The Vulture

Not even the strongest generic pharmaceutical gap-filling cement could have kept his torso from the armpits up from remaining detached after thirty-five hours in surgery; that lump of metal, the incidental shell, hurled at forty-five degrees away from where the party was really at, had a party of its own. Sparing him the usual indignity, Jim’s bowels emptied up through a gap near where his left lung, gripped plaintive and instantaneously by the shoulders and head, might otherwise have been, had fate had it differently. Fate’s a funny thing; were Dr Rudolph not in that particular village at that particular time, surgery would most likely never have been considered an option. Circumstance (secular fate), however, had it that Dr Rudolph was in the boudoir of some local yokel whose wife was in the throes of “stress-induced anal distension”, as diagnosed. Trepanning and Hippocratic semen were intrinsic to the cure (notes on that case are smudged at best and cogent at worst; besides, that’s a tangent, and reports such as this will be tainted with nothing of the sort).

Jim was in a horrendous state when the nearest Fraulein reached his sodden dying patch of ground; it couldn’t have come as much of a surprise to those present at any point in the affair had they been told that fragments of bone and other bodily shrapnel had been flung as far even as the battlefield. Nobody was in any position, however, to tell them anything of the sort, or otherwise.

Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing

“I do it by feel, really. I bumble around, it’s inconsistent. Inconsistency, things resonating chaotically, organically – free! That’s the only way; that’s the way I feel it.”

“Yeah, but if you don’t tie it right, the parachute’s just gonna fly away.”

The dogsbody flipped and told us all to buy gloves for him; he got a lot of gloves that Christmas. He flipped back and the turkey got a stuffing. Blood, guts, everything hung on the barbed wire like the sun dying. Crystals formed on the flesh and winter ate eyes. We all hung ribbons on the tree too. We hung the gloves from the ribbons. The parachute’s just gonna fly away.

Cisterns, Part 1

This piece will be posted in 2 parts.
Any comment/critique would be helpful, as this is destined for the man.

Scene 1

A long, thin, white bathroom with yellow net curtains which dim the already pale light coming through a tall narrow window. A bathtub runs lengthways along the room, the toilet is below the window on the right of the bath, there is a sink to the left beside the door. A young man and a young woman are present, he in the bath, smoking, she sitting on the toilet in a dressing gown, also smoking. The bath-tap is running. She has a expensive bottle of Vodka, he has a cheap bottle of Whiskey. They are both dead.

Alexander. Shit day.
Pause. The sink gurgles. He stares at it.
Alex. Here’s to that!

He drinks deeply, lays the cigarette carefully on the rim of the bath, holds his nose theatrically and submerges himself, splashing water around. Lilja walks to the far end of the bath, turns off the tap, and returns to sit on the toilet before he finally surfaces with a gasp, reaches for the tap, then stops and looks angry when he notices it is already turned off.

Al. Ahhhh…
Lilja. Why must I be such a… (she smokes)
A. (He lies back) Makes life worth living.
Lil. …a pessimist about everything.
Alexander. (mocking voice) Dearest, could you pass me the towel?

He laughs to himself, and reaches over the bathtub to finish the Whiskey, braces himself on the bath and pushes himself out, he gets his towel himself, you pour him another drink, he carries it to the sink. Lilja goes over to the bath, checks the temperature, then gets in.

Alex. (Squeezing blackheads) There’s this computer program
where you load in all your pictures, everyone does,
and it somehow compares them, analyses them,
works out which ones are of the same person, or
a building or whatever. It links them all together and
builds like, an average, what it looks like from all
those different perspectives. It didn’t matter if it was
a massive digital photo from yesterday, a scan of a
third-hand photocopied newspaper story or a
Renaissance sketch. In the example, they did the
Sagrada Familia, remember, I went there? And even
used movie footage. Then they stuck them all
together and it was weird, all these webs of lines
where, like where all the repeated memories of this
church had ¾ somehow the bones of it coalesced from repetition
¾ and, punctured reality. (a worldwise laugh, Lilja turns on
the hot tap.) I wonder what Gaudi would’ve thought’ve it…
Li. … no hot, again, they cover the whole bathroom in
hair and soap and rotting towels, use all the water, all
the fucking butter, ask me to proof-read, can‘t even
string a sentence together. (She thumps herself on the
thigh, you light a cigarette for her, she takes it without
making eye contact.)
A. Got hit by a bus, remember? doubt he could care less?
L. Couldn’t, you shits. Could-n’t care less. COULDN’T - CARE - LESS.

