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alittleghostwhoeatsbread · 1 year ago

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Dafür Zu Verrostet

Fred had used and abused many a pedestal in his early years, having favoured concrete or metal square blocks for their plainness and balanceability before growing up and settling on a marble triangle in Victoria Square, the realisation that flair and a lack of balance weren’t always a bad thing settling it, perching on its upmost tip and striking the pose of that of a naked and aroused sailor mistaking a distant pile of seaweed for the bosom of a charitable mermaid for twenty years. Victoria Square was a haven, filled to the brim on all sides with statues of different forms, shapes, and materials, its centrepiece being the visitor named Floozy who lounged in a jacuzzi shaped fountain the size of a bus and the colour of jade with hands that stretched to the sky as if asking a cloud lover to return, but Fred was close only with the two statues perched close enough to his own pedestal to converse with without shouting- Vicky, an iron made royal figure with a froggish chin gently cradling a baton, and Hazel, a sandy stone sphinx complete with exposed tongue and fangs. One day as the sun rose and turned the square the colour of an oranges intestine, it deemed it time to cling to the statues forms and highlight their imperfections with the magnifying glass of a recently divorced judge, sending a perfect ray out to strike the surface of Fred’s backside and showcase a small patch of discoloured flaking metal to backside loving Vicky, who upon being showcased too immediately raised her baton and pointed it at the affected area of the closed-eyed Fred, who was smiling up at the warming sun with the bliss of a tightrope stander mid tightrope stand, jerking it up and down as if it was a gun rather than a baton.

“Rustitis, Fredrick. On your backside. Rustitis!”

Closed-eyed Fred instantly became open-eyed Fred and his peaceful smile began the slow downward crawl of an accidental amputee to their accidentally displayed and dashed about limbs, opening into a chasm of fear while waking several statues who’d still been sleeping with the rhythmic hammer on metal slapping of his own ass, slapping which caused more of the rusted surface to flake and drift off with the Joie de vivre of a gang of oddly coloured snowflakes who know their own attractiveness and aren’t afraid to flaunt it.

“No, no, no. It can’t be. Maybe it’s bird shit or a miraculous tattoo. For God sake look again and say it’s bird shit or a miraculous tattoo,” Fred pleaded with a Vicky who was still pointing her gun at his ass in a way that cast no shadow of doubt on the hard bodied fact that if she had ammo or a real gun, she wouldn’t have hesitated in shooting.

Hazel, whose pedestal was on the side of Fred which meant his backside was inaccessible to her, woke up during this hullabaloo, confusedly lapping at the air with her fat tongue until the sun helpfully exposed with a blinding light another patch of rustitis on Fred’s shoulder blade and caused her to retreat that fat lapping tongue back into her mouth to hide, almost leaping off her pedestal to forcibly remove him from the square but resisting, partly because he was her friend but almost entirely because the idea of actually touching him was too much for her to bear.

“Oh, Fred. I’m sorry,” she murmured, shaking her great head from side to side with enough force to hammer the final nail in the coffin of belief that the marks could simply be miraculous tattoos or bird shit.

“Don’t let them take me,” was all Fred said to the nail being hammered, his eyes, which had looked pleadingly at an invisible patch of bosom shaped seaweed for twenty years, spinning to look pleadingly at his friends instead.

But it was too late for anyone to not let anything happen even if they would or could, which they wouldn’t and couldn’t, as the signal had been sent and received as soon as the word of rustitis had been uttered and within seconds they arrived in white coats and vans with miniature cranes on top, eyes cold and uncaring, ears hearing but ignoring Fred’s stammering pleas as they wrapped several ropes around his waist and attached them to the top of one of the cranes which had cogs that immediately began to scream like coals in heat as they strained in removing him from the top of his triangle. They screamed for five minutes alongside a Fred whose feet clung like a hunch to a back to his pedestal and hands reached desperately out for his recoiling friends who still cared enough to turn their eyes away and pretend they didn’t want what was happening to happen before his hunch feet lost the fight with a POP! and he came off his pedestal and was lowered into the back of a van to watch from the rear window, his arms still stuck in the pose they’d held for so long, as his home pantomimed a hairline and receded away.

The van sped through the city and Fred’s eyes grew as mournful as a dog in heat as they passed several of his old pedestal points and he wondered if all the times he’d watched other statues with rustitis getting dragged away without making a sound other than a small laugh was why the disease had targeted him, doing his best to feel sorry for all the past victims of his small laugh in his heart of hearts as if it would make a difference to his own circumstances before discarding his limited memories of them and feeling sorry only for himself in his heart of hearts, fearfully considering what was going to happen to him. He, Vicky, and Hazel had debated on what happened when the rust part of rustitis got worse, usually after an afflicted statue was taken screamingly away, and had laughed as they discussed possibilities such as disintegration, missing limbs, and exposed or hidden genitals rotting into twisted things that sang with lyres about the sadness of having never being touched before they were rotted twisted things. He briefly became afraid that his penis would become a twisted rotten thing that sang with a lyre before dismissing the possibility with a clenching of the fists, believing fervently that his penis was at least of the class of genital that would pluck a harp as it approached its end, a clenching of the fists that was remarkably therapeutic as it enabled the metal to stretch, with the grinding grind of a convicted robot’s ass being dragged alongside the back of a police car as a method of cruel and unusual punishment by a cruel and unusual jury, as it hadn’t been able to for twenty years.

His feet were still stuck in the unusual tippity toed ballet position that had been required for him to stay bonded to the tip of his triangle and the stuckness of them prevented Fred from turning his head around enough to look not through the rear window but through the gap behind him where two heads belonging to two white coats floated, but his ears could prick like radar dishes and hear well their mumbles and grumbles about the damn growing number of patients being brought to the Establishment’s treatment hall and how it was too much dammit. Fred had never heard of the Establishment or its treatment room but the fact he was going to a place where treatment was to be had filled his chest with the hope the sailor he had posed as for so long must have felt at mistaking the seaweed pile, and he began working on stretching out the rest of his body as the city continued to pass with the speed of a runaway cat who’d got the cream. He'd just gotten his feet to unstick so he could turn and stare through the back of the white coated heads to what they were driving towards when they pulled into the driveway of a large granite building with all the charm of a train ticket inspector, completely square and almost impotent looking, and the driving stopped, the backdoor of the van being thrown open by more figures in white and the scream of the van’s crane cogs coming again as Fred was pulled out, suspended, and dropped onto a little trolly with wheels that wheeled him towards a huge doorframe as square as the building with a sign above it reading, WELCOME TO THE ESTABLISHMENT: CLEAR YOUR THROAT UNLESS YOU’RE A PATIENT.

The white coated figures pushing the trolly hacked and hawked to unclog themselves before wheeling Fred into a spherical hall as in odds with the shape of the outside of the building as an abstinent ant with a horny-horny hippo, the sloping hall walls bordering a space filled with beds that in turn were filled with statues in a variety of positions and stages of rustitis- some merely with flaking patches of discolouration like Fred, some peeling all over like overheated oranges, some as rusty as a former prodigy returning from retirement- any tiny movement from them letting out froggish croaks and creaks but those croaks and creaks being kept to a minimum as they all kept movement of any kind as infrequent as possible, most of them lying as still as if their beds were their pedestals and the other statues their visitors.

