Twilight of the Big Finish

Like Morris sketching Rossetti’s wombat in the garden, we have no clue as to what’s going on above our heads. The storms pull themselves together around increments of sand and the trumpets blaze even with no one at the mouthpiece. You realize there is a time for reverie and a time for making others pay by cashiers check. Even the lights on the stove fail to make the air around them seem more ethereal. More cataclysmic. Like Pompeii. Or maybe we just aren’t used to this being on our own. Drifting on the waves. Like Pip made insane. Someday we’ll get used to it. If not, there are always discount moving vans. Rakes to rent by the hour. By the day. It’s as if we will not settle for this one option, death, made to seem like ice cream in all its variety. Its ingredients and color. You’ve seen a hundred such examples. People thrown about by their vanity. By their Newfoundland dogs. Like old shoes someone left outside in the sand. We feel sorry for them. We moisten our lips at the corner. But the climax is always the same and always comes at ten-fifteen. It is accompanied by dancing girls. By those strong men who carry pythons around on their shoulders.


Charles Freeland | Mudlark No. 35
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