ALEX

But she was gone, and like a tidied table the room had relinquished all its charm --- it was too subservient. The was no other will, no human to crash knees, elbows and temples with in the dark. The baguette was dry, the consistency of breeze-bloc, and had broke his skin when he’d attempted to catch it. He was hyperventilating. Sucking down the last half of a warm can of flat diet coke he spluttered into calmness.

- - -

Later, downstairs, in the stairwell, the optician from downstairs was sitting on the stairs, holding an unopened packet of Players cigarettes.

Alex says nothing. "Hi," was the reply.

"Worried they might bite?" said Alex. Alex is a mess, he thinks he is dying of tuberculosis, though you’d tried to tell him it was all in his head. He didn’t sit down.

"Nah," replied the optician smiling pleasantly, "my girlfriend ‘s made this deal. ‘No sin un-shared.’ I named it. I want a cigarette, someone else opens the packet, want a drink, someone else pours it."

"Sounds nice," says Alex.

"She’s plucking out all my vices. Refining them. Wouldn’t have got engaged if I’d known this would happen. Your’s," he flicks his eyes to the ceiling, "your Zoe, she not got you off the fags?"

- - -

Alex walks away to the sound of crackling cellophane.

Beat (abridged)

This is a heart…
It’s got this beat… as you can see it consists of four main compartments and this beat… to the left of it we can find an executed sprawl of vessels arriving and departing about it.
It moves frequently, periodically and when it doesn’t we’ll be atoned. (Otherwise, we’ll presume that it’s still got that beat.)
It doesn’t look anything like those hearts you see in shops, the shape cakes are made into, the ones Saint Valentine coos over. They parade as hearts though, ‘coz that’s what they are: Symbols of cardiac muscle in cardiac sac. But more importantly, for the card industry, symbols of Love.
When this age old association began, between one organ and our most analysed emotion, is unclear though I suspect it was the Romans. I’m sure many will disagree, but an organ in both appearance and function is far from romantic and, kinda, bereft of passion- imagine a bloody, bloody heart with a filthy beat being tied with a bow and given to you. Perhaps with a kiss and an apology or left secretly on your doorstep or in some cases backing up an impromptu proposal.
Maybe, pre anatomy the heart really did harbour love and hate, it probably did look like the ones fluffy bears hold but that isn’t what made me ask the question.
I feel Love in my Guts, some skin, these achin’ bones and, now and then, the back of my head. But in the heart? Not that I know of. Even if it were all in the heart, the consumer version lacks the only bit of the heart that could keep ardour & fervour. It doesn’t have that beat.

The Fox

In strides that cast long shadows over trees and felt like dusk for a blink’s duration, Gog and Magog trod almost whispered, lakes and valleys easy footholds. Under a stride at that very instant stood a fox tearing flesh, fresh flesh from a rabbit passing, natural.

The day, though old when the shadow flashed, was light enough that the bee could find his way to rest at the end of a day in the pollen fields, hard work. Twilight rumoured through the woods, the fox was at his picnic, quiet, his breakfast of that rabbit that was passing, and he’d been skulking, clever.

The green was new, and fragile, bright for its newness, strong for its brightness. Caterpillars were making it older, busy and slow, living, and the holes they left, the craters in the leaves seen from the moon, were life. A thousand drops that afternoon from a shower dripped through the leaves and wedded their way through earth to the roots of trees. A spider swung easy from a twig, up there in the canopy, unbothered by budding leaves; the length of a grasshopper, the twig was a leisurely brown.

The fox was steady in eating, here chewing at the tougher meat, there gnawing at a bone, feeding as a beast is wont to feed. From setting out from den to spotting through the trees the rabbit passing, this steady eating, chewing, tearing was the reason for his walk that evening. As was intended, the fox was eating steady, and barely a splatter of blood hit mossy ground.

Sorrel moved little more than the silver birches, and the sky, that instant darkened but no more than in the fraction where the rain cloud first envelopes the sun before the light in eyes ignites, was no less vaulted than the cathedral roof when all eyes alight upon the altar. Unseen by the fox, keen-eyed though he is, a finger of Gog descended, picked up a leg-bone of the rabbit.

