I've been following the news lately.
There ain't much else to do in Hell: you've got nothing but time, and it ain't
like you could use it being awful productive or something. So I follow the
news. About Syria, mostly, in the past couple of years. Yeah. You could say
I've become, I don't know, addicted to it. The carnage in Syria. It is a bug in
me. Pray you won’t catch it. Then again, you could consider it as a hobby. A recreation, like
collecting glass. That's right, glass, with an L and sss... No D, none.
Maybe I can talk to you about that,
my glass collection of sorts. I don’t think Patti would mind... I need a
cigarette, though, first. Anybody can lend me one? Don't worry, you won't catch
AIDS from a corpse.
All right. Once upon a time there
was a giraffe.
He grabs his cane from the wrong
end, holds it erect.
This giraffe was a freak.
He lets the cane slide through his
hand, until the tip of it touches the floor.
He was the 100-proof, highly
processed product of Giacometti’s nightmares or something. The tiniest head
bouncing at the end of the longest neck you’d ever seen, even at the giraffe scene.
The other giraffes found this amusing. The giraffe himself, our giraffe, didn’t
find it amusing at all. Not one bit – he found the situation tragic. And he
crowned himself the King of giraffes, since he had the longest neck of them
all, was more of a giraffe than the others would ever be. They laughed at him.
Our Giraffe the Freak said the others should bow their necks to him. He was the
King, after all. The other giraffes laughed some more. They didn’t bow their
heads, or their necks. So our Giraffe the Freak decided to kill them all.
He swings his cane like a club a
couple of times.
Giraffe the Freak had a friend, a
rhino whose face was like a baboon’s ass the color of an oyster. He couldn’t
see anything save his own horn. That’s what he watched all day long, his horn,
until his head started spinning, and he darted off to attack something,
anything, chasing his own shadow most of the time. The rhino had no neck at
all. This didn’t bother his pal Giraffe, since Baboo wasn’t a giraffe, but a
rhino. And they were in love. They felt for each other, like they’d known each
other for ever, and deep down knew what the other was going through. The rhino
was terrified. He knew he was a freak of nature. He knew that someday the other
rhinos might make a remark of him having a baboon’s ass for a face and no neck
at all, and he didn’t have to wonder about what would happen next. All he had
to do was look at the Giraffe. And all of a sudden Baboo wanted to kill the
giraffes too. As a lesson to the rhinos, if nothing else. So Baboo and his
rhino friends, who were still his friends for now, went on a rampage in the
Giraffe Land.
He throws the cane away.
Enough of the animals. Let’s talk
about the opposition.
But before we go into that, I
think we should throw a little party. In honor of my returning, if nothing
else. A party for me.
O children! ‘Tis the Day of the
Dead.
Let me get something to eat.
Exit Mapplethorpe.
Vaya con dios, Prilepin!, April 13, 2014
