An old friend of mine, reunited with me via the wonders of the internet, recently had the marvelous idea of organizing an excuse to be artsy-fartsy. Each week there’s a prompt, which one can respond to in absolutely any way at all. I’ve chosen writing because I can handle that at the moment.

I blew off a paper to write this, and will have to try to get that done in the morning. That’s going to be tricky, because I don’t have an alarm, so I have to rely on waking up naturally. (I like this lifestyle.)

The deadline for Arts and Farts and Crafts is Tuesday, so I didn’t want to miss it. Really, I probably should have slept. This was actually difficult to write, which is embarrassing for me, the highly esteemed and accredited author that I am.

Here is the prompt for this week’s entry:

My attempts at reason and quiet diplomacy fell on deaf ears as they began to wrap themselves in toilet paper from head to foot and chant “We want women.” I retreated to the relative quiet of my room and read the writing of a monk who lived alone on a mountaintop for thirty-seven years in search of a deeper understanding of the world. His main conclusion, when he came down, was that you can see very far on top of a mountain unless it is cloudy. Imprisoned for his radical ideas, he died several years later in jail. The only writing from this time period that survived is the line: “There are no clouds in a prison.”

-From The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper:  My Life, My Tapes (as heard by Scott Frost)

And here is the story.

A joining

Otto Gottlieb is a rusty old lamppost of a man. A lit cigarette in the rain. The ash collects like fallen snow in the crevices of his worn leather jacket and the rain sullies it. He stands articulated on a square in a nonexistent European town, waiting for a bus already come and gone.

He doesn’t want to answer his door. Without peering out the window, he knows the jaguars are walking about on two feet again. In the den, a clay sculpture of a Sphinx is pushed off the mantel and dashes itself against the stone beneath. Its head breaks off, rather than just the nose. Yet again, the universe fails to be as poetic as it could, if it cared.

Otto sits before a coffee table, face to face with the bust of a woman he never met. Alabaster? Porphyry? It doesn’t ever matter. He fingers the chisel fondly before dismantling her. The nose is the first to go. As the rock crumbles, he realizes his mistake. He flips the couch over and kicks the wolf hiding beneath it.

Wolves feed on rocks.

The roof splits. Embers breathe deep the new air and the fractured Sphinx writhes.

With an air repugnant of the feigned solemnity of ceremony, Otto lays his hand upon the wall of the fireplace, and dismisses it. Absolved of its comforts, the roof collapses. Rafters festoon the stage like compound fractures. Insanity incarnate.

The fire is placated by the light rain and hates nothing. More knocking at the front door, which is stupid, because the house is no more. Otto doesn’t want to let his son in. But the door is opened—by Otto, presumably—and the bipedal jaguar enters.

So, apple in mouth, Otto clambers onto the coffee table and reclines. The door is still open.

But his son refuses him, and stoops instead to collect the various fragments of rock from the shattered sculptures. He gathers a bit of ash in his paw and rubs it into his chest. After an extended bout of eye contact, he leaves abruptly, and Otto realizes he is naked.

He dismounts the table less than gracefully, paws around in the rubble his life has become, and extricates a Journal of Archaeology. No mention of him in this issue. No mention of anyone. Just a shattered ribcage of a house, rafters skyward in a sickly embrace with the still soft memory of some deity that slunk off during the night, staining the cover. No one remembers.

To meld with the loss of memory, the fire grows stronger. A pillar of desperate dancing smoke looms totemically above everything Otto has ever dreamed up. He sits naked, obscured by flames, and wishes for a Martian invasion. He wishes for a boat and a waterfall, with plenty of jagged rocks amid the crashing water below.

Otto reaches beneath the coffee table and pets the wolf hiding there. The wolf is dead, its skin coarse and hateful from the fire.

The door is still open.

Otto wishes his son would come back and eat him.