That moment of darkness, fleeting, unthought-of as it was, brought a shiver to the fox, a momentary shiver, and, though a bead of wetness in the fox’s eye was also fleeting, unthought-of, it was a vein of quartz in a crag next winter.

The rabbit’s bone, carried by strides down an every-coloured road to where the Court of King Jelly Roll will be met, is free of pain and will make it to the feast.

Exponential Nostril Death (Part Three)

Claire’s day had been a tedious one, littered with notions of how she might better have spent it. Truth be told, though, she would most likely be doing little more than she currently was, lying in her hospital bed, and she had come that day to the clinic not so much through any sense of urgency regarding her nose bleeds (though certainly she’d long intended to have something done about them), but rather because she was at a loss as to how to spend her day off, a luxury she was seldom afforded, and had thus grown unaccustomed to. Of course it’s the case, and has presumably always been the case, that one prefers to have control over the precise nature of one’s inactivity, and for this reason Claire was somewhat frustrated, for the first few hours at least. A change in her outlook was induced, in time, by Nurse Gertrude, at the behest of Dr Rudolph, by means of a mild sedative, as was common practice (by Dr Rudolph) in those days.

As a side note, while we’re here, and because no one will stop us, I shall tell you a little about the nature of Dr Rudolph’s relationship with the aforementioned Nurse Gertrude. This will be of particular significance to those with an interest in the dynamics of Dr Rudolph’s later relationships with assistants and apprentices; although his brand of influence, bordering on control, did not emerge fully formed, it is interesting to note the more primitive form of it at work, and it may shed some light on the often seemingly opaque reasons, in later years, for the compliance of assistants, usually safely below the genius threshold, in procedures that to the average human would almost certainly, for all their apparent cruelty and depravity, demand consecutive life sentences on general principle. Circumstances are seldom so clear cut, however, and very little of this is elucidated by the nature of Dr Rudolph’s relationship with Nurse Gertrude.

The sedative, though mild enough to permit worry, was strong enough that, try as she might, Claire could no longer string together indignant thoughts of the restrictions of hospitalisation sufficiently to distract her from her growing concern over the potential seriousness of a condition that she had hitherto found a nuisance at worst. Death rattles from a little beyond her curtain helped matters not at all. Claire’s scant consolation was that, for the duration of the afternoon, after her initial examination, she didn’t once bleed from her nose. That was something. The ceiling, though, was riddled with shadows; most consolation is mitigated by hospital conditions. Something in the lighting, or in the air quality, or the incidental sound, made Claire’s dirty-blonde hair feel like a plague of miscellaneous, unremittant snakes; a hospital fulfils only a fraction of its purpose if it does not inspire in its patients the very real sensation of illness, and its attendant dread, and by extension the hapless, exhausted belief that one is being treated by people who know what they’re doing and that, hopefully, through the sheer force of their benevolent professionalism, one will be cured.

Claire almost slept for it’s hard to say how long, but not very long, until, in what might otherwise have been a momentary lapse into full consciousness, Dr Rudolph eased open the curtain that had, for the course of her stay thus far, been, one might ill-advisedly choose to say, a veritable wall between Claire and the ugliness that might be borne by the near future. And it was ugly, what Dr Rudolph had to say;

“We can’t be sure until we perform a couple more tests,” he said, reassuringly, “But we suspect, quite strongly, that what you’re suffering from is Exponential Nostril Death.”

Claire was startled, “Wh… what does that mean?”

That was the extent of her initial articulation. Dr Rudolph was quick in response,

“It’s a… fairly rare syndrome. Essentially, if not treated properly, it results in the death of your nostrils. It’s an exponential process. Quite lethal, sometimes.”

Exponential Nostril Death (Part Two)

Dr Rudolph in those days, lest we forget, was young; not a child by any means, late twenties, early thirties, perhaps, it’s hard to say, but young enough to be considered precocious still, and as a consequence almost beyond reproach, in a sickly sort of way. His seemingly more than twice half its length string of ultimately correct corrections and contradictions of fellow clinicians, whose seniority should in theory have kept him cowed and incontinent, might have proved a source of envy were it not for the overriding, almost unwitting reverence induced in those positioned to envy by the cold near-nonchalance of Dr Rudolph’s response to often grudging, always sincere acknowledgement of his success. Dr Rudolph was very good at his job. He took the lunch break he was entitled by law to take.

