CEREAL AFTER SEX

The Long Dawn

Photo by Sebastian Arie Voortman on Pexels.com.

A long morning yawns its mallow yellow yawn out there on the grass where the trees and the heart live, out there where the mad heat melts the orgy moon and capsizing starships. It was a day where I felt my guts reeling in agony and worry. I had been at the hip girl’s room and holding her in the sheets while she fell asleep to the baa baa of the sheep dream king.

And I rise up to make the world uncomfortable, I rise up to make the sane seem insane. I make candles and wax them, I bathe babies and attach them to mothers, I rain God a Zippo, strike fire to the fear of the streets, the piccadilly rhombus all nonsense… Like gravy in a gravity-free orbital freefall.

A heartbeat knocks at the door, a witch rises up through the floor, mad Cigarette Sally on her haunches bellowing Bible songs, fellow longs, golden gongs, monks pray to bluebirds in the clouds, aloud, all around. Peace and tranquility for the turtles, the myrtle creeps, someone pens a letter to a lemon. A lemon has its rind broken.

He looks at her lips in the golden break of afternoon day and he thinks of all the words she forms and the ideas she has and all the good heartfelt notions and the crazy thoughts that make her so special.

A tight piece of comatose ass rested in the closet of his mind. She was in dark green work pants and a black top—short-sleeved and revealing the pale softness of her arms—and her wavy cornsilk hair was wet and dangling like restlessness.

And here I am, a scattering of thoughts, a pyramid of jingles and jangles all up in this red head of mine. I eat blueberry pie on medicine street and the medicine man says I have a million miles of corded, tangled thoughts and he just don’t have a cure, man, ‘cept listen to some ambient cyberpunk stream, sit by a real stream, dream, languid row oars on the river Middle Time, think of high grasses wavering in the breeze of another sun and soak, another moon and dive, another starlight far right gong show, the amber ass clown in cuffs. Justice for dessert lies vivid in the sun beneath the lid of a cake holder, key holder, bra holder… Get ready to bend over and get it like you’ve given it.

Milk and minstrels flow down Nickel Lane as the barbarians wait on the hill, flags of war unfurled, girls of prey uncurled, thoughts all in a bucket, sometimes just say ‘fuck it’ and the eyes bounce this way and that way… A cold creek makes a menacing sound at high noon. Meditation insists peace. The hounds of dawn wake the world, a skunk and her two little skunklings waltz up the road where we live. It’s a warm day full of sun and green. I can’t seem to lean into something that isn’t mass unfocus and restlessness.

I went to Athens and wandered through the ruins and listened to the stark larks whispering their songs in the olive trees. I shuffled through the bustling streets, the heavy air, the smell of strange food burned in my face. “I need experiences if I’m ever going to be any good,” I thought aloud to an ancient wall. I turned to look at the details in the sunbeam. I went to the plaza with the big black box and the turning tide of people. There was a man made of rope and he was dressed in black and red. He was waving his arms in the air and chanting some ancient chant of the sea. I looked up to a hotel window and saw a lamp burning. I thought of soft furniture and peace and liquid drink of the mesmerizing type. I thought of creating my own periodical and I would call it The Vespertine Lamp… Despite the sun.

I went into the hotel lobby and ordered up a room. I wanted something dim and cool and with a view of the plaza or the Saronic Gulf. I got checked in and made my way through the lingering tourist crowds and up to my room. I clicked on the jibber jabber box and went to take a shower. The soap smelled like salt and clean men from the sea. Afterward I wanted to tilt and so loaded a bowl with some high-grade Colorado herb and smoked. It’s so strange to be so high in such a foreign and grandiose place. Nothing is familiar, there is no reference point for anything. “Oh, yes this. Oh, yes that.” None twat for a measure. Hypodermic consciousness, laughing gas, permanent waves of perception now twisted like taffy. I went to look out the window and I felt as if I were on another planet, not some cumbersome rock in the Milky, but some far away place, far from the missteps of man, far from the land of aching hearts and unpolished souls, far from the meandering senseless megalithic maniacs and their war machines.

“We do not kill each other here,” someone in the room whispered, but no one was there.

I went to recline in the bed and read Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow until I grew sleepy. I got back up to look out the window and this time it was night. The stars roared overhead like liquid electric bastard lanterns. I bucked my hips and impregnated the galaxy. I bid farewell to the world and curled up beneath the satin sheets and slept long and coldly, the dreams coming like liquid flashes, the long dawn waiting on the precipice.

