20 August c. 599 Green-Fairway Asparagus
Night and day, he says. Night and day. Come here and the light gone bright red there between stove and kitchen sink’s window’s frame, a miasmal bloodcell-red snow falling musically (drip, drip drip!) about the stage’s set’s background, outside-inside, redolent popcorn-and-M&Ms inbucket then as Nostrils looks over to Bowlcut and Shivery with rapt anticipation, as if to say, Can you believe this is happening right now? As if to say, This is just abso-lutely remarkable guys, isn’t it? Isn’t it? And but then Bowlcut’s sever nosebleed’s red flow starting to show under the brim of his papier-mâché hat, sailboat hat, inciting the inner fear Nostrils can tell is brewing hotly inside him; that fear related to his phobia of nosebleeds, especially heavy-flow ones, like the kind Bowlcut has on occasion. There is the static white slush of audio’s overexposed cardioid filter’s windstorm and visual spiral of light onstage as the curtains begin opening. I come to you on the day of my rebirth and as you something… which is… haven’t really thought ‘bout it past that opening part, really, sorry. ¶ Clear spotlit baby’s geegaw smile and blubbering oval eyes shining in the candescent redlight, there some toothy grin filling the Jackalman’s face as he too knows what is to become of such a delicious-looking organism. Lamron, where are you? Lamron, where are you? Cross-eye Stupor hands out The Eating Ceremony’s rough-grained advertorial pamphlets with a delicate smile under a slight-swaying signage denoting same at theater’s entrance. Take one, if you please. / Yes, thank you. / Jackaldude and baby, today at lunch. For lunch. ¶ Most everyone in the audience has an emaciated scowl on his or her face.[i] Remarkably form-fitting dress of mom all up in somatically wrapped gauze, all mummylike and gauzed-up, walking onstage to remove baby from high-chair to attend to it in another room, unknowingly redacting the subject from our audience’s purview and the Egyptian Jackalman’s LoS such that now it is the Egyptian Jackalman who has attained Sole Focus as the only subjectable entity onstage. Who has now evinced a clear dismay at the baby’s having gone—at his supper’s having gone: fanged frown of creasing jowls in response to which Stacey can be heard awwing from the theater’s rear. Baby all swaddled up waddly feet and all somewhere presumably safe offstage, inblankets. And do the blankets have to be blue? Why not pink? Why not copper-yellow-sage? Why not glue? Glue-white? Sad-looking Jackalman’s crawling through window from soft artificial green glade into kitchen’s tight eating area then where from opened refrigerator’s permafrosted sill he pulls a beer with its silver-aluminum-can-with-golden-lid shining jewel-like and his then sitting down inchair inkitchen and reclining. Chair’s antirecumbent ungiving stiffness getting pretty physically annoying, it is apparent. Red light’s growing so bright and red audience members with faces must shut their eyes. Audience members with eyes shut then only attending audibly, as the eyeless do. Something like a howl. Plangent snap of beer’s lid’s tab. The play which no audience member can view beyond laser-rays of red corpuscular blood clots dripping wetly from the ceiling. Some great red rose of eyelids’[ii] flushed void blooming out to neglect by expansion the audience-members’ understanding of what’s going on—any visual cues or what-have-you. Some audience members melt in their retractable seats, including Phil and Stacey and Bowlcut, Bcut’s blood-dripping deluge spilling from congealed pancake-flat-face’s nostrils, Nostrils notices, as the howl goes on and on until all there is left to hear or see is the vacuum of all sensory input: the last gold bullion: blackness.
[i] Nostrils’s horrified-scowl-iteration is more a mask of plain horror featuring pronounced zygomatic dribbling than “an emaciated scowl” per se. He keeps checking his watch and looking over his shoulder at the theater’s entrance. Tiny irksome rock in shoe’s sole. Must remove rock from sole. Must get it out. The lavatory is full of women powdering their faces. Some men wait patiently outside; most men, not-so-patiently. Baby’s expression beginning to mirror audience’s expression at the expression of the Egyptian Jackalman’s expression.a We have here a clear case of baby-becoming-freightened-due-to-baby’s-lack-of-full-faculties-over-the-current-dilemma,-which-only-he-notices,-inscene,-and-which-has-really-become-quite-bad,-the-dilemma.b We have baby’s waddling feet in blue footsies kicking furiously at stool’s ledge, oblate scowl calling out for Mama!, bib all covered in drool such that smiley sun onbib is submerged in water, which water is actually drool, which makes for particularly ironic principles. Most of the audience members from the office now looking around to other audience members, who are now eyeless. Who therefore cannot tell they are being looked at but yet still scowl massively all the same.
a Expressions express, it is true.
b Which dilemma has like multiple avenues of defracted freightened Lines of Sight (LOS/LsOS/LoS/Ls oS/Ls.S.): baby’s-to-Jackalman’s, vice-versa, audience’s-to-Jackalman/-baby, vice-versa, audience’s-to-audience’s, etc. Whatnot. Particularly cold gale from in from out of nowhere, seemingly. Red light growing redder still as baby’s geegaw smile becomes geegaw oblate scowl (and still redder, stilly-still), so much red you’d think the whole place on clot of blood spread…
[ii] Lids to eyes like lids to paper cups so leaky of colored light it is a wonder those with closed eyes cannot see anything.