#inmydadsbasement

[gravityslingshot]

@inmydadsbasement

The metallic sheen of a peacock      The blue of the ocean     the gentle blooming of waves     opening your mouth wide    the Ed Sullivan Show     fresh scents of laundry     roasted ham on weekends with glazes that change     another dusty red Mustang          Helena’s destiny clear before me          is it time to go?     Al is a good, good person, Frank.      Your heart’s desire, I hope. Open it.     We share an ancestor with lungfish.    Fish, and then dinosaurs.     Where were the intermediates, what led them to venture out on land?    A carload of Frank and his senior trainer and the guys who made the launch pods     I know everything that happened before this.      I know what happened before the beginning     and the devious, selfish path by which I have come.    To think of it, they’ve travelled just like the moon of Saturn, shuttling back and forth a narrow two-million-mile long ellipse,     impervious to purity,       striving to be good,    predisposed to murder      while evolving faster than the high-mass stars that exploded more than five billion years ago.    This shell of matter that encases my body        I still need.        The spectra of colours I have never seen before tickles me with its oodles of information.       I feel more than that;     I am stardust brought to life, empowered by the universe to figure myself out, and I have only just begun.        If I willed it, I could birth another universe.                

[gravityslingshot]

Setting meme: a solemnly quiet hospital room . Lucifer to Lorraine@inmydadsbasement

She had had a dream. Over yonder the lands outside Shiprock the Navajo had brought her to, its vacant stretch of dirt-caked rocks loomed big and endless through the fine rain. In front of her, the hole in the ground of its twelve-storey-diameter seemed like an endless pit, having swallowed land, now it swallowed the light. Pitch-black, the coins and stones thrown into it had returned no sound. The light shone down it from torches disappeared into the blackness that sent shivers down her spine while the little girl behind her clung to her mother, Nino. Ed and the elders looked grim. The line of jingling bridles over turkey-red paint, and the weary, solemn faces of the men that rode the horses parted. Out came the villagemen carrying a plain white sheep, bound with rope not at the ankles, but across its body like a makeshift harness with a borrowed silver belt.

‘  A year ago,  ‘  Ed said they had found the hole.   

‘  It’s about time we try to find out what lies in it, what it is, where it came from.   ‘  John, Full of Grace, says through a rolled cigarette with crumpled cigar tobacco.   ‘  Today,   ‘   His eyes shifted lightly around the lip of the giant hole, from which the darkness seemed to ooze over and into the bottom.     ‘   --We let the sheep lead our trail.   ‘

The men lowered the animal with thousands of feet of rope. Thousands became tens of thousands, and still they felt no bottom. So they tied the ropes to the one of many boulders scattered around, and went on the next bout of watching and praying quietly.

The next day, they raised the rope with horses. The elders were smoking big, black cigars. But a different smell seemed to waft up from the hole, almost delicious. It reached their noses before the sight of it did. No one laughed. They all stared at it, puzzled, some in horror, some feeling alone in such a strange space and time, under the day that seemed just as bright and calm as any other.

 The sheep was dead. It looked boiled, or braised, covered head to toe in its skin with its wool fallen off. Its muscles were lean, but surprisingly its belly bulged out, more than it should. Sweetwater pulled her in. After peering up and looking around at the others, he unsheathed his knife and made a long incision, a careful slit across its belly till the roundness of his arms became caked with dried and partly solidified blood – the kind they’d chop into square pieces to eat. He pulled out a lamb by its loosely dangling legs it had, cradling its soft, fragile body and neck. Its mouth openly gasped in air.

He sheared the umbilical cord off. 

Yellow-white with a red tinge of blood over it, the lamb was barely alive. And all over its sickly slick surface were the mounds across its body: tumours, with its womb-blood beginning to pool between them in the large zig-zag lightning grooves. All around them rose a sickly smell. An undescribable stench.

Lorraine startles. Her palm flattens, not on grass, not in the sun or hot wind, not in the rain but under building shade on soft cotton blankets of the bed she sits up in. She listens to the thumping of her own heart clambering – not in relief…  

She reflects drowsily, in the slow swell of birds chirping, the sun glaring through the curtains. The faint sound of a train whistle passes, just like the sounds of Mississippi. And the light from the sun drives in in sheets, basking the floor and bed in a yellow glow. She looks around the hospital room, surrounded by light lime green wallpaper, knowing its only standing screen once she laid eyes on it, that its patients were destined to shiver in the black night, looking down at the pair of feet peeping from under, and up at nothing.

There it is, she begins to realise, what she wanted—tangibly before her a man, unlike the fairy world of a vision’s pantomime.

When she opens her mouth, no sound emerges. Her tongue feels as dry as sandpaper. Her head, slow, rolls away from its horrible place, forward to catch up with words.

‘   Where’s Ed?   ‘

I don’t know what happened. Ed would know.