END

By
Aaron Echoes August
The Last Drop

Photo by Siobhan Dolezal on Pexels.com.

John Horatio Smith was an odd man. He sold top hats in the men’s boutique down the street. The street that streamed near Jack Kerouac’s grave. He sold top hats to idiots, to henchman, to rich and bolshy bastards eating wet cigars for an afternoon snack. John loved his work. No, he really hated it. Hated it so much that he had devised a plan for revenge on the cards he drew. He was going to place a bomb inside one of the top hats in the shoppe. A wee little bomb, but one that had incredible destructive force.

John Horatio Smith pet a stray cat lollygagging in the alley behind the shoppe as he aggravated his cancerous condition with yet another cigarette. He tilted his hand too much to the right and the tip of his cigarette went right into the cat’s eye. The thing screeched an unrelenting feline screech and John H. Smith jumped back. He felt terrible. The cat patted at its burning eye with his paw. It cried painfully. John H. Smith just laughed. He laughed with the power of a communal jeer at a Super Bowl game.

He couldn’t help it because he was so damn odd. The cat stopped pawing and looked up at John. The cat seem shocked and amazed by John H. Smith’s humorous candor. “When I die,” the cat began. “I want to be cremated. Just burn me up, I want to be ash.”

John H. Smith looked around before he spoke. “What?” The cat was frustrated. “Don’t you know if you stick a lit cigarette in a cat’s eye you are obligated to take me on as your number one pet.”
“But I don’t want a pet. I couldn’t feed you.”
“Hey,” the cat smiled, “I’ll just have some cereal.”

John picked the cat up and carried it back inside the shoppe. He set the cat down on the counter and it crawled into a tipped-over top hat and fell asleep. “Hey!” John H. Smith blurted out to a huge audience of numb shoppers and co-workers, “Look! It’s a Cat in the Top Hat!”
An old lady bent over the counter and peered into the hat. “By golly! He’s right!” she exclaimed. “Come have a look at this then,” she said to her friend resting in a rocking chair by a window. “No …” the friend waved her hand in disinterest, “Don’t want to.”
“Oh come on then! It really is a cat in this here top hat!” The excited woman poked her face into the cavernous top hat and suddenly jumped back and screamed. “The bloody thing nearly took me eye out!” she bellowed as she frantically covered her socket with a now red hand. She stumbled back screaming and fell to the floor.
John H. Smith jumped over the counter with a warm, wet towel and hurriedly placed it upon her wound.
“I’m going to call an ambuli!” he hollered, “A big bolshy one with Herculean lights of red and fire in the headlights.” John Horatio Smith picked up the phone and dangerously dialed for help.

As John H. Smith walked home at 6 clutching a warm bag of bread, he stared at the sidewalk and thought of the poor old women all injured like that with only one eye. He tried to choke down the visions of her being loaded into the ambulance and the whole time she was bellowing like mad and her clothes were covered in the red red flow of her injury.
John Smith tried to shake it out of his head as he turned the key to his flat and went inside. He threw the bag of bread on the couch and quickly tugged at his tie to tear it off him. “This noose will choke the life out of me!” he screamed at the walls as he continued to strip down to his underwear. He turned off all the lights, switched the stereo on full blast to Hotel Hobbies and divided himself pole to pole all over the black dance floor.

It was 2 a.m. when the dancing stopped. John H. Smith drew a deep breath and ate cottage cheese within the glow of the refrigerator light. The sweat poured down his body; dripped into the creamed, white spoon. Then, there was a knock at the door. John Smith’s pale heart began to thump in his chest. He turned his head to look at the clock on the kitchen wall. “It’s past 2 a.m. … Who the hell could that be?”

John set the cottage cheese down and tiptoed toward the door. The knock came again, only this time, it was more frantic. “Who is it?” John H. Smith yelled through the wooden door.
“It’s Sherbert.”
“Who?”
“Sherbert!”
“Who the hell is Sherbert and what brings you around my abode this time of night. What business do you have here, eh?”
“I’m looking for Carina.”
“Carina? Who’s Carina? I don’t know any bloody Carinas. Now bug off before I call the police.”
“All right then. Excuse the intrusion sir. I must have the wrong house then, eh? Sorry to have disturbed you mister. I’ll be on my way now.”
John H. Smith put his ear to the door and listened to the footsteps shuffle away. He sighed deeply and leaned the whole of his weight against the door. Then, the phone rang. “What the hell is this?!”
John H. Smith picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“_____________________________”
“Who the bloody hell is this?!”
There was a click, then a dial tone.
John H. Smith slammed the phone down.

