals and squeaks, but the constant violence has silenced its sound box.
When they slept together she often took her teddy and beat it against her husband’s head. He would wake from the deepest dream head a-throb, ears and cheeks stinging, as she flailed him with her teddy and struck him blow after blow. When his headaches grew worse, they decided to sleep apart. He felt it was better and safer that way.
Last night, she sleepwalked into his room, and sat on the side of his bed. She clasped her teddy by the feet, a rabid Rottweiler with a rag doll, and thumped her teddy’s head against her husband’s face again and again.
The sleeping tablets had made him drowsy and slow to wake. His wife kept up the barrage until he finally woke, eased the teddy bear from her grasp, and walked her back to bed
On the way back to his own room, he checked into the bathroom and examined his face in the mirror. Blood seeped from his nostrils. He had bruises under his left eye and his cheeks glowed red where veins had broken near the surface
Next morning, he sat at the breakfast table, his grandfather’s First World War magnifying mirror in his hand, and examined his face. The ice pack had taken effect and he looked less damaged now. He reached for the color correction cream in the packet beside him and read the directions with care. Then he placed a tiny drop of the magic serum onto the paintbrush and worked the correction cream over the marks on his face. He watched them disappear one by one. Now he would be ready to face the world.
He stared into the magnifying mirror gazing deeply into his own eyes. Was that how it had happened? Or had their first child really fallen downstairs, banging her little head on each wooden step at eighteen months old?
The inquest had been inconclusive, his wife held blameless. They had remained childless after the trial.
Was that a blessing or a curse?

Don Nadie

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Don Nadie
walks past the Jesuit Church
where the shoe-shine boys
store their stands at night.

He walks past
the tiny seat where
the gay guys sit
and caress each other
asking the unsuspecting
for unexpected dates.

Nobody asks him
for a match,
for a drink,
for money,
for charity,
for a walk down the alley
to the cheap hotels

The Yalalag witch
doctor sees things
other men don’t see.

He stretches out his hand
and brushes the mosquito
from Don Nadie‘s nose.

“Brother,” he smiles.
“I too have lost the way.”

Don Nadie is the one
who stops the hands
on all the clocks
at midnight.

He’s the one who leaves
this place and comes to this place,
all places being one

Don Nadie thinks
he knows who he is,
but he can no longer
sense his blood in the mirror
as the razor blade draws
its thin red scratch
across the dry husks of his soul.

Don Nadie,
my lookalike, my twin,
stares back at me
from the shop window
and I gaze into his eyes

In the back of the weavers’ shop,
three witches watch us.

One spins the yarn,
one measures the cloth,
one wields
the obsidian knife,

that will one day
sever the thread of our lives:

gimiendo gemelo,
hipócrito rector.

Tomb 104, Monte Albán: Sun & Moon

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Tomb 104, Monte Albán

 Crocodile wraps bat in the carved
crocodile jaws that open the doors to hell.

Cocijo clutches Owl’s feathers.
He wears a feathered headdress
as he flies on Owl’s back.

 At the back of the tomb,

a darker world hides in the shadows
beyond the finger of our flashlight:
hidden galleries,
carved and painted bones.

 Our torch
plucks faces from the dark.

 Brought back to life by our unsteady light,
shadows walk grey bristles
across cheek and jaw.

We blink like owls as we ascend
from the underground darkness.

Up here, in the false world,
the one we know and love,
our hearts sing like wild birds,
caged between red ribs.

 Above us,
the pocked skull of the moon,
bares white rabbit’s teeth.

 Tochtli
knows that life’s only reality
lies in wait for us

underground.

Shit Happens Flash Fiction

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Shit Happens!
Bistro 24

Pain in the joints so bad I decide to get in the bath and soak in hot water. I run the water, test the blend of hot and cold, if baby turns red, I remember, don’t insert elbow in bath, water too hot for elbow.

Bath water bubbles in. I set the fan for steam extraction. Test the water. Seems fine.

High the step into the bath and I cannot raise the right leg high enough. The left leg is worse. I lay flat along the bath edge, naked, of course, and think: “How do I get in?”

The left leg will not rise. I stand on tiptoe, pushing up from the right leg’s toes: cramp, shit! I slide back down, swivel, and my belly is cold against the bath’s edge.