Despite their stillness, rust floated off the statues filling the beds, forming clouds, puffs really, in the air of swirling vapour metallic in taste no matter what material the statues they came from were made from and Fred was pushed through and made to inhale these puffs on his journey from the entrance all the way through to the back of the hall, which was the back of a hall, blocked from both extending the space further or revealing whatever wilderness lay beyond it by a curved brick wall that Fred was pushed up against before being levered onto his back on top of a bed homed in by metal bars. The bed was bordered by a row of others just like it that followed the sideways curve of the back wall- the hall being set up like a Dantesque version of hell, the rows of beds continually forming their own circles that grew incrementally smaller until the ice cold centre was reached- the two on either side of his own being occupied by a wooden whinnying and rearing horse and an alabaster little girl with an oversized and extended hesitant finger hesitating over some invisible debris. The white coated men who’d wheeled him in nodded at Fred after tying him to the bed with a leather strap that would have looked more at home in a brothel to say that yes they had brought him and that yes their job was done before leaving with a sharp turning of their heels and Fred’s legs, one of the only parts of him able to move with restriction, began air running desperately in the air as if he did it enough he would somehow air run back to a period in time when he was not tied to a bed and slowly rusting.

The wooden horse did its pose a service and let out a high-pitched whinny before immediately doing that same pose a disservice by turning that whinny into the wet-lipped hacking of a smoker face to face with a clown, inciting the little girl on Fred’s other side to look at Fred and let out a tinkling akin to the splash of urine in a dark alley.

“Did you hear that helped with the rust?” The horse asked in between hacks, his raised legs nibbled, almost to what would have been bone if bone had been there to arrive at, by rust, raising higher and kicking with glee and a little bit of hope as if he might have actually heard it helped with the rust.

“Yeah, ha-ha, did you?” The little girl also began kicking, not her legs which were cemented together to form a shapeless mound the rest of her body rose from like the fire of a firework, but her oversized hesitant finger which abused the air with wags.

“I just want to run. Out of this bed, out of here, out of the present, but I can’t because I’m immobile and not by choice.”

“If you didn’t hear that helped from someone then being immobile should be your choice, it’s good for your rustitis,” the little girl’s wagging finger purposefully came to a stop as the horses' legs also stopped kicking. “We’ve heard, and from trained and informed specialists in white coats too, that staying as still as we can might be the way to being cured. Why do you think we’re strapped down like this?”

“You’ve ruined a solid week of immobility,” The horse neighed, its gaping nostrils gaping furiously. “My rust has gotten worse already, look. Look at it!”

Completely smooth holes with the look of tunnels of the worming worm, larger than the nibbled patches that had been visible before, had appeared right across the horses hide, dotting it like enlarged speckles, and when Fred turned his head and saw these holes leading to somewhere he didn’t want to go but was heading any way he shivered and turned his head and body as much towards the little girl as he could, questions falling out of him.

“Are we safe here? Has anyone here ever been cured? How long have you been here? Why are we strapped down? Does rustitis make your genitals twisted and rotten? Will being so close to others like you with it worsen my own rust? Answer the second question first please,” Fred flicked the insides of his eyes down to all the parts of his body not covered in strap but keeping the outsides of them solely on his penis, rubbed gold by twenty years of visitor's hands, his mind playing tricks with him so that he sometimes saw rust there and sometimes didn’t as he waited for the little girl to race to answer all his questions but specifically the second one, the little girl being interrupted before the starting whistle by the horse forgetting its desire to stay immobile, click-clacking its teeth together.

“Boulton’s going bucket,” it shouted to the excitement of all the statues whose beds were positioned in a way that they could see what was about to occur, all immediately abandoning their own respective immobility exercises and spinning as much as their straps would allow them in the direction of a bed containing what had possibly once been a full statue but may have always just been an overly large bust of a head.

The head of Boulton had two eyes which had rusted into perpetual shuteye and a mouth that was looked down upon by what might have once been quite a regal moustache but was then little more than a smear, tiny patches of metal not rusted and showing his original colour splattered like pox across the rest of his features showing him to have been a statue of much finer quality and material than most of the ones salivating at the sight of him trembling and flapping his looked down upon mouth with the haplessness of a seashell with wings, each flap letting out a cloud of the progressively darker rust until, with a tremendous booming noise that temporarily made the world go black, he exploded into a beam of light so dense and bright it couldn’t be seen into. The beam of light, stretching from floor to ceiling of the hall, stayed dense and bright for several seconds before beginning to swirl in the manner of a tax-evading tornado, the tip of its swirl bouncing on the bed in the spot where the head of Boulton had been before finally dissipating, leaving behind only a little nest of fragmented rust, the egg resting in its centre not an egg at all but a shiny silver bucket that shouldn’t have surprised Fred by appearing but still did. The horse’s teeth were two coconuts making love, going slower and slower as the excitement of the scene died down, stopping without finishing as the cheering and whooping of the rest of the statues faded too and several white coats appeared to remove the bucket, the bodies of all the statues returning to their immobility with the exception of their eyes which fixed and flickered to remain on the fastly disappearing bucket that had been Boulton until the fastly disappearing bucket that had been Boulton had completed its disappearing.

Fred’s teeth took up where the horse’s had left off and clicked together, two homeless pennies huddled together in a winter rain, as he contemplated what he’d seen until he felt as if he felt all the patches of rust on his body growing and eating away at him bit by bit as if there was a hungry rat let loose inside the pipes and tubes of his innards who had no qualms about coming up for air to munch indiscriminately on things it thought looked tasty, and when he felt as if he felt that a mad thrashing, accompanied with a little old lady groan that escaped his lips like a stray balloon and rose into the air, began to be done by him. The little girl turned to look at the fearful flaying of Fred, reaching from her bed with her oddly long finger to prod him gently but repeatedly in the left eye, a shhhhhhing sound emerging serpently from her lips until he stopped thrashing and groaning to look at the tip of her prodding perpetually ponderous finger which had an expanding patch of rust on it far worse than any of the other patches on her, a rust so rusty the slightest breeze or gust or gale sent parts of it smoking away into the ether and encouraged him to scuttle as far back on his bed as a strap would allow.

“Did you know Boulton?” She asked once he’d scuttled.

“N-n-no,” Fred stuttered, fearfully watching the tip of the little girl’s finger sway in the space his left eye had occupied.

“Then what’s up duck?”

“I didn’t know that’s what happened.”

“You didn’t know going bucket meant you turned into a bucket?”

“I didn’t know we would go bucket at all!”

“What did you think would happen? We’d disintegrate into clouds and float into the sky and that would be that? Wishful. The white coats told horse who told me that we’d have to have a really lazy disease for it to end us like that. At least we don’t have a lazy disease.”

“What are they going to do with him now he’s a bucket?”

“I don’t know. Use him to collect water or hold a mop. Sell him to people who’ll use him to collect water or hold a mop. You know, bucket things,” the little girl, who’d finally withdrawn her finger and gone back to being still, shrugged with her eyes.

“But doesn’t the idea of that scare you? Buckets don’t have eyes or a mouth or anything,” Fred was adrift and agog that nobody else was adrift or agog themselves about the entire situation.