When John Horatio Smith awoke the next morning, there was something furry with fury curled up on his stomach. Toast was burning in a distant dream. John H. Smith realized he was caught in the whirlwind of life.

After a shower and shave, John Smith walked to work. He wondered if he had killed the thing well enough. He stopped suddenly and stood stone still looking at the ground. He stayed that way for eight days and no one paid him a dime of attention.

When John Horatio Smith returned to reality it was snowing. He shook off the cold flakes and continued walking linear north, to the shoppe of top hats where he was immediately terminated for unexcused absences. “But mister, I was frozen in time, right down the street. It’s a bloody good and honest excuse sir.”
The shopkeeper waved him off into the cold and John H. Smith stood there, in front of the shoppe window, glaring at the warm comfort of a job he had come to despise but kept him fed and sheltered. He spat on the glass and walked home with his hands tucked deeply in his pockets and his head tilted toward the frozen ball of white in the sky he called the sun.

“Piss off!” John H. Smith screamed through the wall at his neighbor who was wailing on the harmonica like a bastion of mad devils feeding on endless time. He picked up his favorite vase, green glass with lots of sparkles, and he hurled it against the wall. The vase shattered explosively, and John H. Smith pushed his head forward to kiss the shards of glass whizzing by his face. It was all slow-motion madness with a pinch of solidified holy grace.

When he calmed down and clicked the light on which illuminated the oval mirror in his mahogany, steamy bathroom, he stared deep into the rivers of red that were flowing down his face, frantically searching for the Gulf of Mexico. He curled his fingers gruesomely at either side of his face and screamed louder than he had ever screamed; looking at the triangular, rhombusical, trapezoidal kaleidoscope of tiny green mirrors stuck in his face like glossy spaceships that just crash landed and steamed in the epidermis of John Horatio Smith.

A daddy long legs scuttled across his forehead as he lay naked and breathing heavily upon his bed. He had a white cloth draped across his face. Cold, wet cloth. He slapped at the spider and felt it momentarily brush against his fingers before it was catapulted into the great void that surrounded them. Satisfied that he was clean of all multi-legged creatures, John H. Smith got to the business of sleeping.

John Horatio Smith resented the noose around his neck. It was a tie that bound too tightly. It was the ignorance of bliss. The hammock that never swayed. The pendulum frozen in the body of a dead grandfather. John H. Smith’s eyes opened widely, and he stared at the ceiling for a long time. A whisper of new-day light sprinkled through the thin, torn curtains and splashed upon his already warm belly. He tried to wipe the glow away, but it did not move, simply wavered a bit and then went back to its
stronghold on his body.

There was an explosion, outside somewhere, and John H. Smith leapt up with a ragin’ heart and smoke bunnies in his eyes. He tore the curtains aside and peered out, straining to see where the blast came from … And then he noticed the cloud of smoke filtering up through the clouds. The building across the street was a spire of blackened rubble and mist; the screams were wafting their way up to his head, strong screams of fear amidst the rabble of darting folks ducking for cover.

If I was the man on the moon, I would fly to Mars just to know your love, thought John Horatio Smith, as he watched the mass ascension of firemen and police and Doctor of Law. They cradled the text in the basket that was their arms. The steam and hiss of death curled away from the object of destruction and made its way up to the pearly eyes of John H. Smith … He did not cry, for he could cry no longer. He threw on a Sting CD and began wandering around his home like a lost sheep. He was baking bread and thinking of time. How much time had slipped through his fingers. He destroyed his heart and soul daily just to feel nothing. John H. Smith was close to complete breakdown, but no one cared, and John H. Smith knew it; he was no longer afraid of death, for Sting knew the way to eternity.

His bread was still wet in the oven; the smell was beginning to be birthed about in his place—his flat, his condo, his home in the cemetery called STREET. And John H. Smith asked for advice from his soul: will I ever be loved again? Will the volleyball break my head, could she be any closer? Those shorts my dear, they are beautiful on you.
Magic.
Do you ever wonder if you are magic, beautiful, desolate, hurting, afraid or full of joy. What are you? What are you, beautiful woman? Love me beautiful woman… Just love me before I vanish. Vanish to the sea of all my dreams… Every scene of paradise with you as the main character in the play illuminating my heart.

