43: Dinner

I moved my hands over it, tried right to left while humming, but nothing that's thrown at it reaches its skin. What do you mean? You know I am! Why are you telling me? Now look at those twitching eyes. Your interest in energy, gems packed in one thousand layers … Steamed my face off using a kettle full of tears. Aren’t you, I know, one of a kind? Dressed in a thousand clothes to drown in the bath Although he has been walking at a truly leisurely pace, a man catches up with a horse he has been following behind for some time, for this horse has been stopping often to reflect in its surroundings and chew on the long grass. He sees a like minded traveler in the ambling horse, feeling they are both seeking sustenance from the scraps they find in every moment, ready with every aspect of their being to imbibe life’s offerings. So, with this in mind, he nonchalantly places his hand on its back as he sidles up along side. The horse is clearly wincing at the touch, though making no sound the muscles contract tightly to create a fleshy earthworks around the hand, altering its gait yet it continues to walk forward. The man stops in befuddlement and, looking at his hand, sees it is covered in an iridescent substance as though he had patted the wing of an immense meadow brown butterfly. “How odd to have make believed a horse.” he says watching it canter away “Eggsy? Eggsy? Are you there? Oh yes, Eggsy, you there. I see glints of your smooth shell in the moonlight. I have birthed you again like a kidney stone. It’s every day isn’t it, Eggsy? Whether you ended the last boiled, scrambled, fried, or poached, you come back to me Eggsy. Sometimes I dream of you Eggsy, I dream that you will be so small I can barely see you on my bedside table, yet I know in the very same dream tomorrow you may be so big that you will crack open pressing up on the ceiling. Oooooo, Eggsy, the day before I’m sure I dreamt I found you just a pixelation on the laminate counter; there was no dinner from a jagged little Eggsy, but I stuck you to my satchel. The whole office whooped and banned their desks as I strode in. Ooooh, I can see now you are the same old Eggsy Eggsy, my mother used to say washing up is where Saints are made, not the cooking. She always dried, so I asked what that made of her. She moved the dish cloth along the blade of the bread knife, looking out the small port hole window “Infinity,” she said. Eggsy, Eggsy! Some twenty or so years later I was standing in the communal kitchen at work, drying the cutlery left soaking in the sink over night. “Infinite” unexpectedly sighed from my mouth as my thumb circled the last dry corner of the sodden cloth around a teaspoon’s bowl. Eggsy. It speaks for itself without telling you what it is. In its non existence it exists. As an abstraction it is clearer than what is in front of us now, Eggsy. Oh Eggsy, I read that somewhere and thought of you. I came home one night Eggsy to find you already fried laying languid over a spinach sheet on rye. “You know Eggsy, I never did manage to see you cook.” I said A message bubbled from you Eggsy through the uncooked albumen pooling on your surface. I laughed, remember? “Back on the bucket list, I guess?” I said. I did wonder today whether you are nourishing me or I you. Do you change Eggsy, do I change you Eggsy? Is it a different Eggsy whenever I wake up? Is it, ‘I am about to eat a fried Eggsy?’ or is it more ‘it is now time to Eggsy myself?’” Eggsy, Eggsy? Squeeze us together into one. Towards a few single things from the past. All in-between, all in the way. These strikes sink in, become a single substance. A monochrome with a monotone drone.