39: Prosthetic

Behind your husband - as the latter shouts towards the coach driver - at the side of the road sits a man at a low fold up table, puzzling at a jigsaw. Piled about haphazardly, in a scattered jumble of brown and grey, the pieces seem to depict — although no reference image is provided, and only a few pieces have been connected — the surface of a bog. The man’s concentration seems to have been momentarily broken by the proximal bellowing of your husband, and you approach to apologise. As he shrugs and does a thing with his lower lip and eyebrows to indicate he’s not bothered, he sweeps a hand over the pieces in an outward arc, distributing them in a single tier over the table’s surface, cracking a grin as you simultaneously notice his prosthetic arm, glass eye, and single crutch resting up against the back of his chair. When you glance back down at the table, two columns of pieces have been connected, and he’s already working on the third. “It’s the Stucco-Point technique” he says suddenly, his thick Dutch accent catching you off guard, “I was there for two years.
Then I was for four at the Academia de Truques, and six in Brown Sponge, Nebraska … When you start out at Stucco, you don’t get to do things by halves…” He emits a strained wheeze of a laugh… “See, first you build the verticals, then find the key bridging pieces… you work your way from the centre, filling the patches until you reach the edges. The corners must be placed last: south-east; south-west; north-west; north-east. North east must always come last. As he snaps the final piece into place, he stares deep into your eye, his glass eye on your husband and speaks in a loud whisper, without moving his lips: 
“The prudish swarm that descends around this time: Descend into the swarm. Let the brutish swarm ascend around you. Rise with the swarm!” “The prudish swarm that descends around this time: Descend into the swarm. Let the brutish swarm ascend around you. Rise with the swarm!” Your gaze is fixed upon his face, which flushes with yellow like the reflection of a marine explosion on glassy waters far from land, and a muted soprano drone seems to rise from the mountains behind the lodge. “Go Fund the Golden Goose.” He gasps as something flashes blindingly from his glass eye. As you flinch and screw your eyes up, honking car noises snap you back to the present. Your husband is guiding the coach as it reverses back to where the wheelchair ramp can connect with the curb, and drivers that have to overtake on the bend are issuing punitive jabs on the horn. The jigsaw man has packed up and gone, without a trace. But then you notice a single piece from his puzzle he must have dropped, it has the same uniform brown, only this one has a yellow speck in the centre. You reach down and pick it up. Floating on the brown surface are seven children on a banana boat, each slumped forwards onto the other’s back. Something nauseating stirs in you and as you try to blink it back, the ghost flash from the glass eye flickers in your vision, from green to red and back again: the silhouette of a goose in flight. You put the piece with the banana boat in your pocket and head to the coach.