“I’m assuming we won’t need eyes or mouths or anythings when we’re buckets but of course it’s scary and we’re all scared,” the horse snapped while moving its mouth as little as possible, his teeth hitting together nonetheless with a force that made it clear they wished Fred’s gonads were between them. “Why do you think we’re trying to stay still? For fun?”

Fred sat up as much as he could sit up to angrily reply, the strap pulling tight across his chest with the type of restriction only a strap made for restricting could enforce, just enough for his body to be at an obtuse angle and for the digits at the end of his hand to mimic a furious mouth, but before that open mouth could spew or sign any words at all into the ether, an old speaker attached like a hair follicle to the curved wall directly above Fred’s head, snap, crackled, popped and announced with the voice of an elderly snake charmer that it was that time again, yes that’s right, treatment time and streams of white coats began flooding into the hall from areas unseen and unknown, all with different objects in hand, all of which they held with the air of charitable givers giving umbrellas to those caught in the midst of a terrible rain shower when in fact the objects they had in hand were nothing like umbrellas brought in the midst of terrible rain shower but things such as guitars, canvases, paints, beers, plates of food, cans, megaphones, tape recorders, violins, microphones, wine, chopsticks, detergent, antibacterial spray, soap, shampoo, tables and chairs, boxes of toys such as little cars and figures, torches, blankets, teddy bears, teddy dogs, teddy cats, dogs and cats, one giant tortoise being led by a lead, forks and knives, meringue, stones, and lemon shaped juggling balls. A white coat with an electric violin and amp went to the horse’s bedside, another holding a plate of macaroni and cheese went to the little girls, and approaching Fred’s, a white coat with white hair and a small white goatee and two cheekbones made from bone holding a can of polish, a rag, and a bottle of beer, all of which were brandished in front of his face with a hand as steady as an unflyable kite as the sound of an electric violin being poorly played filled one ear and cheese and pasta being force fed filled his other.

His white coat mimed clearing his throat before screaming over the sounds coming from the bedsides beside Fred and the similar sounds coming from and echoing around the entire hall.

“Hello, I’m sure you have questions. Hold them inside for a mere moment. Introductions first. You are my patient and you have rustitis. I am Doctor Doc, one of the leading healers and leaders of the Establishment and I will be treating your rustitis. This will be a long process that may take longer than you last. We are sorry this is the case but the case it is, so try and take heart that your potential demise could be the key to us finding the cure for others. You can let your questions out now.”

Fred’s face had turned as shiny as a new fish from holding in just two questions which had been competing with each other to be the first to scale his body and emerge victorious from his mouth so when he did let them out, both of them having arrived at the same time and been beating on the drum of his clenched lips, they spewed into the world almost simultaneously.

“Your name is Doc? What will you be treating me with?”

“Yes, my name is Doc, short for Doclan, and with the items I hold in my hands, of course.”

The can of polish, rag, and bottle of beer was again brandished to Fred’s face before the bottle of beer was placed on the ground and, with the air of a magician convincing an audience he is about to do a dramatic trick but instead just exposes his nipples to them, Doc twisted the nozzle on the can of polish from locked to unlocked, spraying the substance first on just the visibly affected rust areas on his torso but then everywhere so that foam as white as the surf of the sea coated his body. Fred looked at the little girl as his body was foamed, her oversized finger poking at the white coat of the white coat who was shovelling food like slime into the Styx into her, each poke causing the white coat no apparent discomfort, their face remaining as jolly as a jellyfish in spring as their mouths repeated, ‘It’s homemade at home by me!’, but each one reducing the size of that finger, and then looked at the horse who lay as still as he could as the electric violin let out a tune that could have been O Danny Boy and could have been a cat being molested, accepting its treatment with the wide eyes of a steed broken in and willing.

Doc, once Fred was covered to his satisfaction, began wiping away at the foam with a variety of polishing techniques more akin to that of a window cleaner- the S shape polish, The V shape polish, the rubadubdub polish, the whenI’mcleaningIsinggggg polish, the circular polish, the freestyle jazz polish, before doing the towelling off a wet child finale- each stroke, rub, and wipe of the rag on Fred’s surface making him tingle as Doc, who spoke as he stroked, rubbed, and wiped, ducked his head close enough for the words to be heard.

“You’re in luck having me treating you. Such luck. I almost cured my last statue. They were showing such promise. I’d faded not one, but two of their rust patches to patches of almost not rust before they, alas, went bucket. But I considered what I’d done, and I think now I’ve figured out a way to speed up the process. With these treatments and my new know how, you could be the one!”

“What treatments? Where? You’re polishing me, that little girl is being force fed, someone’s playing some awful violin. I don’t understand,” Fred’s voice came out in the tone of a claustrophobic tortoise feverously praying to escape its shell.

Doc stopped polishing in its tracks and looked sternly down at Fred who’d shouted loudly enough for some other white coats to hear, his mouth in the middle of his goatee a puckered anus ready to release a shit storm as the violin screeched into silence and the white coat holding it brandishing their horse haired bow like a rapier towards Fred, eyes wet as puddles and cheeks pillowy.

“Of course, you don’t understand, are you a white coat? Are you a member of the Establishment? Have you ever had to treat a patient so sick you’re afraid that nothing you do will ever cure them? No, you’re a statue with rustitis. A statue with rustitis whose damn well lucky if you ask me to be being treated by such an esteemed white coat as Doc.”

Doc held his hands up before the bow, twisting them as if controlling the internal temperature of the angry white coat.

“Now, now Igoress, calm down. Carry on with your playing, which I much mention is getting much better by the way, Fred here is just afraid.”

Igoress stared at Fred with their bow brandished for several more seconds, its tip shaking with a Parkinsonian tremble before spinning with a dancers gait back to the horses' bedside to begin again inciting wails from the electric violin while Doc, still paused in his polishing, looked down at Fred, his brows berating him as his mouth gently explained, the very definition of a man with good bedside manners.

“We members of the Establishment treat our patients with rustitis in the best way members of an Establishment not made to treat patients with rustitis can do. This disease hasn’t been around long and we don’t know much, so we treat it in the ways we think best. Me, for example, I’ve always been a good polisher, Igoress over there can, almost, play the violin, and Llewyn has always made damn good macaroni and cheese. Now, accept your treatment because it will only maybe work if you accept it and there is nothing else to be done.”

Fred fell silent as Doc began to polish him again, accepting the rubs and wipes like tight hugs from an aunt you’re obligated to accept them from, until his parts unaffected by rust shone like the light of life, the parts affected had an even uglier blemish to them than before, and Doc wiped some sweat from his face, throwing his rag down and cracking open the bottle of beer he’d placed carefully on the floor before matronly lifting Fred’s head up and tipping some of the liquid across his tongue and into his depths where it swished and swashed down with the sound of a rainstick when you’re all tucked up inside. Fred liked the taste of the beer and was disappointed when Doc stopped pouring into him and started pouring into himself, relaxing into an armchair that appeared from nowhere at the bedside as an alarm went off and the rest of the white coats placed little white pills in their statues mouths that even without swallowing made them close their eyes and sleep and all streamed away, leaving with their items so quickly that if you blinked you would have missed them, all except Doc, who stayed in his armchair beyond a blink watching Fred and taking minuscule sips of the beer in between periodic licks of his lips.

