He’s standing on a cliff, warped. Warped, but curious, unsteady and staring, he’s visible in the lake below but misshapen, an undulating distortion reflected in the lapping waters a hundred feet down. The clouds behind him give way to an angry sun and the heat punctures his stamina, buckling his knees and dropping him prone. Loose, dry dirt adheres to his sweaty nostrils as he breathes in, while pebbles and slightly larger, sharper stones dig into his chest. Crawling, he chases the shade laboriously, his own shadow offering up the illusion of respite, and drags himself to the cliff’s edge. Tines of wispy, dead vegetation and mottled, hopscotch rocks tumble into the lake as he pulls himself still closer, framing his sightline between two hearty handholds in the cliff’s crust. Furiously, the sun burdens the lake with the mountain’s craggy silhouette, obscuring the circular dilations of falling debris as well as his notions of meaningful reflection.
Fraught with a blistering melancholy, he reproaches himself for typing those words with a palm-heavy slap to his own forehead. He is determined to use the term elegiac to describe how he feels, entirely heedless of its inherent redundancy in the paragraph, and proceeds to wring his creativity dry with a range of ill-conceived analogies designed to inject poetic gravitas as a counterbalance to the comedic and slightly glib twists he enjoys whilst foraying into the self-reflexive quagmire of metawriting. Exhausted, and too pleased by half with the construction of his text, he allows himself a fleeting smirk as his eyes wander blithely across the broken spines of dead novels nestled in his bookshelf. Huddled, as though steeling themselves to an inevitable outburst of angst, the books stand united as silent evidence of his own misaimed cleverness and portend a dissatisfaction that soon gives vent to a grim exhalation of disgust. Like the exhaust of an idling car in a sealed garage, so too does this disgust permeate the room with the stink of invisible poison, and his fingers twitch in response.
His want of cloud-cover is enormous, and though the unyielding heat staples him helplessly to the rock, he manages to quarrel viciously with himself over his next course of action: should he shout at his reflection from atop the mountain, prevailing upon the quiet for a reply with his stringy, dishevelled voice? Or should he permit dutiful serenity to embolden him, to roll him on his back and expose his tender underbelly to the ferocious warmth of the sun?
Inwardly, he curses his word-processor for the lack of breadth in its thesaurus function and agonizes with insufficient synonymy. Ruinous unfinished sentences pile up under his text, deleterious examples of allegory and analogy and alliteration summarily undeleted, and he moans in frustration. Even with technological aid, the proper words escape him. The cursor hovers imploringly over a white X etched in red, and he scrutinizes myriad ten-dollar alternatives to obliterate should he feel capitulation to be the only option.
He pushes himself from the ground, dirt like paste adhered to his torso; he twists, turns, feels his shoulder-muscles tighten and quiver in little knots of pain, but they hold fast in support. His held breath sputters as he rolls, finally and resoundingly, onto his back. Sunshine warms the surprisingly cold skin on his belly, and he realizes with a certain and welcome veracity that he is unable to see his reflection from here.
He understands, ultimately. Staring into the sun of his computer screen, his shoulders ache not from spinning himself in the dirt but from the unduly hefting of bulky metaphors and unnecessarily turgid wordplay. He imagines not his soft underbelly exposed but his guts; he sees clearly the tediousness of hiding beneath style-considerations that amount to little more than rolls of fat in disguise, and that clarity itself has been too long overlooked. He needs truth. I need truth. As do you.
Truth, and maybe a story about a clown getting kicked in the nuts.
What about a fart story? Can't go past a good fart story.
ReplyDelete@grumpy: What if the clown-kicker was interrupted mid-kick by his own fart? Paralyzed by his inadvertent flatulence, the clown-kicker stands at the mercy of the clown, who, being the entertainer that he is, heroically kicks himself in the nuts.
ReplyDeleteThen he farts hilariously, proving that the clown is, in fact, a double-threat entertainment-wise. I'll call him Nutsack, the Fart-Kicker, and I will sell a million copies of the book but only make fourteen dollars after being robbed blind by my shifty agent. But, hey, there's always t-shirt sales!
Where was I? Oh, yes, agreed: Can't go past a good fart story.