- Vol. 03
- Chapter 03
Three pinhead priests, two in flight, one walking on water, enforce the ritual of land-bound remembrance on a boy child found watching birds at swim
Stand at the edge, feet planted, arms back and winged, and tell us what you see. Myself, face-hanged slack and pouting, body like a plucked duck’s, smooth and long, toes frilling the wet board. The sea is a landscape – tectonics warping dunes, weathering moraine, depositing polder, mooned and distorting – I am distorted too: dunce, moron, poltroon, loon, to think I could leave the ground. That is the preserve of priests – light in their godliness, anti-gravity, hydrophobic, magnetic repulsion, aerofoil – full of maths, full of signs unreadable, faith in the experiments of others, of machines more expensive than all the breakfasts, dinners, suppers, and snacks of whole races of men: lifetimes of sweetmeats, collisions of electron volts, compact muon solenoid. Keep your arms back – imagine them tied at the elbow. Keep your knees together – imagine them stuck, cyanoacrylate. Don’t dare enter the water – colloidal suspension, suspended particulates, particle accelerators, sharks (great white and killer). Enforce the ritual of land-bound remembrance. We float above, and to the sides, no need to wonder which; don’t check the magnetic field, alignments of pins, floating corks; don’t wonder at the absence beneath our frocks, footless. Don’t touch the pole! What pole? What compass? Small bones, ossification of mineral salts. Pigeons homing. Look down instead at the landscaped – surface of the mirror. Warp and weft and remember your idiocy – failure of language, inability to commune with the ineffable, Geiger-Muller tube, reflection, refraction, that light in the distance, lensed? Mass spectrometry.
Three pinhead priests, two in flight, one walking on water, enforce the ritual of land-bound remembrance on a boy child found watching birds at swim
The fractional distillation of oil. And if I edge forward? If I tumble in? If I choose to die by asphyxiation of the bronchioles? The alveolar sacs will impact with compacted microscopic plastic particulates. Microbeads. Parabens? Wings oiled, skin separates from the fat with a bicycle pump – excess gathered from the rear, I sewed up the abdominal cavity with a bamboo skewer, breaking it to prevent it from getting unwieldy, all rights reserved vietworldkitchen.com – then what will you pinheads say? Levitating above my corpse, all of a piece, all at sea, rest in peace, sea burial, washed up on the beach, mermaids' tears, mermaid's purse, sharks' teeth anthracite.