“I’d like to start devoting a bit of extra time to my treatments,” Doc explained without being asked to. “I feel that forming a connection with my patients is the missing link to what I’ve been doing and forming a connection can’t be done to a time constraint or while polishing someone. No, you have to have a drink with them after a hard day's work. I’m simply doing my duty to my treatment by doing this. Does that make me better than the rest of the white coats who don’t do it? Most of them would, and do, say yes, but not me. I’m very humble.”

Doc leaned forward and poured more beer into Fred’s mouth which had been left agape with the aura of a tunnel waiting to let in battle reinforcements, the alcohol entering his system until his head felt as if a bumble bee was in there bumbling about and his pleading sailor face became a content sailor face, a grin changing its structure as Doc finally finished off the beer with a dramatic gulping, throwing the empty bottle into his deep white coat pocket, his eyes shiny as he spread his wide hands wide, the lines of his palms beckoning Fred to lean into the treatment by asking, ‘Tell me about you Fred’, and Fred did.

“I’m Fred. A statue. I stood in Victoria Square on a triangle pedestal for twenty years. The visitors of the square liked me and the two statues I stood with liked me. I liked them too. All of sudden I caught rustitis and now I can’t be in the square or stand on my triangle because I was taken by you and the Establishment. I’m confused and scared about maybe becoming a bucket without eyes or a mouth or anything.”

“The lines on my palms didn’t ask you to tell me about your situation. I read your case file, and I know your situation. I want us to form a connection, Fred, my Freddy boy, I need you to tell me a secret. A secret something that reveals a certain something about yourself to me. A secret something that I can gasp and nod and feel as if I know you in a way nobody else does.”

Fred cleared his throat and thought until the beery bee in his bonnet told him what he already knew, that he’d had spent his life posing and had no secrets, not in his bonnet nor his bumper, and so, scared that would mean he couldn’t lean into the treatment and thus commence to be treated, closed his eyes like a rabbit afraid of rejection, whispering. “But I don’t think I have any secret somethings.”

Doc’s mouth became an upside-down rainbow with two pots of gold masquerading as dimples on each tip as he considered what he’d heard before he grabbed Fred’s hand, rubbing his thumb over the surface of his metal, pointing first at his chest and then at Fred’s with his other hand, pointing and pointing until Fred felt a little sailing ship sail by his heart and throw a rope around it before sailing into Doc and throwing that same rope around his, tying them together.

“Now that’s worthy of a connection. Do you feel that? That’s treatment baby. You told me something and to make this connection as strong a connection as a connection between a white coat and a statue who’ve just met can be, I will now disclose something to you. When I was young I�� sigh… I had a dream where I molested a shrew.”

Doc nodded after his confession, looking down in shame while Fred nodded in return to show he’d heard and accepted that secret and what’s more wished he could move his arms out of their restrictions enough to pat him on the side of his white goatee and gently show that he felt the connection, oh boy did he feel it, but before he could say something to show what he was wishing, Doc was standing up and looking at his watch.

“That’s enough treatment for today methinks. We have a connection that we will continue to build on in further treatments, believe you me.”

Doc pulled out a white pill of his own and, putting it on a tongue which lapped out as trustingly as a trussed up taco terrier, forced Fred into a sleep in which he didn’t dream but merely stared at an oil painting depicting the horror he’d no doubt feel when turning bucket until he awoke again in a hall absolutely bustling with statues in states of shock and excitement about the four buckets that had appeared while he’d been gone, all lining the back wall, the horse who Igoress had been playing so badly to one of them, gone and replaced with a bucket made from shiny wood and dull metal bolts.

“Finally awake?” The little girl asked, not yet a bucket herself but much rustier than she’d been before Fred had slept, her childish features marred by the creeping and crawling patches, her oversized finger suddenly normal sized as she turned as fully as her restrictions allowed, her rust addled components letting out Shakespearian shrieks as she did… haaaaaaarkkkkkk… horatiooooooooooooo… “You missed it all. I was lucky. I woke up as it was happening. Four buckets, all at the same time. Look, the light of them burned the floor! The horse wasn’t even that rusty, but it didn’t matter, bang, bucket he was. He wasn’t even awake yet.”

Fred shook his head in a daze and a similar shrieking as what came from the little girl came from the folds and sheets of him… Viennaaaaaaa…. and when he looked down to see how that could be so, in shock and horror, he saw, with shock and horror, that his own rust had gotten worse to a degree less than that of the little girl now he’d woken up but more than she’d been when he was first brought in, a swirling pattern of it decorating his chest and shoulders giving him the fear his life would never be beautiful or good that sipping expired milk will give you.

“Nobody thought you could go bucket asleep or as not very rusty as the horse was but now everybody’s thoughts have been changed by the fact that both of those things can and have happened,” the little girl suddenly gave a leap from her back, coiling her spine so that she came a tiny bit into the air with a smile. “But try not to show you’re scared. There’s a new educated rumour going around that showing fear makes you go bucket faster. I’m also heard that the previous advice of staying immobile to help with treatment was just a joke by the white coats and that it’s actually more helpful to keep moving.”

The little girl’s features ticked in perpetual movement as if some great beast was waking inside of her and pushing at certain nerves within her casing and it was then that Fred noticed that it wasn’t just her, that whereas when he’d last been awake the hall had been accompanied by the Royal Stillness Symphony Orchestra, it was, now he was awake again, accompanied in fact by the Royal Movement Symphony Orchestra, all the other statues leaping and jerking within the bounds of their confines like machine parts come loose from their machines, smiles spitting in the face of fear tattooed on their faces so they resembled convicts queuing up to be shot but not giving their shooters the satisfaction of shooting people not smiling in a spitting manner. Fred began to move too, with more force than everyone else, jerking his limbs around and letting out a scream that shut most of the other statues in the immediate area up and removed their smiles, a scream that had an under and overtone of fear to it, words mingled in with its gargling,

‘HOOOOOOWHOOOOOOFuckfuckfuckfuck, I’m afraid and I’m not going to hide it because I am afraid and you keep changing your minds about how to fix things and I want to speak to Doc because I’m his patient and we have a connection and I want him to hold me and tell me it’s okay to be scared.’

When his scream finally fell off the edge of the cliff it had been precariously balancing on, the other statues in the hall began their fearless in the face of fear smiles again, making them even bigger than before so they could make like a gaggle of magpies ignoring a dodo in distress, thinking in their hearts that he would be next to go bucket while they would all get better, and then, from wherever in the Establishment the white coats congregated, Doc appeared, sliding through the circular maze of beds, white coat billowing in a capeian manner, to place a hand on Fred’s brow gently.

“You are showing you’re afraid, stop it. Have you not heard the new advice now we’ve had enough of our joke? Showing your fear is detrimental to your treatment.”

“I told him. I told him,” the little girl said. “I tried to help. Can I get a new white coat because I tried to help? Please. I don’t want any more macaroni.”

Fred and Doc ignored the little girl who was doing the worm in bed as she spoke, their eyes on each other as Fred’s tongue waggled, “But I am scared. Very scared. Scared about this, scared about that. Scared I’ll go bucket when I really don’t want to, scared because I’m even rustier now than when you started treating me.”

