Monday 26 December 2011

Parthenogenesis - FridayFlash

In certain Latin countries, fathers take their sons to visit a prostitute to confirm the age of majority upon them. Probably a smut too far as far as British sensibilities are concerned, but I can render you the next best ministration. So, given what’s good for the gander is good for the gosling, this is what I’d consider doing for you. When you’re a bit older of course. I’m wagering you’ll like this and that you’ll concede your old man does boast some worthwhile merit after all. Bearing in mind you’re currently such a fan of wrestling, we'll move you on to a different form of burlesque. I can hardly contain the secret, but in time it will be all the more special.

*

My Best Man had procured an exotic stripper for my stag night. A self-impaler, a woman who inserted all sorts of found objects into her fundament. I think one can venture the kind of objects that are around, when men congregate in a boozing establishment such as our rugby club bar. Bottles, matchboxes, packets of pork scratchings, ketchup and pickle sachets, beer mats, pool balls, cue chalks, a cribbage board (sans spilikin pegs), a neglected shots glass (occasioning an impromptu heated discussion between us over its state of hygiene), ice cubes (which failed to rematerialise), ice tongs and the ubiquitous cigars beloved of lubricious American presidents.


All manner of aides de pleasure that help us rub along in the drinking environment were douched. With the steam arising consequently from us. Only to re-emerge and avidly get passed around and inhaled at. Or licked. The re-entry was truly tantalising and had us all teetering on tenterhooks. This was us at base camp, tracking our sherpas and pathfinders as they disappear into crevasses and over the edge. Dangling out of sight on their swinging lifelines, only to reappear triumphantly and intact at the summit, unfurling the glistening ensign of survival. Of conquest. Of colonisation.


And though many of our party at the conclusion of the act, wheedled and importuned with their tip notes to try and be granted exclusive mining rights, all of them were rebuffed with a winning smile and simultaneous fierce nostril flare. Sort of akin to her ability to swivel either breast in contrary directions, as analogued by the whipping nipple tassels. This woman had coaxed all our tongues to loll out along the ground and then proceeded to catwalk up and down their length with her stilettos.


Male hopes and fantasies so spiked, yet she remained a topic of fantastical reconstruction among us long after my wedding (effectively meaning that I had to start from the pit lane once I returned home from the honeymoon). The fabulous configurations we composed for the contents of her act, had us debating long through the night. All around us lay cues, humble mnemonics, quotidian bar optics. Yet we could barely bring ourselves to believe in the truth of these objects, in the veracity of their testimony, now outlined in the dim light truncating their solid depth. I know I haven’t played pool at the club since that evening.


And then a chance for verification. For polishing up the dreamy vision into super-sharp clarity. To wipe clear the smearing that our blurred reminiscences had conferred. Fly-Half fly boy Matty had come by a public appearance from her at a pub, in which she had a residency. Matty, like me, wanted the chance for a double take. To rectify the refraction, of eyes made watery, for pile-driving through their own aqueous humours in the press to sprawl out at the end of their stalks. I wasn’t the only one of our squad Matty asked along, but I was the only one to take up his offer. Presumably the lone musketeer not to run it up the flagpole with the wife. To my mind it can’t possibly be deemed unfaithfulness if I don’t actually do anything transgressive? Same thing Amsterdam’s Red Light district, can hardly avoid having a gander, but you still don’t have to drop off any Euros down there. Look but don’t touch should be the presiding guideline. Twice does not make a propensity. Yes the figment becomes a stitch more solidified, touched up with some detailed brushstrokes. Fixed and set more in the mind, but not to any lasting consequence. On closer inspection, she was not to persist in my faculty, as a succubus draining fealty. She would not come to represent an aide de memoire to anything beyond the marital pale. This was to be no more than scratching an itch. Lancing a boil. Laying to rest of an apparition. A one time only show. A penicillin thunderclap of reality.


And you know what? I was correct in my supposition. Upheld in my belief that it closed the book, or the sesame in this case. There were to be no local objects de pub taking up residency during her residency. For seemed she had built up a loyal and devoted following. Each invited to bring along sundry items from their familial homes for her to suction. Every patron opened up their secret hearth to offer her up a gift. An oblation. A fetish to their intimately untouched inamorata. A little desirous piece of each. How they envisioned themselves. The nub into which they abbreviated themselves.


Accordingly she encapsulated their physical beings. Enshrouded their puissance, then rebirthed it. She anointed their motifs. More lingam than eucharist. She had them eating out of the palm of her hand. Or rather she ate up what they delivered up off their palms and then handed it back to them consecrated. I imagined them at home. Ransacking their knickknacks in search of something with the right dimensions. Or conducting a forensic search for the same. Nothing too asperous nor whetted, since these are reverential votaries. I pondered on their precise choice of object. What made them plump for the snow globe, the poker chips, the bottle with miniature ship inside, the spectacles case, the referee’s whistle (no notes emitted), the nutcrackers (irony intended? - didn’t seem that sort of crowd). Enthralled and in thrall.


What would my object of choice have been?

Thursday 1 December 2011

Rebarbative Me - Friday Flash

I have spent a tender lifetime trying to efface myself. To purge the bovine features of my father that have conferred their genetic tyranny upon me. I may bear his loathsome visage, but none of the violence that leaches from his pores and creases every time the skin blazons his disgust.

Yet that same genetic despotism ensured I could no longer continue to shrink my presence from him, once I no longer folded into the nooks and niches under tables and in cupboards. The serpentine lash of his strop unerringly bit the small of my back and rump. Places where I could never apprise myself of the lacerating damage wrought there. Physical pain wasn't visual. Psychic pain was ineffably so. Triggered at the mere sight of him. At the vision of a slightly grizzled version of myself.

To compensate, as soon as I was able, I started to grow a beard. Praying that the bristles would be tensile enough to bury my flesh from sight (having had no modelling from my father who religiously shaved everyday, whetting his razors on the dread strop. And for those hairs adhering to me after a beating, like tiny porcupine quills to prolong the scourging).

My solitary daily ritual, far removed from any ablutions, was to raise my hand to my fluff and gauge its overnight growth. For I could not bring myself to consult a mirror. Partly for fear of the hair betraying me with its feebleness, but also because I might have to engage with my eyes. And see the defeat indelibly etched there. The melding of his sadism with my masochism, I must be heaping it all upon myself right?

But the follicles proved fecund and strong. In time they occluded both me and presumably my father from my features. He of course fulminated against the beard, but he had grown sick and weak, while my transformation only seemed to embolden me. I left home for a place without mirrors. Mirrors mirror only isolation. That and duality.

I was out of his immediate clutches, but I could build no kind of life for myself. I could never look people in the face. I could scarce lift my chin from my sternum. As if the skin there was made of velcro.

However today I have made the decision for the beard to come off. To celebrate news of my father's death and my possible rebirth. I went out and purchased a small round mirror that pivoted on a stand. It resembled a squashed globe.

I laboriously cut the hair with scissors until it lent itself to razor shearing. I was thrown when my face was completely eclipsed beneath a snowdrift of shaving foam. I stared at such wonderful inchoateness for ages, until the chemicals in the cream started stinging my flesh beneath.

I started ploughing, barely able to fix my face in the tilted concavity of the mirror. The white layer stained red in places. Yet more effacement.

But gradually, the alluvium bristles were swept away and the contours of my cheeks emerged. I peered hard at the tiny mirror, barely able to frame me as I leaned right into its purlieu. With difficulty, I looked into the doppelganger's sightless eyes. It wasn't my father, but then nor was it anyone I knew either.

Does the butterfly that metamorphoses from the imago of the grub have any connection to it other than what lies within its genes?