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sheencko · 7 years

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mr. moreau

an unfinished scrap of a novel i am not sure ill continue

i can see it its a diamond with the crossroads its white borders from my cracked window up here

i ‘ave to get that fixed)— just below the fog (the fog is low today)

—and its on top of the street that was just painted

oh yesterday or maybe the day before that

or something,

i think

black as my genevieve’s ‘air

two bodies crisscrossed atop of each other and splattered like paint on a black canvas, a pollack of angry reds and i cant see their face cause theyve been ravaged by the hard concrete and im so high up looking down like a dreamer into a field of rye and i shudder because oh, how painful is that but i also suppose,

when youre fallin i guess you only feel the woosh of the wind under you and maybe your soul leaves your body before your body breaks into a million teeny tiny pieces and everything inside you that youve ever dreamed flows out of you like a bucket tipping over onto a tile floor—maybe

maybe its a perpetual fear and youre trapped inside a perpetual cycle of mind numbing terror because youre falling to your doom and you regret that your feet left the edge in the first place and maybe, maybe you shoulda called your mom and then told her that you loved her one last time or apologized to the man that you bumped into while you were hurrying home yesterday and the tears are flying from your face ‘cause you can see them surrounding your grave wearin nothing but black and your father is silent but a kind of silent youve never seen before and in that second you can just SEE him taking the same path you are and then

maybe the fear grips your limbs like god coming down and punishing you but all you feel is a childish sort of aversion an “i dont wanna” cause you dont wanna—you dont wanna die cause you have so so much to live for and youre cryin to some big fat man up in the sky but whats he gonna do? he cant stop you

but i wouldn’ know but i took the elevator and went down to look at the scene anyway cause we’re all drawn to the misfortune of others anyway like nothing more than moths having an orgy on a blue flame

mr. steinway was next to me in the elevator; he lived on the 13th floor and i on the 12th i saw him smoking up on the roof sometimes. he was a gentleman by any other name, except the part where his wife left him cause hed been caught with a particularly young mistress but i suppose that didnt matter because he played ravel’s jeux d’eau like no one else in the world could and maybe he played her body like that homonymous six figure grand he has, who knows

his face was wrinkled and ugly but the melodies he played were smooth and beautiful so who cared about his damn visage i guess

“oh, mister moreau,” and for that matter, his voice wasnt particularly musical either

“steinway, are you heading down to see what happened?”

“arent we all,” he chuckled like the deaths were a funny little joke he had made up,

“i think i’ll stop by the grocery store”

“is that so?” he spoke like a conductor introducing a symphony to an ignorant audience and he was just trying to find a way to relive his days of performing inside carnegie hall’s stern auditorium because all he performed in now was his empty apartment, we around ‘im the unwilling listeners. he silently watched the floor numbers count down on the bar above the elevator doors 10 9 8 7 “i ‘aven’t been there lately.” he finally said like he had wondered how to talk without being offensive while still showing his pockets were full of gold.

dick, i thought 4 5

and waited and 2 1 and the doors opened.

our doorman greeted us. he was a fine fellow and i talked with him when it was too awkward for silence. he had a prized son about to head off to columbia on some scholarship or another and his younger daughter was expected to follow in his shoes. his mother was bedridden his dad dead and apparently he made a great deal of money working as a valet for the most expensive hotel in the city on the weekends. he liked the color orange and his ties were sometimes tied with a different knot because his daughter liked to practice on him. for lunch he preferred a simple tomato and mozzarella panini from the cafe a few blocks away but occasionally he partook in the pita bread and hummus that mrs. tomadakis on the fourth floor gave him and he always always despised it when someone moved the rug in front of the door. i didnt know his name.