John H. Smith rode his bike to the other side of the wicked town. The gray day was polished just right. The leaves were silver pallets of wind as they whipped past him through the slipstream of his vision. The air grew cooler as he came to the desolate end of it all; a great blockade steaming and weaving through the wonder of it all. Train tracks that never end, sailing ships that never dock, spaceships that never land… It was all there on the very edge of his life, his strife, as the angel in the clouds kissed away the simmering pain of all his bee stings.

He missed the glowing passion of her eyes, the love he saw, the glistening tears of all her caring. And as he stood and looked over the whispering, windy edge, he longed so deeply to be near her, to feel her, to smell the scent of her in his restless dreams… He wanted to love her again, only her and always her and his heart throbbed from the ache of it all, for her shadow was but just that: a shadow; a spiked memory constantly telephoning the empty room in his head, the vacant stare in his beating heart, the incessant lump in his throat when he thought of her fingers, her hair, her lips, her passion in the dark.

John H. Smith was lunching in the Dead-End Café… The windows were large and full of warm sun and cold grease and views of the edge of the world, the drop off point. John H. Smith sipped on oily, black coffee and read a newspaper, but all the pages were blank, and John H. Smith filled in every box with pictures of her—pictures of her in a brown wedding gown clutching a bouquet of green roses and smiling as if she were now truly happy without him.

John H. Smith never stopped to wonder why he was here. He sank as he looked around at the shiny hall that was the Dead-End Cafe. A breeze from the ocean whirled in through a waltzing screen door. The fan blades on the ceiling turned so slowly, and the light was lemon… Bright and sour. John H. Smith couldn’t swallow all his regrets any longer and he bowed his head upon the table and began to cry it all out. A river steaming with every bead of sorrow in his aching soul. And still the screen door waltzed, the hall was empty, and the ocean stretched out for endless miles.

John H. Smith had no more promises to make. His soul was reckless, his mind was a corner in the white ceiling—compressed experiences that made him bloated and fearful and wishing to escape. He felt so out of place as the pace of time dragged its feet through the mud in the sky, the shiny wax on the floor, the floodlights illuminating his circle of space, all the satellites spun around him, zapped him with illusions and delusions of what his life meant. The lines were all cracked and fuzzy, incoherent and John Horatio Smith wished for another dream, another goal, another life.

When he went to pay his bill, the waitress smiled and pushed the money back into his cold hands and she told him: the last drop is always free.

By
Aaron Echoes August
The Boy With The Spanish Bayonet

Her cactus bed smelled like butter nectar. She swears that lying down on the thorns helps her back, yet all the red marks there on her skin, looks like she was nearly eaten alive by fire ants.

Fire ants. She remembers the hot summer day when she was maybe 12 and she was playing in a field in Colorado with the boy who lived next door. He was a year or two older and she liked him, so she didn’t mind playing in a hot, thorny field in Colorado.

The fire ants build great volcano looking mounds and they were streaming in and out of the top of them like an army. The boy thought it would be fine and fun to destroy their mounds. He gripped big stones and hurled them at the ants. The sand and dirt splattered like a bomb hit. The ants grew angry, and their movements sped up as if someone pressed a button… And then the bites came, all over her legs, his legs. The pain made her cry, and she was embarrassed, and she ran home.

Her mother was upset that she had gotten bit by the ants while playing with the cute boy next door. She made her stay inside and so she sat near the window and watched him play football with her brothers in the long yard between their houses. When she knew he saw her there, she smiled and made kissy faces at him.

Then her mother came up behind her with a thin stick cut from a lilac bush and in a threatening way she tapped the stick against her motherly palm, and she said, “I don’t want you around that boy. He has problems and will be nothing but trouble for you.”

The girl looked up at her mother. “What problems? He doesn’t have problems. He’s just a boy.”

“He’s not just a boy,” the mother sternly answered. “He’s a dweller in the darkness.”

And perhaps he was, for just the other day he had been out in his front yard wrestling with one of the neighbor boys who lived around the corner and up the hill that led to the foothills. It was supposed to just be a fun thing, but the troubled boy took it too personally and started punching the other in the ribs as hard as he could. When the meeker boy was breathless and writhing on the ground, the troubled boy cut a green spear from a Spanish bayonet plant growing at the edge of the yard and proceeded to stab him in the stomach with the sharp point.

