Nicholas to Jack: The Second Trial
Jack,
The winds over the ashen plane are a gift to my wet brow cold as they are no matter that they smell of a thousand unwashed cunts spread to make my pathetic acquaintance.
I sit among the holes I dug to find that certain bit of memory. It is found and with many more. Memories of my home.
In most worlds, I can buy the papers and look for notices of my Bradley’s crimes and other ticks of that nature - an estate robbed of its rose bushes and someone defacing that appalling car. The pieces of wall with Ev’s mad rantings scratched in.
Here are the mongoose holes where I’ve cobra’d my hands to find a used bottle of hair gel, the neon pictures of the label badly faded. If it weren’t joke enough to be finding rubbish where I’m meant to find my home, then it’s joke enough that come squirting obscenely from it’s cracked cap are 1,296 instances I’ve watched Adam apply it through his pubescence. Well, here and now, I’ve yanked up the last of the 329 naked Barbie dolls victim to Rosie’s little blue handled scissors, the bald retch with a smile still stuck on that face. All in a day’s.
About me is the flat plain of this crop, the expanse of which is empty enough of anyone who had planted the damn things. Nicholas, the wasp-eater, whispers it might’ve been I who dunnit.
The clean and bright and blank and white paper appears like a frozen mirage growing up out of the sky line and squirms all them wormies in my vision till it takes the shape of our house, the house on the swamp. It can’t be, no. Tho the chill of the door’s knob in my fist is a temptress indeed. Tho the smells of magnolia and fire draw me closer, clomping closed my treasure troves, this is not the place.
If I sleep and wake, I know the sun will be spitting down from a different direction, each pock in the dirt now erased again. I once rode a train just so. 1931, the Mumbles in Wales. Dreadful rumpy-bumpy but the sleep was genuine and my fright as well at the betrayal at coming-to in another world.
My heart is crumbling like the paperworld I do wish would do the same. I will not enter this abominable hallucination, teasing me as it is with the hope of running my blistered hands over my items in the black, the skins of my family, their voice calling out for me. Lying flat on the stump beside the porch stairs is my brother’s ax. It is sprayed with some muck the red color of deep earth but the thing is still and the stillness of a thing showing evidence of it’s once wild movements makes it’s stillness that of death. Of a disappearance of it’s soul. Left is the heavy tome of what had bound my lovely thing to its existence.
My congrats, love, on the stuffing me so full on the loss of my tribe and village. I should be rendered useless now, yeah? You may newly count me among the faithless, for to become unwandering, I must assume this new emptiness is and has always been my home.
Your Nicholas