A fevered lip burns with a passion and pepper of the moment. After a thought, it bites itself with teeth coated like the candy-stripers who ply their infectious good cheer and reticent good wishes before the imprisoned souls in torments unknown. A pinch — that’s all — and then again the swirling carts go flying off to the next room. One penitent who sits wearily waiting for the extreme pronouncement lies mournfully gazing at the ceiling tiles, tracing the lineage of despair in the coolant soaked panels above his fixed gaze. This stain, he muses, looks like the missing coastline of Guyana, some millennia after the birth of Christ. That one, can that be the peninsula of freedom where General Custer caught up with the Yukon Jack that left behind the masses of privacy and emptiness? Ah, well, another moment has passed, and there will be another, and another. Always dripping slowly in molasses from cookery not bought or paid for but stirring slowly before the time eventual memory chooses to despise the words of flight.
Once he cried, “No hope! No hope exists before the awesome tableau of an unthinking, spittle-spitting, grub-chewing god of madness and infinite loneliness!” But now even that rejection seems limited in scope and the ticking of clock hands against the flowers falling over against the dying bicycles outside sounds an even more ominous note than the prattling voices inside his head. He starts to gesture towards his head, the thumb-and-forefinger pistol to receive the coda of suicide, but his arm is still in a cast, his other unlearned in butt-wiping, gun-shooting, change-picking up from the floor. Staring at the useless appendage, and then the other, one in its strait jacket of fear and the other dopily smiling in its ignorance, a snarl of anger soothes his irritated spirit.
The bent straw is praying. Leaves outside decide not to fall. Later there will be another procession of comets and miracles, his eyes fixed upon the ceiling interposed between. Somewhere a horse is shrugging off a feeling, a trickle of the butterfly wings of longing. The horse dreams of the last great stampede, across the sedge grass hills towards the sea. The powerful loins chew the dirt under his hooves, and at the precipice, he leaps and falls up, up, up into the sky.