Cat Alone -4-

April 26




The wife and I, we are both into stunts. She performs in public.
Her pyramids of eggs attract the crowds and the cameras – thousands of TV
stations from all over the world carry her incredible appearances. Millions
upon millions of eggs have been smashed on account of her several
record-setting, amply broadcast achievements. For her pyramids of eggs just
grow and grow, level by careful level, until the whole thing collapses. The trick
is to have on record the biggest pyramid still standing. She’s hated by all of
us, meek ovipositors, the snakes, the birds, the tortoises, the platypuses… We
wished she were already dead. To no avail, for she thrives, everyday more
popular.






Me, my specialty is humbler, easier, more clownish: I’m just Mr. Knocker, the
one who gets to knock over his own head, the one that smashes his noggin
once and again, just for laughs, of course. My head is always running into
walls, into rocks, into corners, into pavements – falling, colliding, tumbling,
collapsing higgledy-piggledy down the screes… Cracked like a nut, shattered
into tiny smithereens as the shell of an egg. My stunts are really doomed from
the word go. Here comes his head a-cracking, ha-ha. Splinters of my
fractured cranium penetrating my brains, I nonetheless am still able to come
up with new ways of bashing my shell anew: I’m falling from planes, from
skyscrapers, with faulty rollers into the hard rinks… I’m a window-washer
whose precarious nest tilts and, lo, the flagstones underneath have the pieces
of my skull seasoned with a side dish of peppered brains. I’m moderately
applauded. My act, alas, is not for everyone.









Crocked tentacle, numbed hand in the form of a dulled crook, trying to
fish for memories – dead little fishes camouflaged in the mud. Through my
ear into the poisoned marsh of my brains, the probing hook. That would be
living. Stopping to fish into each pond of dead water.






And then it snows. Cinders falling. Open your thickened hand that fished
nothing but tiny dead muddy fishes, half rotten. Here, those cinders melting on
the pachydermatous surface are your true experiences of just this jaunt into
the now.