The boy started crying out in pain and that’s when the troubled boy’s mother came bounding out of the house yelling at him to stop. She yanked him aside and berated him in front of the other kids gathered there in the yard. She shook him as she screamed at him, “What are you doing!? You’re hurting him! Stop it! Stop it you crazy child!”

He pulled away from her and grinned. He couldn’t help it. “We were just playing,” he said.

“Stabbing is not playing,” the mother corrected him. “Get in the house!”

As he walked away, he turned and saw that his mother had knelt near the boy he stabbed with the Spanish bayonet, and she was caring for him. She was caring for him, this weak boy, this new boy, this stranger boy. She was caring for him more than she had ever cared for him. Maybe that’s why he was crazy and reckless and dangerous and unstable.

The girl’s name was Linda, and she was Middle Eastern in a way and so her parents were strict. The boy’s name was Coal, but not the normal Cole, Coal like the earthly material. They decided to meet one day in the Netherlands, not the country but a place beyond the new neighborhood that was pressed up against the foothills of the green Rocky Mountains, a place undeveloped and open. There was a strip of forest that was dissected by a cold mountain creek, and there was a trail that ran along the creek and the trail meandered far and deep until it ran up against the very base of the mountains.

It was in these Netherlands that the outsiders would escape to. It was in these Netherlands that Linda and Coal decided to go to together. They walked side-by-side. She reached out to hold his hand. He held it loosely. She stopped and turned to look at him. “Do you want to kiss me?”

He moved quickly and did it. The he turned his attention back to the exploration. “That’s the reason for all life in the world, human life, I mean.”

“What is?” she asked.

“That kiss… A kiss like that is the start of everything for humanity and beyond. Just look around at the world and everyone you see walking or talking or falling down. It’s all because of a kiss.” He picked up a rock and tossed it. They heard it smack against the trunk of a tall pine.

Her heart smiled at the sound of his words. She thought he was everything. “But it takes more than a kiss,” she said.

He stopped and looked at her. “But not today. I want to remember that kiss just the way it happened. Nothing more and nothing less. So, leave it at that.”

“Okay,” she smiled. “I’ll leave it at that.”

“Until I say different… But let’s make a fire. I like to look into the flames. I like to look through the little Russian black doors.”

“What do you see on the other side of those doors?”

“Most of the time I see nothing but more flames. I think that it means that life means nothing to me.”

“How can life mean nothing to you?” she asked as she followed his lead and picked up twigs and set them in a pile. Then she helped him gather stones to make a fire ring.

Coal looked down at the gathering of stones once it was a complete circle. He assembled the sticks inside, laid out the kindling below, set fire to it with a yellow cigarette lighter. The flames attacked the dry wood. There was crackling and smoke and the smell of a campfire.

They sat down on the ground around it. Coal seemed mesmerized. Linda watched him. “What do you see now?”

“I see a future fraught with upheaval… You may want to do yourself a favor and step away from me.”

“My mom says you’re a ‘dweller in the darkness.’”

“She’s not wrong.” Coal turned away from looking at the flames and fixed his eyes on her. “That’s why my name is Coal,” and he spelled it out loud, “C-O-A-L. But that was my doing, not my mother or father’s. I mean, the name and the darkness… Is it true that your family are terrorists?”

“No!”

“Because everyone at school says your family is from Iran and that you are all terrorists. Your brother, at least, seems like a terrorist to me.”

“He’s not a terrorist. None of us are. People are so stupid. We lived over there because of my dad’s job. That’s where he met my mom. So yeah, I’m part Iranian but I’m not a terrorist. Small minds…”

“Do you want to get high and go listen to Rush in my bedroom?”

“I’ve never gotten high. What’s it like?”

“It’s weird. Hard to explain. But everything changes. Perception changes, sound changes, time changes. I want to see what it’s like to kiss you when I’m high.”

She was intrigued by that idea. “Are you sure I won’t go crazy?”

“I can’t promise you that.”

“Are we ever going to be more than this?”

He ignored her question as he worked to douse the fire with dirt.

“Are we?”

Years later, Linda sat on the edge of her cactus bed and blinked her eyes and took a breath. “What am I doing with my life? What are any of us doing with our lives?”

END

By
Aaron Echoes August
The Cloud City of Nashville

Photo by Mont Photographs on Pexels.com.

And there I was, raspy as a ghost lost in time, so drunk on the night that I tried to put a pair of glasses on over another pair I was already wearing.

