It was cold and I took a hat for it.
Outside, frost wraiths lined the avenue like invisible waffles, perforated and terrible. A silence draped over the town like a carpet of shit. Somewhere, a car barked, softly, as if to say, Dear God.
The funeral was later on. Nobody wanted to go. It was that kind of funeral. I breathed a heavy sigh, and adjusted myself. Wind blew.
I stopped at the usual spot. It was dark inside and moist, real moist, with the promise of failure lingering in the air like poisoned milk. I ordered a Silent Wonder, which is scotch, tonic water and Legos. The Legos went down like puzzle tumors. I shuddered. Small talk. A smoke. I made eyes at the leggy yarn-mane down the counter, real small ones. The drink was slugged, the butt out. Cough. Money. The apparent future and the realization.
I staggered out into the dewy urban wild, shielded my brow and made a noise like a 78 on 33. I pushed away a wraith and hailed a dude mover. "Abe and 441st," I spat out. "Step." He did. The scenery passed. I lit up and blew out a cloud of triumph.
Templesmith was all wrong. It was the green wire with yellow stripe, not the blue wire with the red stripe. We'd argued cyanotic, shaking our parched fists like little fleshy bundles of parchment paper in the shape of human hands. I chuckled to myself, if only to stave off the acid-rain tears. There was plenty of time to get bloodshot and lumpy. The smell of fire and blood wafted in from the War District. I took another drag and ran a calloused finger through thinning, sad hairs. God damn him. God damn him.
My knuckles cracked, muscadine. Bing bang. Ring a ding. Fiddle faddle. Other things. The future yawned its desperate, wailing mouth wide like a blow-up doll, eager to disappoint. I stayed quiet in the back there and stifled a prescient wave of nausea. The dude mover pulled up to the church and stopped. I handed the man an eight-spot with room. We exchanged brief, but substantive eyebrow raises. I disembarked.
The church loomed high, high in the chuckling sky like a man possessed and also made of concrete. Lichen blossomed from my fingertips. A homeless person farted, with no teeth.
The church's insides were warped and convoluted like stolid brain maps. I folded my programme in half, then again in half, and a third time also in half. Taking a seat in the way back, I breathed out slowly, fingering my pocketwatch as the masses spoke their putrid reminiscences and cried cheaply, the weep of the unknowing, the pointless weep of the conscious attempting to pull apart the sublevels as if expecting to find treasure maps and heaving bosoms, car fresheners and mint juleps, all of it just a writhing mass of awful vapid vacuums and reality television, horses snorting in the dying fields, makeup running down the countenance like jet black diarrheal outbursts, hands placed about each other artlessly, the children, God damn him, God damn you, God damn ourselves and what then. What then, Templesmith. What Godless, artless, pointless futures you have wrought upon the living. A sea of white noise made of sobs and ghastly averted stares wet the place like a sodden diaper. I sucked in my gut and let out a soundless scream, a gaping chasm of a crevasse of a silent outpour of cinematic grief, a tear making its empty way across my cheek, and pounded my knee, then once more. I made my way up to the coffin and dropped in the folded programme, then derailed the narrative of a filmic yawn as I made my way out of the church.
It was still cold and I was glad I had taken a hat. The wraiths shifted in place, eyes cast down, erections tucked under the belt. We shared a thorough and gentle cleansing in the frozen sun. Things would never be the same again.
A cat moved, but only part way.
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