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Children's Corner
Farmer James was enormously
fat and hated himself with a dark passion. After his first wife,
also astonishingly fat, died (heart attack at twenty-nine), he sold
the kids and moved to the city. There he met a skinny woman whose Acrank
was turned by massive clouds of flab, and he married her, and he fucked
her somehow, and they had children. What are your notions of the
arbitrary and why do you hold them? From the day of their birth,
the former Farmer James (now delivering milk from a horse-van) made
sure his new children associated eating with extreme discomfort, even
pain. Thus they grew to be even skinner than his skinny wife,
their skinny mother. They would sit all day in their flat and
look at the backs of their hands. They would cry before they ate.
They thought this was normal.
Former Farmer James had
a potato in his head almost the size of a normal human brain.
While his children would lift their forks, bite, chew, and swallow,
he'd scrape them across the back of their necks with a wire brush or
mash cold packs into their genitals, which were various (two girls and
what appeared to be a boy). Sometimes he'd turn up music godawful
loud and shout in their ears as they ate. Sometimes he'd slap
them with a spatula. Nobody lingered over their plates, or ever
asked for seconds.[1]
Patty, the second wife
of Former Farmer James, had been an actress until she had become too
ill to work, ... actually too weak. (Nothing for breakfast, a
broth of shadows for lunch, and for supper she'd stare at her empty
cabinets. Sometimes a phantom turnip.) She'd play a nose
flute softly to herself in her bare kitchen, her cabinets open, also
bare, trying to get into the mood to continue living. One day,
just before she was ready to throw herself out her third story apartment
window, or just before she was ready to steal away into the bathroom
with a razor and the flute, she spotted a fat man walking with obvious
effort up the steep street from the Bay and got thoroughly wet for the
first time in her life. Oh she'd been fucked before, by sundry
and various in fact, had been a stand-in on a porn set for several months,
had even been pregnant, had two former families full of kids, if not
to purpose, but this was the first time she flooded at first
sight. Looking out that morning, what she saw was a biomass in
overalls moving as much side-to-side as forward, but what she felt were
two squirrely ball-bearings dipped in hot honey syrup, coated and sprung,
roiling in sweet oils, and little men with mops swabbing down her lowest
abdomen, loose and dripping, circling a liquid planet, a fleshy mount
upon which stood all the meat of her life, the meat of sight for instance, as though meat itself
were gel, and gelatin more fluid than a liquid smell, all aquiver.
Hereafter ever!, she nearly said to herself; and as she exhaled her
noseflute itself gave comment, soft, throaty, gorged with lust: Yep,
Ooooohh.
All this in memory of.
She ran down the stairs, tripping only once over her own shadow,
stumbling a constant in her forward thrust, down and out, launched into
the street in a babel of arms and legs pumping the air, nose flute catching
the morning sun and sky brightened in its reflection off Bay waters
(how lavish even the most humble of moments, how full!). Perhaps
gestures are our bearers, as Kundra suggests, that they're more individual
than we, perhaps we are the parasites of words, as well, that they speak
with us, yet none of this even begins to account for her fully realized
and passionate response. If she was a word, she was pure word,
heart attack and not an ounce of fat, she would sink like hammered lead, her flesh a
thread, recently ignited, a skinny, spiraling rocket.
[add 373 pages of devious
plots, a kidnapping, perp waddles, mutant cakewalk, so sore in the pen
he'll never be able to hold his own again, a tired homecoming to an
earthquake, waking alone, finding Pat at Ocean Beach, watching a whale
breathe its last, sunup, trucks and cranes in attendance, he'd lost
so much weight, vows a new start, begins really eating as though for
the first time, they sell the kids and buy a scrapeyard in Nevada off
I80, build torture pens for unsuspecting tourists, read Bowles aloud
to each other every night, raucous laughing, more planning]
Dawn found the pickup
of Scrapyard Owner Former Farmer James on the shoulder of the interstate
softly sheathed in roseate nimbus of exhaust, nearly on its side, it
tipped so to the driver's. Spindly Pat, wearing an obvious arm
sling, stood calmly, playing her nose flute, twenty-five yards past.
Her thumb would twitch whenever she thought she heard an approaching
car. It was only a matter of time. [Last thirty pages filled with screams.
More screams. By the end readers should be helmeted, deep beneath
several layers of overcoats and blankets, wearing something to protect
their eyes as well like a welder's mask or a bank vault. Hideous
screams, comically prolonged. Screams like a bird in a sausage
grinder. Jungle screams, beyond horror, beyond hope. A dying monkey
in jaguar's jaws. Rodent under beak. Screams without sound.
Lonely child eviscerated by crock. Searing shrieks of cat
and a woman's scalding gasps . . .] Screams rising into a broken
tower of sorrow and pain, bells of maniacal laughter hammering down
from the ruined cathedral in the background, in the foreground Hell's brightest vertigo
of the soul, all tolled for your sweet dreams.
_____
[1]Idea
for commercial, #364: Establish such conditions as described in this
paragraph, hell, hire former Farmer James and his wife and kids to play
themselves, and have Mom serve up some of [insert brand] that's Soooo
Delicious!!! they ask, with enthusiasm!, for more, shining through their
wounds, through their open scars, sweetly begging for seconds.
Que music.