I refuse to give in. I try again. I raise the left leg, ouch, cramp in the right toes, and slide the left leg over the bath’s edge. I slide weight to the left, raise the right leg and slip into the bath, on my knees, face down.

I grab the sides of the bath, flip myself over, and victory: I am on my back in warm water, feeling the comfort of the whirlpool’s heat seep into my bones.

Exercises: I raise my legs and move ankles, then do the windshield wiper, left right. I feel immediate benefits in hips. Then comes the slow military march, legs slightly raised against bath end, left, right, left.

Raise both hips now, then gyrate them, left to right, twenty times, and reverse. Now up and down, raising them in a familiar though nearly forgotten motion.

Twenty minutes, they say, or else you may suffer. So I call my wife and she runs upstairs and turns off the motor. The whirlpool ceases.

Now I must get out. I have a funny feeling that something is wrong. My wife pulls the plug and water drains from the bath. The last thing I want is to lie face down in an inch or two of water and drown.

I roll to the left and slip on the bath’s bottom. I roll to the right and slide again. I grasp the handle on the left … it comes out in my hand. With nothing to grasp, I can’t sit up. So I lie there with the water draining away.

I start to panic. Mustn’t panic. I’m in pain. Not that much pain. I must fight. I can’t give in. Again I try to turn over … and again.

Tears. Sweat. I get cramp in the toes, and in the lower legs, where I push against the bath’s end. Panic now and a tightness in my chest with bile edging up in my throat to choke me. I half-turn but fall again and bang my head. Don’t struggle. Don’t panic. Think.

I ask for the towel and my wife slips it under my feet. No good: my hips still slide. I need to pee. Hang on. I can’t hang on. I tighten my stomach muscles involuntarily and urine spurts. My wife slides the towel under my knees: I get more grip but my arms won’t hold. I slip and squeeze. Oh no: my bowels are turning to water. I groan and hope but I can’t hold on and bath and body are soiled. But I have rolled over and now I lie face down, in push up position, humiliated, soiled, tears streaming down my face, breathing above the absent water.

My wife goes downstairs to get the garden kneeler. It won’t fit in the bath. I experiment with my walking stick, but it’s no good, it slips and just won’t hold. Naked, shrunken, smelling like I don’t know what, I can’t face calling the neighbors or the fire department.

My wife kneels beside me. Together we haul the now wet towel beneath my torso and finally I gain a dry base on the slippery bath; no sliding now. I curse as my wife sinks sharp fingers into my fragile flesh and helps me to rise. Together we force me into a kneeling position. From here I can empower my arms and push myself up.

It has taken me twenty-five minutes to get out of that bath. I stink and I am no longer clean. Dipped in my own excrement, I hobble to the shower in the other bathroom and hose myself down.

Shadow Flash Fiction

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Shadow
Bistro 23

             The janitor said he saw LJ’s shadow lying down at midnight on the corridor floor. He dialed 911 and a police car came with a bucket and a mop to sweep the evidence under the carpet. LJ wasn’t there. He had climbed to his feet and scuttled away, a peregrine crab clicking his pincers over dry moonlight on a sanded floor.

He migrated to the elevator and the janitor watched as the needle jerked to a stop at every floor. Now they feared him in the washrooms. They stared at themselves in the mirrors and saw him as a kind of devil looking out with an offer of work for idle hands.

LJ is horned and hoofed and he breathes heavily as the customers clean their teeth and leave the cold tap running. When the water’s turned off, LJ’s long, thin fingers pluck the strings of their hearts and a quaint fibrillation fills the silence of this haunted house that breathes in and out, moving fine membranes of memory.

Upstairs, downstairs, a lonely route he treads while the wind at the window scratches tinkling notes. Something breaks loose in the confines of his mind and walks beside him. His twin brother stalks through this silvery sliver of splintered glass, this simian mirror wrinkling their troubled suits of skin.

LJ glimpses the old moon’s monkey face through a broken window. Jagged and coarse, it wanders like an itinerant snail, cobbled with clumsy clouds. A vagabond in a paving stone sky, it rumbles across metal cracks, a knapsack of nightmares humped on its old man’s back.

