Skip Fox
- 5 Flash(er) Ficts -
Itching of the Phantom Foreskin
Once there was a country mouse and a city mouse and the country mouse, who was his cousin, went to live with the city mouse . . . who knows why, . . . really? Was it drought? Did the farm blow away? Or was he bored with all his hick buddies talking about how they were going to “blow this town one day”? When he set down his suitcase and told his cousin, the city mouse, that he had come to live with him, the city mouse leapt upon him, held him down, tore off his head with his teeth, and took a dump down the pie-hole’s sceptic pipe we call a throat, partially for the gratuitous violence but also because the country mouse needed it done (pan-struck face, smarmy hairlip, obsequious drivel). The city mouse kept the corpse of what had been his cousin out in the alley where he and his friends could join to their merriment of skies, of cans, of blasted brick, the example of how a decapitated country mouse, some festering of the primitive, looks, and smells, and moves, how his red plaid shirt browns from the various chemistries, the beautiful fluffiness of a corpse, deflated the third morning with a whoosh and no shortage of joyeuseté, comparing its bouquet to flatulence, someone’s wife’s breath, or feet, etc.
Thus might end our story were it not the “absolute is the dimension of a thing prospectively” “now that the relative has been restored as that which includes the absolute” (Olson), which brings us back to the rotting corpse and one of the city mouse’s buddies who--after long afternoons of coffee and evenings of drinking, cigarettes, talking of little Minnies tight as squeegees (how they barked! gravel titties), of a city’s necessary luxuries, and of leaving one day--would return in the latest of the earliest hours, after all the others had gone home to their loathsome holes and cabinets, he would sneak back to the alley’s hymnal vault, to the corner behind the dumpster, beneath a slice of constellations (shield of Perseus), to stand above the ripening joke, breathing in its stew, and to think, masturbate, and pray
Felix on my case
this morning, each time I close my eyes like Roy Orbison I see him pacing to and fro his one room (where does he sleep?, of a haystack, pitchfork or bowling alley surprise, the ball making a face like a friendly bomb when he rolls it explodes, sending him, shards of alley, and pins into the intracranial reaches of one-reel space where the pockety moon winks as he descends, drops in on his one room still pacing up and down like The Great Contestant, while the clock flies off and into a landscape, he’s waiting for an exclamation point (or does he bear down?) to appear near the ceiling of his grainy interior, “Ah, hah,” he’ll exclaim, “An entire factory processing rabbit foreskins! Forty-seven separate products, including two brands of breakfast cereal and three chemically distinct straps for shoe shine kits!,” or, “Lexical vocalization had to proceed syntactical functioning since protolanguage yet occurs stripped of all but groundedlessness like Philip Guston’s daughter!,” or, “I think I’ll go visit my cousin, Fritz, the city cat,” and thereafter, for almost the rest of the reel, we watch him imagining what that might be: arriving, getting a drink, then more drinks, something to eat while getting drunk, then more drinking, so it’s really late by the time he gets to the alley, but sure enough there is that simpleton mouse Fritz told him about, like a sieve blubbering and jerking off over some dead fuck of a corpse even his lobotomized cousin Krazy wouldn’t touch, but Felix is not amused, instead he’s horny and hungry again, so the grabs the mouse, holds him down, fucks him, then eats him, snapping bones, sucking joint and ligament, and as the dream ends he is back in his room still walking up and down but now with a mouth full of mouse parts like tiny thumbs in gravy when he suddenly realizes what he’s doing, and bows to say grace. Amen.