Doc put two fingers upon his chin in an Apostolic manner before using his remaining six fingers to undo Fred’s restraints and wave him up and out of bed with a ‘come with me’, chirp, taking his hand and pulling him away from the back wall of the hall and through and towards the right side wall of the hall, on which, almost hidden, sat a small brown door with the number three perched like a cleaved in two number eight on it. Doc pushed the door open roughly and they stepped through into another hall, larger than the one they’d left and more appropriately shaped to the cubic nature of the building from the outside, one divided into patchwork sections by towels and rags and curtains with a thin mazey strip of a path running between them for you to find their way through. They walked down this path for a while going sideways and upways and crossways, Fred marvelling at the sheer lack of noise permeating the air, as if all sound was being smothered by a jealous pillow, until Doc stopped them at a floral curtained section, his name embroidered on it in emerald green thread, and they entered, Doc pushing Fred down on a wheely chair next to a chest of drawers and quickly drawing the curtain back across the hole they’d made, the silence which had followed them in there becoming somehow even more so, so it was as if they stood in a vacuum cleaner that had accidentally hoovered up the vacuum of space.

“This is my office,” Doc said, sitting down himself while synonymously drawing up the sleeve of his white coat to reveal that he had a pale arm under it, a pale arm of normal length but one that’s paleness was disfigured by patches of greenish rustitis. “And as you can see I, and I’ll tell you now all of the other white coats as well, have what all you statues have. None of us has gone bucket yet, but the time is getting closer. None of our treatments have worked so far and I, we, need one of them to work, for all our sakes.”

Fred’s mouth, so used to falling open and letting out a string of fearful nonsense, was already halfway to being open but was stopped on its rusty hinges by the palm of Doc striking it with the sound of a triangle being clanged somewhere in the back of a complicated piece of music.

“We have a connection. You showing your fear makes me want to show my fear and I don’t want to show my fear because deep down I believe what we white coats have made up. Besides, neither of us should be afraid at all because I have a plan that has never been tried before and so is almost certainly bound to work.”

“What is it?” Fred kept his tone nice and middle ground though his innards were a battlefield of giblets stampeding to escape a disintegrating arena.

“I’m going to put a white coat on you and let you treat some statues.”

“Why would that work?”

“Because it doesn’t seem as if it should. Why should trees grow when wood seems so dead? Who knows. This has never been done before, a statue white coat, who would have thought, and so I think if you treat a few statues, eventually either they or you will begin the process of de-rusting and BOOM, a cure.”

At that Doc threw off the rest of his white coat and then top to reveal that underneath them he was nearly all rustitis with a hole where his heart should have been so that if Fred had wanted to he could have peeked through and seen the face of God, and then he threw that white coat at Fred caught it with his head before standing and slipping it on, becoming a white coat in all the ways putting on a white coat can make you, it muffling the screeches of his movements as Doc himself pulled on a t-shirt and sat down where Fred had been sitting, putting his feet up in the air with the air of a handsome feline about to be milked.

“Don’t dally, go, go,” he said when Fred paused.

“But where shall I go? Who shall I treat?”

“I guess I can hold off Llewyn and his macaroni for now so go to the little girl. Treat her.”

“But how shall I treat her?”

Doc sighed like a trunkless elephant.

“What are you good at? What can you do?”

“I can stand really still.”

“It has to be something more than that. You can’t just put on a white coat and stand as still as a statue.”

“But I’ve never done anything other than be a statue.”

“Well, we need something.”

Doc got up and began rummaging through the wooden chest of drawers that by golly seemed to be there simply to be rummaged around in before, with a “Hoooooooo”, he withdrew a large thermal mug sealed with a black lid and threw it to Fred whose hands sprung to grasp its round warmth instinctively, caressing it as a bovinophile would an udder.

“Take a sip of that with your gob.”

Fred did as Doc said and took the lid off, releasing a finger of visible steam that suggestively fingered his nose holes and carried with it the stench of a burnt carrot, before sucking a sip and turning back to Doc while posing as he imagined a version of himself that had been born a white coat would do while treating, putting a hand on his hip and sullenly gazing into the middle distance, a pose that made Doc act as a stray dog at a buffet, veering up further on his hind legs and smacking his lips.

“That’s what I’m talking about, yoooooooooooo-mama, you look great. Very Geil, to bust out my almost perfect German. You drink very well and what’s more look good doing it. That my friend is coffee, and drinking it shall be your treatment. That mug won’t ever run out, believe me, so take it, go to the little girl, drink around her, maybe talk to her a little as well, but mainly drink.”

Fred took more sips of coffee, deep ones that felt like rivers as they flowed into him, and sighed, the burnt carrot stench having been replaced by the stench of perfectly cooked toffee and the taste, which upon first suck had been like tar- hot and thick- dancing devilishly on his tongue, having replaced itself with what he could only imagine was the taste of godly ambrosia and didn’t move until Doc began to jostle him towards the curtain door with his feet.

“Don’t dilly dally, go treat. You don’t need to wait until treatment time dammit. You can treat by your own rules. Be the renegade white coat, the maverick. We all need you to succeed quickly, and I definitely don’t want to see you fail slowly.”

Doc’s words shoved Fred out into the wilderness for him to walk in the direction he thought was right for him to get back to the hall he’d been in before, zigzagging like a hindered bolt of lightning through the maze of curtains, towels, and rags, drinking his coffee as he did and feeling more and more like dancing in a moonlight he wished was spotlighting him until finally stumbling upon the back of the brown door with the dismembered eight on it and opening it, puff puffing on his mug’s hotness like a choo-choo train has he stood white coated before the ailing statues, forgetting with his feeling of power that underneath that white coat he was still also an ailing statue. Fred followed the curvature of the hall like a blind mouse, sniffing at the toffee-scented finger of steam and trusting it to point him in the right direction until he came again upon his own empty bed and the little girl who he was surprised hadn’t rusted any more in his absence, the bed where the horse and then the bucket that had once been the horse having been filled by a cat-sized plastic statue of a slug hunting toad desperately stretching its tongue a metre out.

The armchair that Doc had materialised by Fred’s bed had since been placed by some unknown helper at the little girl’s bedside and Fred swept himself onto it with a dramatic flurry, coughing to gain the still gyrating and jiving little girl’s attention, stroking the lapels of his white coat as he did, expecting the little girl’s little mouth to fall open at the sight of him, a statue as a white coat, but instead, that little girl’s little mouth simply grinned as if she’d merely stumbled upon a balloon filled with grinning gas.

“A new white coat, oh yes a new treatment! Thank God, I couldn’t have swallowed any more macaroni, let alone cheese.”

“Are you not surprised it’s me giving you that new treatment?” Fred asked, slightly put out, leaving his thermal mug hanging from between his teeth like an armless Inuit.

“You? I don’t know you. I suppose I knew you for a bit when you were a statue but I don’t know any white coats so even if you are the same statue I knew for a bit underneath that white coat, I certainly don’t know you now so no, I’m not surprised but am curious as to what you’ll treat me with? I really hope it isn’t more macaroni food. Don’t tell me it’s more macaroni food.”

Fred’s put outness disappeared at the sight of the little girl’s eyes looking so earnestly and questioning at him, a man of power and decision making, so, raising his thermal mug dramatically with his pinkie sticking out like some sort of vestigial tail and wiggling his ass to get comfy, drank deep from his well of coffee, almost drowning himself before coming back up for air, blowing his finger of steam into the little girl’s eyes where it coiled and licked like a flame at the rust creeping around the sides of them.

