ennui

Yesterday when she had me in the chair, tied into a yarn suit and surrounded by those mewling chickens, I told her the truth.

She had not realized I found her letter to Santa Claus. It was written backwards in a shifted skink format, all the more surprising for its blueness off the get-go. Not without pains though I deciphered the crap and found her correspondence to be without merit. A ruse, yes; but a clever one.

I hold my secrets dearly, but I kept this one to save my life. Knowing it was known meant certain doom – at least a sound tickling. And in my condition, who knows where such things might end. Nuts, spilled among the gadgets and various raised accoutrements, not in the least.

Alone, for she was engaged that night to peruse various portraits of trebuchets in her Tuesday evening nipple piercing guild, I scoured the residence for additional clues and found much to my annoyance an eyesore. It was slightly L shaped and covered in Naugahyde and tucked away in a corner of the living room, a random space cordoned off by swinging doors and normally off limits to one such as I. In no time I deduced its perimeters by swinging my arms about and using my inch-stick. The exact proportions became known to me, and armed with this information I fell back, intact.

She came home late and complained of soreness and chafing, forcing me to alleviate her pains with a sponge and other means, but the advancing hours saved me from the usual drudgery and that night I did not don the suit of yarn, and the fowl pecked indiscriminately at their leisure, and more, at scattered jigsaw puzzle pieces of Buckingham Palace intermixed with macaroni. Ten thousand monkeys typing on ten thousand typewriters might eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare, but all the chickens in the world couldn't sort out the edge pieces in a thousand piece puzzle of the queen when they've got macaroni too. That's the theorem I worked out, but I digress....

While I have little spare time, I confess also to sleeping very little, but I needn't ascribe that to insomnia. In every corner of the small world I inhabit there is a collection of motes, and I keep them occupied by means of a one hundred watt light bulb which is attached by various long cords, some green, some orange. The place is quite dark, and air currents have no refuge here, so by leaping around and casting my light like angry aspersions I keep these motes agitated, and thus fit for future duty. It is my army of dust, and I march my troops nightly. Quietly, in rank.

My captains and I were unrelenting that night, and it was understand that action was likely. In the wardroom we discussed general affairs, as well as the atrocity I had measured. When asked, I acceded, and so we cataloged it as Floral, for such was the pattern that enveloped the whole of its girth. Springtime floral, in fact, and dreadful. I begged to be left behind, for needles to be driven deep into the soft pieces of my frontal lobe, but mightily they held me down, and my dementia subsided.

I left them to it, and succumbed to a slumber as deep as any ever encountered, and to my everlasting shame, this is what I dreamed: A plethora of wire plugs danced willy nilly the length of my dozen unpolished casserole dishes and circled back, dosey doe, and with no warning fell deep into catatonia, whereupon they dreamed of me. Exclamation. Finally I became aware of my own shape and form – I was a god in every aspect, and looked exactly like Clark Gable. Eventually I woke after evaluating my good fortune, only to find that the casserole pans were absent, and worse, merely stew pots, and cooking at their innards were the plugs who writhed in a comic dance from some overwrought Dante-ish opera composed by the master himself, Batmaster Spleen. The wire plugs poked me and I awoke again, for real. Oh, my.

I sat up for some time brooding on my dilemma. Knowing of the heinous creation, I pondered the existence of further atrocities. If there be one, perchance there might be more. All would be lost, for I could not sustain my vigor knowing of such vile contraptions. No more would I recline, entranced by a jellybean sculpture, not even by a woven big stuffed thingamajig, not I, moi, the me. Nor would I entertain the thought of a new, a better horror 'round the next bend. Here I was, here I would stand my ground, my motes and I.

Balloon skulls rising in a bag of mesh, sobriety expressed by the girl in a window. Somewhere a dog is barking. No cliché would temper my mood, and ere I dissolved them all in an acid bath of forgetfulness, she came to me suggesting a soiree and teacakes. A certain rue must have been etched upon my face, and it reflected off her visage like a marble dropped on stone facade. Pigtails and a twelve foot Trojan elk. She stood, her chickens took me by the hand, and led me to a chair, unencumbered by prestige. Gently I was stripped and adorned anew by all involved – they circled so that by and by I, like a maypole, was born of wool streamers and immobile as a giant locked in immortal combat with really big glottal tongues. I would never jump rope with heavy nymphs, probably. Hardly could I bemoan the fact, when she stroked my cheek and teetered on the brink of a notion, suppressing a giggle while the tattoo brow of a maid jiggled atop her loosened bodice. I came undone and the babbled arcanum came flowing in a torrent of conjoined participles, my syllables were transient.

She mesmerized into my soul like a torch eating screwbit even as I pondered the parameters of my mecho-master board – interface and circuitry, inverting my eyes I followed the thread and moved across the board, tuning down the switchback and backflipping a lateral plunger. Too late, I flinched, and unraveled like a flung spool, cast like spent dregs in a pool of disorderly nematodes. My usefulness at an end, I fell wholly bent and subservient as a young willow to the North wind. My struggles were over, and preparations were all for naught, but lightly she gathered her yarn back into a ball and led me like a newborn through rhythmic doors and lay me down on a supple divan, kissing me back and forth, to and fro, thoroughly through and through, until all thoughts of subterfuge and motes died in a swirling vortex of fluff and daisies.