Published
Wednesday June 4, 2008
Literature by
Kurt
Remington
©
Kurt Remington 2008
|
Wednesday 04-Jun-2008 11:56
|
RETORT
MAGAZINE ISSN 1445-7164 |
Oh! The Screaming Hoard
1
It
goes like this.
The black room fills to the brim with warm air. And there
is mom, squeezed to the edge of the mattress with her slim
mouth slightly open and always anticipating, some infant
tantrum. Mom never got over the postmortem stall that having
a child engenders in a woman’s sleep patterns. She
was and is, perpetually awake.
Not a scream tonight though. Tonight you wake up and the
balmy room is bursting with crimson light that melts to
the sheets already warm and musky from Dad’s sweat.
She leaps from her back to her ass and you are already there
in her thin arms. Her mouth is moving and the red light
is all over her face. It is all you can see. Then Dad on
his feet from the bed to the window. Then we’re out
to the kitchen, the hall, the driveway.
2.
The source of the blaze as I came to find, had to do with
the man next door. A gnarly old asshole
-I’ve rarely heard him referred to as anything else-named
Ron. He was too slovenly to be brutish and too boring to
be any sort of personality. He did, however, poses his own
talents as even I at my age had become aware.
There are those with a true sympathy for aged things and
their past. And for them, the tears and slog that are carried
in the smell of old things-especially of the deviant sort
- give an unmistakable air of beauty.
Then there are the walking sleaze who eat and sleep and
play in pools of the world’s most stinking waste.
Never mind sentimentality. A true cache for them and a fire
hazard for the rest.
That Ron belonged to the latter is something I say without
the slightest apprehension. He was a tireless collector
of anything and everything worthless and depraved in humanity.
He stuffed it in all corners from the top of his three story
bungalow, through to the kitchen and into that moist green
basement…back up the stairs, and through to the long
back lot.
And oh what treasures! From the top there was war memorabilia
of all sorts, old grenades and helmets and swords next to
boxes of filthy comics, junk mail, and bottles of booze.
Damp old records, weapons both functional and not, video
tapes, radar detectors, radios, and surveillance devices
that could only have been found in the back of some radio
shack brochure.
Splashed throughout the stink was an array of pornography
which his son and daughter and I took in like the dirty
little sponges that we were, to say nothing of the daytime
sexual acts that he forced upon his little wife despite
any passerby with ears.
The house held the stench of a mouthful of rotting teeth.
A giant cavity in the belly of the West Side.
But the real wonderland was in the back lot. See it strewn
with dozens of battered cars, tire irons, engines, lawnmowers,
all wading through the Cleveland air for no thing in the
world save for children dancing over the lawnmower engines,
or making combat with broken bits of steal, and whipping
each other with old timing belts and rubber hoses. Just
rust and iron and rust and steel and big pools of oil oil
oil. We road our training wheels through rainbow pools of
it and raced to the tops of El Caminos and old semi cabs.
The whole lot withered and flaked and would certainly have
outlasted us all were it not for the Ron’s plan to
torch the bastard.
For him, there must have glimmered the hope that burning
up this trash heap could afford him enough in an insurance
settlement to fund years more of this bloated masturbation,
securing a dismal enough caricature for his children to
either detest or mimic and no betweens.
So he torched my wonderland. And sent, my mother, my father,
and myself into a panic.
3.
The method for justice need not be intentional or even immediately
apparent.
I wonder what old Ronald would have thought of my smooth
face in his daughter’s crouch as it had been so placed
by her very own hand only a couple years following the great
inferno.
What grace. Call it moral providence!?
Really though, I cannot claim the victory as I was too young
to know what that older girl was doing with my head. She,
telling me to get on my knees and hold out my mouth. She
was bigger, older.
But again, no victory. The faint taste of urine is all I
can really discern from the incident and that alone was
no match for what was left of Ron’s backyard, my playground.
Charred as is was, life went on and we played with the blackened
rust, toyed with each other’s genitals. The games
kept always from the parents who no doubt lead more grotesque
lives than we could have ever imagined….and not in
the least at the time.