“I drink this coffee and you listen as I most likely, almost certainly, definitely, talk. The end result, the treatment works and either you or I are cured.”

The little girl, obedient as a fable, waited as Fred sucked back some more joe, waited as time commenced to pass, the seconds doing what seconds do, speeding down the autobahn into nothing as Fred waited for some words he could use to treat the little girl with to arrive at his tongue until finally the little girl, who was patient and obedient only until she got tired of being those things, proceeded to incite the words to appear herself.

“Tell me a story. A good one.”

Fred looked into the depths of his coffee and swirled the shadow substance around as he tried not to panic, taking back the finger of steam from the little girl, breathing it in, deeper and deeper so that its entire length became inserted into the depths of his brain, its tip there not licking or lapping like fire but prodding and pushing at all the sleeping masses and parts that resided there in beds with quilts up to their chins, legs and feet skinny and disused but sturdy enough to carry their weight as they were awoken by the incessant prods and pushes and forced to roll over and out of those beds with grumbling grumbles, pulling at red tipped levers that sparked and flashed.

“There was a girl once who desired nothing more from the world than to be able to eat porridge and sit on a boat on the water,” Fred’s voice was a mistreated otter standing before a warm hug as it started in its attempt to tell a story, a good one. “She had many oats, lots of milk, and a very nice boat made from shiny wood with a blue sail sticking from its mast, but unfortunately there wasn’t a drop of water around for that boat to sit on as the ground where she lived was a hungry beast. A dry thing filled with cracks and slices like the dome of a bald head made from sand.”

Fred’s voice was interrupted by his hands raising his mug back to his lips to take back more than the finger, cramming in fact the whole body into his brain, finding room somehow, smacking his tongue at the taste and clicking his fingers, feeling gargantuan in both mind and spirit.

“One day, sad beyond belief at not being able to eat her porridge while sitting on a boat which was, in turn, sitting on water, the girl began crying thick salty tears that dribbled from her eyes and fell like drops of rain from the tippy tip of her nose. These tears plink plonked to the hungry ground and, knowing their origins despair, surprisingly, raised a knife before they could be swallowed, threatening the shocked ground with castration until the shocked ground lost its appetite and cowered into a foetal position, allowing the tears to stay until their edges touched other edges and became more than single tears...”

The little girl in her bed watched Fred talk and every now and then inhaled deeply with a flaring nose that acted as a net swinging around a lakeside trying to catch a hint of the scented steam that had once floated from the top of his mug and tickled her but was then firmly ingrained with the rest of its body within the maze of his brain, each swing being followed by a shower of rust flakes falling from her marred features, what had been her oversized finger but was then little more than a stub waving in the air with the air of a frog conductor conducting a symphony of bassoons as if it, as a sort of finger itself, could call the steam back out.

“… soon they formed a lake the colour of an aristocrat’s embarrassment that drowned the ground and raised the little girl’s boat in the air. Unfortunately, the girl, who had jumped onto her boat as soon as the lake started forming, had only two hands available and could only grab a few barrels of oats and a single jug of milk to bring on board the boat before the rest of her stock was washed away, but she didn’t mind too much to see them go. In fact, she was happy enough to be sitting in a boat on some water to stop crying once a large enough lake had formed. To stop crying and start smiling as she prepared a small bowl of porridge and ate it for the first time while bob bob bobbing on the lake.”

Fred waited for the little girl to speak, his hands, in the manner of a giant holding a lock of hair taken from a non-giant lover they’d physically loved and subsequently crushed, curled around his mug, nervous until the little girl clapped her hands together and wriggled and jiggled for the first time not from her desire to be constantly moving but because of excitement.

“I liked that. I liked that a lot. I like this treatment and when I had it, I liked the smell of that coffee. Could I try some of its taste?”

“Coffee taste is for white coat’s only and even if it isn’t and I’m wrong, it’s still a no because though Doc told me this mug is endless, he could be wrong, and it would make me very sad if it was finished by anyone other than me.”

“But what if the taste could cure me quicker. You’d be the best white coat around then and even if it did run out, get more.”

The little girl’s lips pursed, stretching towards the edge of Fred’s mug in a manner crocodilian, but Fred only nodded thoughtfully in the way all nodders who aren’t listening nod, sitting back, his white coat brushing his ankles as he took another bigggg long gulp of coffee, the taste of it having acquired subtle hints and clues of hazelnut, dark chocolate, and iron the more he sampled, and he flicked through these hints and clues, enjoying each one individually and collectively while stroking a large patch of rust along his collar bone, quite enjoying the lumpy bumpiness of that too until his stroking came upon a small patch of rust within the larger patch that felt less lumpy bumpy and more just lumpy, causing him to use his eyes and see that the small patch of rust also looked less lumpy bumpy and, what’s more, less rusty than the larger patch around it.

“Break time for treatment, that’s what I say,” he stammered before running back to the office of Doc, finding it upon throwing back the curtain much changed; Doc, still there, but lying in the crack of a luxurious heart-shaped bed completely naked apart from the parts of his body, such as from the waist down and where once there had been pectorals, that while Fred had been spouting a story to the little girl had succumbed to rustiness and gone away.

“You see what has become of me?” Doc raised his head when he heard Fred come pantingly in, also raising what would have been a thumb if hadn’t just been a fist. “All in the space of five minutes. One second I was relaxing, drinking a beer, polishing my arm, trying to form a connection with myself, the next, reality’s palm, my face, SMACK, I fell, my legs piles of rust, my middle melting away. This is a cruel disease.”

“But look,” Fred sensually exposed the small patch of treated rust housed tumourly within the larger patch of untreated rust on his collar bone. “I’m getting better.”

Doc attempted to jump to feet that no longer existed and so simply fell back down onto the bed with the grace of a disco dancing dodecahedron, what had once been a jolly well deep belly button becoming less than that and joining the dusty rust pile of himself lying in the middle of the hole that had been his middle, but still the light in his eyes jumping to attention as he shook his hands together as if they belonged not to him but to two eminent businessmen who’d been waiting a long time to meet and whose first impressions were more than good.

“I’m the greatest of all the white coats. Look at that rust, running away from its death which my imagination imagined with such force it’s becoming reality. Was it just drinking the coffee around the patient that did it? Was it more? I need information.”

“I drank the coffee around her, but I also told a story I made up. I’d never done that before, make a story up, but apparently, I’m good at it. I’m a storyteller.”

“Undoubtedly. Indubitably. Christ on a cracker at Christmas this is exciting. What about the patient? Did her rustitis show any improvement? Did you give her any coffee?”

Fred clutched his mug tighter, hesitating before clearing his throat with a shake of the head, swirling the hem of his white coat around his knees like a blackhole hating ballet dancer doing their act in front of a ballet hating blackhole.

“I gave the little girl some coffee, of course. Are you suggesting I didn’t? Of course you’re not because she did have some, but when she indicated that she didn’t enjoy the taste as much as she enjoyed my story I stopped giving her any just in case it was a waste. Which it would have been, because no there was no improvement to her rustitis.”