The Three Little Pigs Is Another Story
While you are reading, your mind and your arms and your digestive tract, nerves, brain, and eyes will be doing many things but The Three Little Pigs Is Another Story. How do we know that but? How do we consider ourselves in the knowing of something? Not wearing any pants and wearing very short shirts always seemed to me a very exciting thing, worth everything like spring, so to speak lightly (as Micah might say), corkscrews on their bubbly gerunds, tummy up the butt of face, slick when you step into sleep regardless of weather, but especially The Three Little Pigs With Big Little Butts, each one’s interchangeable parts dipped in melting honey-butter your eyes like someone you surprised with Where’s The Big Bad Wolf, who drools for lazy and screwy little piglets squealing with too many toes and bellybuttons to boot (Can we be said to be possessed by that which we are said to know or to have known?), sleek and slightly sour, you should have seen what he did to the first two, grizzled canine dick in every orifice, some new, and into the night as it goes, knives and cries and balls and cock for hours, your mother didn’t tell you, did she? Maybe it’s because she knew what she’d do to you (the mourners sang) given half a chance with your little digestive tract, little toes and cute willy. Do any of these piggies have names? (We name our cocks but not our cartoons because our cocks are mortal.) If we might think of something as an exception to knowing, how might we speak of it? (Mine’s Lazarus.)
Our mothers were on the rim or rink of the phenomenal, the universe, a cross between patterns of indelicacy and the motor pool. They looked just past the scrim as walls were dancing in color, even low in light, all the mealy little squealings and emissions untying their limbs by the twos and threes, they could just see that their lives would be nothing like walking beneath a night sky illumined by jets and enormous planets, silent explosions (ancient cirque du nuit), glow of globes floating down (these were the joints, no they never even made the movie, to her suddenly dilatant sadness as she sat there reading the story and getting wetter by the moment, slacked by the flash of the first ravishment amid dismemberment, disembowelment, and then the second, hot and deep, but when the third little pig, Dickie, tricked The Big Bad Wolf (what would you know?) to pot and bowl, then to cute cannibal belly, provocation poking beneath shirttail, indolent petulance picking its teeth with a splint from the coccyx, it was too much, she was loose, flood of intestines falling, had to leave the room, though she left something behind, a strange scent, remember?
1003-04, 1007. Witch Stew
By Hansel and Gretal
Pull out of oven well before point of death, where pain brings desire to die equidistant from will to live, poised, if you want to call that pain cavity living. For dissection, a penknife or bonesaw in a child’s hands, Happy Happy Slip, Slide, Slip, Smile no candy for supper tonight but succulent bowls of witch parts, the charring holds flavor in and provides a smoky backdrop, a little stage across which puppets “jump” from reel to reel, everything’s on fire if you want it hot, use the spices in the lower register deep in late autumn like grass in dreams. Marinate outer limbs with liquids nearest heart spiked with banana wine and stitched with flowers, the rife of life as soon shredded like memory or you can forget it, stuff heart with crumb-fattened birds, let soak overnight with lateral organs in the Kettle of Abominations if you like to lose your boundaries in every mouthful, it’s not even an acquired taste so much as forcibly recognized.
Pour off brine middle of following night, let frogs approach, no blame, etc., stir airy drams of Crystal Stream Aether of Decaying VioletsTM with three moles, eviscerated, still living, slowly in. Simper on low self-loathing for days, occasionally fold in beds of mosses, cliffside, fluids squeezed from peat under the pressure of song, season to taste like waking up still drunk on the eighth of October, Bad Indian, summer run away like wild dog and the fog contains a mortality that perfectly captures the essence of in-the-midst. Serve hot that the parts might dance in the bowl.
Gams and Gats (My first novel!)
- for Matt
As I waited for my parole officer, I thumbed through the Spring issue of Modern Criminal: “Vacation Hot Spots,” “Felonious Thoughts,” “Acts Without Atonement,” “Effective Rodent Elimination,” “Joint Custody,” and Willie-the-Termite’s column, “Joist Work.” It was snowing outside, and it was going to snow, or like Wag would put it, “Blowing the blow that don’t bite back.” But what I was really thinking about was the antfarm of my youth, and how if I hadn’t . . . [120+ pages, rough comic decapitations, frilly car chases, walks down by the warehouses or dark harbor shotguns coming out of loose boards, iron out of crevices between words, blasting readers to shreds that they wake up to a dead laughter brighter than the sunrise we call plot and maybe a couple times we think he’s going to have to saw his leg off or shoot his own daughter, when he only went out for a Snickers Mocha and a pack of Luckies, etc.] “Naw, babe,” I said over my shoulder, “never been a believer.” Then she walked into the room, . . . wearing only her scars.
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