“another suicide, huh?” he gave me a warm smile and mr. steinway a slightly cooler one

he said ‘another’ because it had been the eighth one this month and we were only fourteen days into it and silently, slowly we found ourselves heading towards a point of numb disassociation—when one person committed suicide it was all over the news like mr. steinway’s scandal and you learned their birthday, their name, their age,

every tiny detail of they had been, the sorrow of their friends and family,

and everything that happened between the day that they they came into the world and the day they left

and the people reacted with horror, the parents apologized to their kids and the kids to their parents, and the grief counselors opened their doors to those who had lost someone in a similar fashion and had to relive the memory through someone else’s eyes and maybe a wide-eyed girl holdin the blade to her small wrist told herself not today, not today

but of course, thats me being optimistic

sometime after the third suicide all that popped up was a name and a vague somethingorother reason they lit themselves on fire or shot themselves in the ‘ead or something and then a frown from the casters, maybe a tinge of sympathy entered their tone but then 10 seconds passed and they forgot because this was all part of a trend that would end. the people talked about the suicides in hushed tones but now the conservations were turning into a more questioning again? and a response of yeses and then it tended to be never discussed again because hey it didnt involve us anyhow

so the nameless bodies started to pile up one on top of each other and i knew the faces and names of maybe three or four but no more.

i nodded to him. “troubling,” i said, because what else could i say

“yes, definitely. my wife had me turn off the news last night because she was so… distressed at all the incidents lately” the doorman replied and there was a hint of something unknown when he said it. nonetheless he turned to the man next to me because his priorities were his own “I heard your playing the other day, mr. steinway. marvelous as always,” he said, voice turned slick because steinway gave good tips. he couldn’t hear anything from all the way on the 1st floor of course

mr. steinway looked chuffed, a prizewinning cock who fought with all the other roosters. “the debussy or the khachaturian?”

“the khachaturian, of course. i always find myself partial to the contemporary—“ the doorman said in an inviting tone to begin an conversation that would undoubtedly net him a few more dollars or maybe a lot more next week—

“interesting!” steinway murmured in that hushed tone since discussion of classical music was clearly some covert operation that no one was supposed to know about. i walked outside into the cool fall air knowing that they would be stuck there for a good ten minutes or more and noticed that the crowd around the two corpses in the middle was gone already and the first thing i wondered was not who they were but rather if dear genevieve had heard the news

there is a photographer standing by the bodies with her big old camera snap snap and she looks up and stares at me staring at her she stands up and i notice that the bottom of her pants have been scuffed by the road she smiles at me without dusting herself off,

“hello!” she was too cheery for the death in front of her “do you live here?” she is the only one out here and the world feels strangely empty

“yes, i” i pointed to the clean, modern building to the left “live just over there,”

she looked at me up and down up and down “you wouldn’t know these people would you?” no i wouldnt

“no” her face fell but then it rose again as she stuffed a card into my clammy hand and the bracelets on her hand jangled and she grinned at me with white teeth but the front two were crooked as if someone ‘ad taken a pair of pliers to them and her brown ‘air was messy, her skin lighter than mine—“i was just wondering since no one seems to know who they are” (she spoke in a rush like she was breathless) and i finally start to wonder indeed, who they are because even as corpses their hands are entwined together “i’m” and now that im down here i can see the fine details in their “photographer, i” faces and the one on the left has that dead fish look in their dark eyes and the eyes are wide open and theyre staring into “crime scenes” my very soul and i wonder if theyre blaming me for my being complicit in their deaths because i too heard the news and did nothing but “ive been in the news” my hands are shaking and i think i couldnt have done anything because i didnt know but something jabs me — a maybe i did know because i too heard the news and passed by disinterested “but i also do” and im staring back at them and theyre staring back at me in a staring contest that i know i will lose “family portraits, anything you need basically” and the one on the rights eyes are closed and the part of their face that isnt all burst open and spilling onto the floor has a tender charm and their lips are fixed in what seems like a peaceful smile but im thinking no there is no way that could be peaceful and oh “call the number if” their ‘ands are all so small if i could just have grabbed those before they jumped maybe id be staring at an empty black canvas instead of a grotesque exhibit of all that we ‘ave done wrong

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artist:

medium: human on concrete

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