“So, the treatment only works for those administering it. Mmmm, a reversal of the typical white coat/ patient relationship. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm, how interesting and good,” Doc smiled at Fred before holding out a hand, its one remaining finger doing the mariachi. “Well, pass me my white coat back then, lickety-split. I’ve gotta get to work!”

“What do you mean?” Fred instinctively took a step back. “I’m getting better. If I take the white coat off, I’ll stop getting better.”

“You won’t, you won’t. Well, you will, but only until me and the rest of the actual white coats are cured. Then we’ll take to the beds and let the rest of you have way. That’s an actual white coat promise. Now come on, have off with it.”

“What if I go bucket before you’re finished being cured? What if all the statues do? Look how quickly your rust has spread.”

“Exactly, look how quickly I could go bucket if we don’t start my treatment immediately! Now I don’t want to invoke our connection, not to mention my natural superiority over you, a statue, but I have to insist you pass me my things right now.”

Fred took a long swig from the mug, knowing as he did that his connection to Doc had been seized like a jewel by Blackbeard by the black stuff in there, the finger and body of steam, which had slunk back out of his brain as soon as his making up of stories was over, beckoning him to drink some more and then never stop drinking, to stay in the liquid forever, and so, shaking his head at Doc once he’d finished slurping, Fred stamped his foot on the floor.

“Our connection has been rerouted and I won’t do what you insist. I’ll keep wearing this white coat, drinking this coffee, and spinning my yarns until I’m completely cured and not just on my way there, and you’ll keep lying there and getting worse until that happens.”

Fred’s shout was a grain of rice announcing its passion for frying, the sheer loudness causing Doc to cower in his bed with his neck sinking into his chest, his crumbling hands held up as to defend themselves against a Fred who hadn’t planned to strike him, his crumbling hands which had a meekness that prompted Fred to strike him despite his lack of plan, giving him a little flick on the nose that turned its rust black and blue. Doc began to howl once he’d been flicked, the jagged end of his waist that had once worn legs kicking up and down as he mixed vowels together indiscriminately, “OOOOOOUUUUUUIIIIIIAAAAAEEAIOUEAIIIII!”, before Fred stopped his mixing as abruptly as an ant in headlights by flouncing off through the curtain to continue his treatment, waving his elbows like maracas until he reached the little girl who was pleased to see his mug again, her lips immediately pursing.

“Well, it’s been several minutes. Break times can’t last forever, and I figured I should see how you were looking. I see now you’re looking exactly the same except for several patches that have gotten significantly worse. On with the treatment then!”

“I really think, and it’s not just because it smells so good it would make me salivate if I could salivate, that if you shared the coffee my treatment would go much faster and with a bang and a wallop and a tick, I’d be as cured as ham and then you could be as cured as that too.”

Fred stiffened like a statue and put the little girl’s pursing in the bin by physically pushing her lips back towards the rest of her features, his breath becoming the sound of wind in a tunnel and funnelling out to strike the little girl’s face, the same shade and scent as the finger of steam arising from his mug as he asked.

“Are you a white coat?”

“No.”

“Have you ever even worn a white coat?”

“No.”

“Exactly. You’re a white coatless statue so do as white coatless statues are supposed to and leave the treatment ideas to me and the Establishment. In fact, if you can’t just leave your thoughts where you find them, discard them in a bin. The coffee is mine. Ask for it again and you’ll receive no treatment from me or anyone else and bucket you shall go. Stand of the under?”

The little girl sat sullenly back and she and Fred stared at each other, a battle of wills armed with batons having a baton-type tussle, until, finally, she was tussled into a submission that equalled the back of her head resting on her bed’s pillow and her ears opening wide enough to swallow the voice of Fred, who clenched one white corner of his white coat in hand as he again began to story and sip, the rusty parts of him becoming slightly less rusty at the end of each one he spoke, the rusty parts of her becoming slightly more so throughout. He told her the one about red having a fight with blue who was having a fight with yellow so it was that they were all fighting until they realised the fine line between love and hate and stopped to form a throuple and collectively give birth to brown, he told her about the man who stuck himself in a hole filled with quicksand and refused to leave until he was given the perfect bite of croissant but eventually sank to the bottom all alone and biteless, he told her about a featherless bird who was mocked for being featherless and unable to fly until it evolved and invented a flying machine that helped it fly better than any of those with feathers, he told her about a photograph of a desert that wasn’t fixed in space and time and how its image would shift and move depending on the time of day and of the little boy who found the photograph and realised he could dive into the image and so did dive only to find he was and had been a desert snake all along, he told her about a bowler hat made from wood by a carpenter who’d always wanted to be a hat maker instead of what he was and how that wooden bowler hat was rejected by the men and women who wear hats not made from wood but because of that rejection went on to experience adventures no other hat-shaped object in the history of anything could claim to have experienced such as becoming a pirate and marrying a slug, he told her about a chocolate bar the size of a skyscraper never unwrapped and destined to never be so though it was made of the most delightful tasting chocolate the world had ever seen and so simply basked in the sun until it grew so hot it melted and flooded the city it sat in.

The little girl never got to hear the end of the chocolate bar story as that same little girl, all of a sudden, went bucket with a tremendous bang much louder and tremendouser than the bang Boulton had bequeathed when he’d done the same, a shard of bright yellow light piercing Fred’s eyes in the instant before she fully became a bucket but had already ceased to be a statue, the bucket of her when it appeared having the appearance of any old classic plain stainless steel bucket if that stainless steel was whiteish rock, its surface trembling against the buffed surface of Fred’s hand, which he briefly laid on its side in commiseration, as if it still held the writhing spirit of the statue it’d been, before pushing himself while still story telling in the direction of a chicken the size of a desk rock rocking back and forth in a bed too small for it that would have been rusted from beak to cloaca if patches of unrusted granite resembling miniscule versions of the polka spots of a polka man hadn’t still dotted its sides.

“… and the city was forever coated, chocolate coated. The end. Good story, shame you only heard the end. I’m Fred, a white coat, previously just a statue with rustitis and without a white coat, I’ll be treating you…”

“Baaaarqqqkk?” came from the chicken, who was one of the rare statues made so well they could sound only like the thing they’d been made to resemble, as Fred went straight into the story of a man who, being in love with his own daughter, locked himself up in a high tower without windows or doors to protect her before ultimately being rescued by a foolish hero who thought he’d had been locked up by a fiend and needed rescuing and who, upon being rescued, thought he’d been saved by God’s grace and had permission to take his daughter as a wife and did just that to the misfortune of their severely impaired offspring, the coffee bouncing around Fred’s mind like a ball designed to bounce causing him to speak faster and with more excitement, his foot tap tapping in time with his words, each one giving out the ringing of a bell muted by touch. The chicken went bucket at the very end of the incest story as if consciously taking a way out, wings a-flapping as it boomed away, but Fred barely noticed- so intoxicated was he by the mug and the substance within- his veins a marching band marching and banding in a rising drone, his tongue a piece of Velcro catching those sticky treatment words flying from his sparking mind as his body zip zipped from the chicken’s bedside to a section of four bedsides that he spoke to as a whole, as if their rusted forms formed one giant bedside, speaking until the crackling speakers lining the hall walls crackled to announce that it was that time again, that time equalling treatment! and all the other white coats began flooding in, some commencing to remove the buckets Fred had left in his wake.