Earlier I had been in the bookstore in the cloud city of Nashville. I saw the metal and glass buildings—squares, oblongs, towers, spires, spheres, all golden blue and silver and the clouds hung heavy in the heat because it was in the June of the year and all was warm and sticky in the world and there was this girl in a pink shirt and sea-blue capris and she was wandering around with her glasses and her cocked head reading titles on the shelves at an angle and she had a fantastic ass and I tried to bump into her but she was rebuff in her intellectually stimulating breasts.

I was too coy and couldn’t do it as she melted into the aisles of made up things by made up beings and all around was the roar of human traffic as they found joy in the pickings there, like air it was for me, to breathe, in that sea of paper and ink and pictures and descriptions and all those heads like I say, cocked at an angle to decipher the spines, and there that girl again making eyes and saying she wanted to be my wife for one thousand years and then some and I couldn’t help but splay forth my guts and heart and say YES! YES! I’ll do it because I love you madly like no other love there ever was and she took my hand, and she took my books, and she took me to the front, and she paid for everything I wanted and then boom we were off through the glass doors and out into the steam heat of the cloud city of Nashville.

And we went forth along the wide lanes and the wild rush of the engines and the people sailing like maniacs because everyone, dear everyone, was rushing mad like wild old time western folk trying to get somewhere that wasn’t even all that important in the end and boom we go, and boom we row, this maiden of love and cornflower eyes, the perfect lips, the perfect kiss, and we went back to the town on the outer edge of this cloud city of Nashville and it was still hot and the engines still roared and we went into a store , a small grocery store and I wandered around like a weirdo looking at meat like someone may look at art and I picked up a spiraled ham and I threw it across the store and it hit the floor somewhere and I just hear someone hollerin’ about loitering and all the world comes rushing in to accuse my abuse and say I am nothing but King Kong wrong and I slam that golden gong like a monk in search of just some god damn peace and quiet! Paradise…

I was just released from the cell of Sith meditation in the Red City called Hell Street, the place of magic cauldrons and bellows and mattress motion from the fornication fry house, spy house, back to it we go…

Earlier still we had been driving on the mad freeways, life and death all churning and burning in a soup of rapidity, insanity, the leopard engines roared like mad, and all signs pointed to my nerves, my hyped-up hypomania, a clockwork chicken fried steak plops onto a plate, and this is life, life like the movies, life like liquid, all the goings on behind steamy windows… The window cleaners dangled above the cloud city of Nashville, their canopy tilted, their boards wilted, and then it was just restless space and reflections, blue glass reflections of life in all directions.

By
Aaron Echoes August
Ravioli River

Photo by Bethany Hicks on Pexels.com.

He had a wandering image that followed him, something about ravioli in a lonely café somewhere on the other side of the world. Light rays harken down thin alleyways, the sun an orange ball in the sky, the clouds clotted with heat, melting like a sorcerer’s tongue on acid, leopards and leprechauns leaping over the moon, shirt tails caught on the quarter point that hangs down, a broken piece of cheese, a nightlight. “Right, right,” Alex says.

Fright night. The nerves are ticking like wax paper snuffing terminal electrical anxiety lamps. The rain patters against the window, a crazy man in gloves comes for a visit at midnight. The rotten guts of a warlock wreak havoc on a Long Beach bungalow. Crystal quartz hearts conduct energy like a psychotic maestro.

Daybreak den wake. He slithers out of a chair like a pale snake, a voided king at the precipice of gigantic sin. He puts two quarters into the coffee machine and waits for the dark brown dribble to come out of the hole and flow into a red cup. He preps his mind for complicated mathematics, genital schematics. He sits down at his worktable, clicks on a lamp, readies his chisel and hammer, and goes to work carving a notorious-bound puppet.

Once fully formed, the man fills the puppet with fear and anxiety. He stuffs it in like seasoned ricotta into a pasta shell until overflowing. He zippers up his flesh, sets him on the ground and winds him up like a pure machine. He watches as the young and inexperienced toy soldier marches off to war, the battle with life, the battle with God. Explosions abound in his wake.

The man breathes a sigh relief as his new creation disappears beyond the horizon. Now, it is time to rest, to eat some ravioli on the banks of Ravioli River, to drink some wine, to dream of more fiendish things about love and life, to look out upon the street and simply watch the ripple of time pass by.

By
Aaron Echoes August