He sat on a bench out towards the south-west corner of the hospital garden with a steak and kidney pie and a healthy dose of sauerkraut, and he partook of it heartily, a hint of a breeze assisting; variation in location for the eating of meals has always been important to Dr Rudolph (the previous day he had eaten by the lake in the park, some ten miles walk from the hospital), but nothing was so important as fresh air; he was a firm believer in the virtues of fresh air, but more pertinently, he felt them. As he finished the crust that more people than don’t leave till last, Dr Rudolph began to mull over the case at hand, that of Claire of the nose bleeds. He had with him a veritable tome concerned with every aspect of epistaxis, but more as a talisman for the process of thought than as an actual practical aid. He didn’t need it for that anyway, or rather he wouldn’t have had epistaxis been his principal focus. As it was, its primary function was inevitably to keep Dr Rudolph’s bag from flapping should the wind pick up. The wind didn’t pick up, and his short walk back to the hospital building was accompanied by an unseasonable flowering of the sun.

Business thickened significantly for the afternoon, and Dr Rudolph spent an uninterrupted four hours in his band of active meditation, healing the tedious sick. He was never oblivious however; he never succumbed to the lure of the motor function that is the dead-eyed application of the textbook and the manifestation of the boredom reflex. There were instances that afternoon of the common cold, of glandular fever, a broken finger, hepatitis A, hives and a semi-regular patient with intermittent urinary tract difficulties. She wasn’t pretty. Dr Rudolph kept his mind active on a number of levels, as was his wont, and it was just after six when the clinic closed its doors for the day. It was then time for freshening up, for taking a few deep breaths should they be necessary, which they needn’t be to be taken anyway. Dr Rudolph took none, but he did take a shower, and it was pushing seven when he began to make his leisurely way through the corridors, and up to see Claire. His mind was clear; he knew precisely his course of action. He didn’t have to wait for the lift, and was soon ascending.

Exponential Nostril Death (Part One)

Before his rise to notoriety in quasi-cosmetic fields, Dr Rudolph was a well-respected, if little-liked clinician in a provincial teaching hospital some fifteen miles outside Hamburg. His reputation, though local, was one of jealous professionalism and an insect-like attention to detail, but also, and perhaps as significantly (though only ever spoken of in hushed tones), was one of not-entirely-infrequent, shockingly cavalier and, in the words of one former colleague, “scarcely human” plunges beyond the accepted cutting edge, as it were, of medical pioneering endeavour. A case in point, an early indicator, if you will, of his extrapolation of the aforesaid traits in later years, would be the case of a young woman who came one early April day to the clinic, complaining of intermittent but profuse nose bleeds.

It was a fairly docile morning, quiet enough that patients could sit at least three seats apart from each other in the waiting room. Dr Rudolph was perusing patient files, his customary leisure activity on such mornings, and glancing up at intervals, assessing the human contents of the waiting room. None held his attention until the patient in question – we’ll call her Claire – arrived at around 11:30, clutching a handkerchief to her face. She was already sitting down when Dr Rudolph looked up from his literature. Even then he had a tremendous enthusiasm for facial afflictions of most kinds, but what most drew him to Claire was the apparent purity of her skin, and to a degree the flesh of her thighs. He put away the patient files and made his way across the room.

Introductions were polite and formal, and Dr Rudolph led Claire fairly promptly to a consulting room. He performed his standard full gynaecological examination, and a colonoscopy for safety’s sake, all the while dictating detailed notes into his machine. The usual perfunctory measurements were taken, as well as blood samples for various indeterminate tests. In due course, he turned his attention to Claire’s nose, observing it from a number of angles, some requiring a degree of contortion on his part. A trickle of blood began very slowly to flow, gathering a little pace upon rounding the cusp of her upper lip. Dr Rudolph inserted a gloved little finger a short way into Claire’s left nostril, and licked the resultant smear, as if to determine the direction taken by a herd of bison. He made a short humming sound, and then informed Claire that, and he stressed that it was merely precautionary, she must, in his professional opinion, stay overnight for observation. She was somewhat surprised at this as, nose bleeds aside, she felt a picture of health. She assented, however, as one must always trust a doctor. He made the necessary arrangements and told Claire, with a reassuring smile not reflected in eyes, that he would look in on her some time in the late afternoon, around teatime, as they say in Hamburg.