“Excuse me? You, statue, why are you in a white coat?” Four white coats chorused in unison, the hair on their heads bristling with just as much union, every strand of it on their skulls standing up and increasing in thickness so that they could have easily and collectively brushed down a dragon if there’d been a dragon handy and a person big enough to wield them, as they stood to the side of the bedsides that Fred was treating and that they were used to treating themselves, their voices aggressive but not enough to stir the big ol’ cup of coffee that was Fred who thought, ‘I know your secrettttt,’ when they interrupted him and stood up, his movements fluid, his rust barely surface level, to grip and rip their white coats from their bodies.

Gasp, shock, and horror were things done and felt by all the statues who could see the rust eating away at the white coats and curiosity followed by a gasp, a shock, and a horror were done and felt by the statues who couldn’t see this exposed event but could and did hear tell of it as like a domino falling, screams followed by a roiling as statues strained against their restrictions filled the air. The white coats Fred had exposed screamed too, their noises the same as foxes caught in play, their legs slightly crossed and bent, covering their rust with hands and arms despite their rust being uncoverable no matter how large the palms or expansive the fat while the rest of the white coats, unexposed but being angrily confronted by shouting straining statues- like blocks of mouldy cheese that know they aren’t appetising and that they won’t be eaten and that if they aren’t eaten will simply mould even further- thought, ‘fuck you,’ and took off their white coats to make themselves even more unappetising, exposing their states of decay to the masses. Once they were all exposed, all the white coats then all fled the Establishment, each fleeing footstep causing great puffs of rust to rise from their afflicted bodies and float in the air, the exact colour of a variety of extinct and poisonous caterpillar, before being sucked towards the inhaling wailing mouths of the restrained statues lying beneath them while Fred, whose eyes had reflected the fleeing scene, turned back to the bedsides he’d been speaking to and carried on with it in the same garbled excited manner that reflected the fact that his coffee was sweet and bitter and made his liver a jazz drummer beating a cymbal at 4/4 time.

“Now we’ve got them out of the way, now we’ve got the space to ourselves, as it should be and as it is, I’ll carry on, I’ll tell you my stories, I’ll make them up because I’m a deity writing the history of an elephant named Grady. Or maybe I don’t have to make anything up for it to be a story? Maybe this is the story and we should fuck Grady? A stream of story sent straight from my consciousness to yours, beamed in like an image to a television. Tell me can you see this in your heads? Can you see me sitting and speaking to you as closely as if I was actually sitting and speaking to you this close? Or am I crackly and distant like a pirate radio station or your grandmother who never thought you smelt good enough to hug on Christmas? Drat and blast it, I have to tell you, I know I shouldn’t, you’ll be upset I’m not allowing you the opportunity to take this opportunity now there are all these vacant white coats lying around, but I’m too busy to give even some of you this opportunity. I’m a white coat drinking coffee and telling tales busily but not too busily to have to tell you that I’m in fact being cured while you’re all slowly going bucket and that it’s all thanks to my drinking coffee and telling tales in this coat. Don’t be upset or angry, that is if you can even hear me over this din, this absolute racket of-”

All four of the bedsides interrupted Fred by going BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, the echo of those noises being followed by an even more alarming BANGGGGGGGGGGGGAAAAAAAABOOOOOOM! as loud as anything the world had heard since the first big bangaboom spat it into existence as every statue from the hall’s entrance to rear went bucket with the force of a large bomb going off in the style only large bombs going off can go off in, violently and with the power to make Fred, a bronze God with a firm palm over the opening of his thermal mug, go flipflopping through the heavens as the entire Establishment came down around the field of buckets and uprooted beds that had appeared, the building crumbling into nothing as Fred landed on his back one hundred metres away, getting up quickly to take a calm, measured sip from the pool of coffee he’d collected in the well of his hand.

“Well that’s something,” he muttered, staring at the rubble before raising his arms and shoulders in a full-bodied shrug that opened his white coat and revealed the rust that had once snaked up his chest had finally snaked away into nothing, the blast having blown it all away so Fred was as shiny and new as a shiny and new penny not yet put in a pocket or spent at a shop or tossed in the air and accidentally dropped down a drain. “My, my that’s something indeed.”

Fred took off his white coat and laid it gently on the ground to inspect and stroke his once again unblemished surface and think of the freakshow contortions Hazel and Vicky’s faces would achieve when they saw him lackadaisically stroll, white coat clad and rust free, back into Victoria Square to mount his pedestal and reinvent all that a statue could be; no longer would he pose in naked stillness, NO! he would keep his coat, change his pose often, without routine or rhythm, and keep making up stories to regale visitors with, a prop thermal mug of delicious coffee held clenched in hand, the only constant in his ever shifting posture. He began to walk back in the direction of the city on roads that had been close enough to the rubble that had been the Establishment when it went bangaboom to have become black and cracked like the toothless gums of a grandma coal, roads that sounded like dry leaves underfoot and remained like that until Fred had walked on them enough to allow the hungry horizon to swallow what he’d left behind. He drank at the same speed he walked- fast, erratic, and urgent- time moving as fast as that as well, speeding away from him, taillights winking, so that it was soon dark and he was soon on the outskirts of the city, staring at the lit lampposts lighting up the Aston expressway like the strip of an unloved and abandoned airport. There were no cars on the road and his feet were cow lovers shaking and banging their cowbells to make them go a-clanging and call their loved ones into pasture on a cold Sunday morning as they came down on the tarmac, his mouth a ravenous limpet slurping and suckling on an open wound as it drew coffee into him, coffee that made his thoughts flicker with the quickness of a deluge mob … Hazel… Vicky… coffeeeeeeeeeeee… dancing?.... Doc is bucketdeaddeaddeadbucket, dead as a doornail… how many doornails are in a pudding pie? Too many!... each one frozen and then thawed as if introduced to the centre of a dying star as they rapidly arrived and left, his mind being the centre of that dying star, pulsing, pulverising, pitter-pattering as he reached the end of the expressway and the great square pedestal of the great floozy, lounging jade-like in her jacuzzi in a spontaneously seductive manner, appeared in the distant centre of the bright city and into Fred’s sight.

His hurried footsteps hurried, turning the sound of cowbell clangs into the childhood memory of a hammer coming into contact with a sheet of aluminium and his leechy slurps into the gasping inhale of a pirate realising they have nothing left to live for… home… red slippers… clip clop… I’m a horse hoarsely heading homeward… hospice for can I ever stay still again?... how can I dance and run on a pedestal?... I’m a better man with a better plan... drink… sip… yeahhhh… his sight affixed so intensely on the beacon of the floozy’s great square that it was all he could see as he burst onto the square with the confidence of a gigolo knowing a large phallic legend will have preceded them and worked up a clammer, panting as his burst finished and no clammer was met, standing still finally to listen out for voices that upon not hearing he finally looked for amongst the metal, wood, and stone buckets standing upright on pedestals dotting a floor of smaller buckets made of veiny skin stretched thin that lay on sides or upside down and twitched as if attempting to escape their inherent bucketness, or dance in celebration of it.

#short story #story #fiction #absurdism #literary magazine #surreal #original story #short stories #fitzcarraldo editions #weirdcore #weird art #bizarre #funny #humour #statue

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