The Third Day, Boulder (weight)
“You don’t really die in real life, if you die in your dreams. You know that, right?”
A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stone, a time to gather stones together
— The Byrds, Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season)
The Butcher Black, Ibbock the Master Boulder, postmocked from Chechnya to the skimpy wrists of Larvae, there will ne’er be a superhero for the aegis (toss a coin and choose your schildern) like him, hammocked in good fortune between two trunks of aspirational elm. A diamond pipe of glitter popping in and out of his dental grip as the leprechaun babies danced a whirl of autumnal vehemence.
‘Dad-blast-it, you infernal cretins, eager mice at my fungal feet, do you plan to ever steal the cheese and cease?!’ The breathy wind of the furor continues to flicker out his magic matchstick before he can touch it against the cold powder in his bowl.
In a cymbal crash of frustration, he snatches one of the homunculi scurrying underfoot by its chest, pinning both arms at its side. It worm-wriggles strenuously, ineffectually. He barks a history of alcohol and pastry in a hailstorm of discontented cruses at the frantic chittering well-dressed and kempt miniature figure in top hot, kicking tuxedo legs from the bottom of Ibbock’s fist.
‘I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it, shit-boy!’ Ibbock scrapes the magic flint across the squeak-squawking face of the tiny trapped mogul, and it ignites into a blazing meteoric carbon to offer the release of apple-scented tobacco leaf.
‘Now feck off!’ In one superfluid quicksilver motion, Ibbock releases his steely grip and lo drops the wee monopoly man to the ampitheater of his palm. Distracted and semi-rapturous, sucking in the warm earthy gristle jagged between clamping smoky pomaceous jaws of fruit, he brutally flicks the irate itsy elitist across the sunny lea with a crack-painted nail, where, in the wisdom of tuck and roll, he bowls over weedy blades of grass.
I extend an invitation to Iboock’s experiential state, as his lungs first luxuriously balloon billow with warm pear-scented vapor allowing legions of alveoli to martyr themselves furiously mining nicotine and diamorphine from blocks of tar to infect his bloodstream with a bloating of carbon dioxide carrying along the critical substances to his cerebral cortex, one heart pump at a time. His soul sucks into the aether above as he succumbs to an opiate shudder, as if his entire body was elongated into the infinite, his head crawling along beads of precipitation forming cumulonimbus figures of erotic egestion.
Ibbock struggles to speak aloud, as his mouth is distended the length of his body, and the effort inconcoctable from his slumping facial musculature. At best his essence becomes a brief grunt that he cannot recall uttering, but feels returning as an echo to his elephantine ear. The grunt ricochets around the grotesquery of his enlarged pinnae, wobbling over flesh ridges, distorted and disrespected, as if imagery were preferred to the cumbersome accordioning tension of air.
He thinks he wishes they were all damselflies about his bog-soggy corpse, lying mustached and naked in the starry bowl of the hammock.
It was hard enough to once lift a tree from the ground by its trunk with his bare hands, but this weight he possesses now has generated from within. He is the weight of the world which would rest flat against the Earth were it not for the criss-crossing of atomic wavelets, ushering a greeting in vast projection.
One eye bulges bloodshot and dilated through the prison bars of twine, wide open to the promise of gravity’s revenge expressed through a stalk of grass cracked and bent in two, its tip touching its tail.
_You, too, can only stand so tall as there isn’t wind, Master Boulder_
An unrecognizable male baritone relays this to Ibbock, who wonders for a moment if it is yours.
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