When the snail moves house who stores the furniture he leaves behind? The hermit crab lurks naked on the beach, seeking new lodgings. Two eyes in limbo watch LJ roll his snowman’s belly of flab across an unknown, clouded room. Who killed the candle and left him in the dark where a fallen star grazed by the lamppost?

A bouquet of golden sparks flew from an iron tree and sanctified the gutter. The gas lamps sputtered patiently in uniform rows. A scarecrow stuttered into the limelight and shook LJ’s hand. The skeleton was wearing LJ’s grandmother’s Easter bonnet, with all the flowers renewed, but she couldn’t keep his heart from last winter’s left over crumbs.

When a tulip thrust its tongue through the concrete. It became as red as a robin and flew into the lounge bar of a public house. The bronze leaf necklace circling LJ’s throat filled with a flow of springtime song. His heart stood upright like a warped piano and the skeletons in his cupboard emerged to tarry at the corner to play knucklebones with the wind.

Torn butterflies of news fluttered round the neighborhood. Yesterday’s horoscope winked its subversive eye and called to the hermit in his lonely cell: “Look out for the stranger with the tin can alley smile. Sharpen your knife and tie your heart to the tail of the first albino dog, white as a lily, that comes whistling down the street.”

Raptors Flash Fiction

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Raptors
Bistro 21

“Falcon, Richard?”
“Here, sir.”
“Finch, Thomas?” Mr. Shrike’s predatory eyes squinted out over half-rimmed glasses.
“Thomas Finch?”
“Not here, sir,” Dick Falcon answered.
“Why not? His trunk’s here.”
“Don’t know, sir.”
“Hawk, Peter?” Mr. Shrike continued.
“Here, sir.”

* * *
“Tom Finch not back?” Mr. Shrike perched by the fireplace with his conspicuous, upright stance. “Why not?” He addressed the staff room then spat in the fire.
“Tricky business,” Mr. Slaughter replied. “Important birthday, his mother said when she called. He’s at home but his trunk’s here. He’ll be back.”
“Pity,” Mr. Shrike winced. “That boy’s spineless. I’d like to…”
“Impale him on a thorn and hang him out to dry like the butcher you were in the war?” Mr. Slaughter peered down the long beak of his nose. “Not on school grounds, I hope,” he sniggered.

* * *
Tom and his mother lived with her parents. His birthday cake had thirteen candles that year. He blew them out and made a silent wish: “Let me be brave enough to do it.”

* * *
After tea, Tom’s mother sent him into the kitchen while she talked with her mum and dad.
“He’s got to go back to school,” Tom’s grandfather cleared his throat and spat in the fire. Tom’s mum recoiled at the stench of burning phlegm.
“He doesn’t want to go,” she murmured. “The boys bully him and the masters are worse.”
“Just like the army: he’ll get used to it. It’s me paying his fees; it’s my money you’re wasting when he’s not at school,” he spat again.

* * *
Tom leaned over the chipped porcelain sink in the kitchen. His fingers brushed against the damp red flannel and the soap dish. Then he touched the leather case of his grandfather’s cutthroat razor.
The folded razor lay cradled in his left hand. He nursed it, swaying back and forth on his feet. He found the groove and pulled the cold steel blade from its protective casing.
The razor formed a glittering right-angled claw. Then it became the sinister half-wing of a hawk that fluttered for a second, hovering above his wrist.
It pounced.
A fierce talon slashed into Tom’s wrist and a red river of pain sprang out. Tom fought the urge to scream as he stared at the flowing blood. The great claw of the triumphant hawk lay deep in his wrist. Strong wings flapped and bore him away.

* * *
“Falcon, Richard?”
“Here, sir.”
“Finch, Thomas?” Mr. Shrike’s strident voice pierced the classroom. “Thomas Finch?”
“Not here, sir,” Dick Falcon answered.
“Why not?” Mr. Shrike surveyed the class.
“Don’t know, sir. But he won’t be back.”
“How do you know that?”
“Saw his trunk being sent home, sir.”
“Finch, Thomas: absent,” Mr. Shrike looked down at his list and skewered the boy’s name with the absentee’s black cross. He smiled a cruel, calculated smile, and returned to his list.
“Hawk, Peter.”

* * *

Obsidian’s Edge 26

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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 …