Fiction

Sculpting
by Kenneth Updike

I want to dance on the scum frogs’ bones. I want to grind them into a powder and inhale the powder to receive magical powers. I want to leap over tall buildings in one or two bounds.

The lepers fling their flesh at me then cling to post-hasty legs fleeing, begging as lepers beg for mercy and a holy cure. Red spots boil over the cauldron, hot blackjuice spills, chases my feet. I can dance in the mud instead of upon the bones. Splashing, sploshing below me, burning flesh and the clinging lepers, fumes rising up, poisoning the air. I must escape this convulsive ceremony.

I am hungry for the fresh meat lazing by the docks. The little boys and the little girls selling themselves to aging perverts, the next generation of capitalists, mature before their time or doomed never to mature. I want to sprinkle salt on them and bite into their livers.

I’m headed for home, Saint Malcolm’s Mortuary. It’s where they’ve stored my children. They let me sleep on the old mattresses in the back. They never let me take anything home or dig up any knowledge. Then when I leave that place the world pushes books through my skull.

The books are bad. Books bad, Satan good. SATAN! AEIAI! It’s all trash, is what they feed my head, in volumes. I’m so overflowing I puke shit.

Waltzing through the junkyard, headed for garbage. My stack's reserved. Some locals don't get the memos. There's a weakling, thinks he's got the stuff, all the stuff. Thinks he's strong, thinks his metal is strong. His metal isn't strong.

The Tin Man wants to take me down for stealing all his scrap metal. I’m burning his oil fields so he’ll squeak and freeze. Bam! More scrap metal for my projects.

You’d have to be an artist to live like I live. People see my static machines and think, no moving parts. The moving parts you can’t see or hear. The moving parts are internal well-oiled invisibles, like soul. I sculpt souls.

The Tin Man has oil to spare. He never falls. Back to him later. He’ll catch up with me in a while.

Mostly, there's running.

Hilarity is a kind of clarity beyond your reach. Hilarity is the divine comedy nobody dares to touch, but everybody thinks they’re touching. Just so long as they don’t touch my pee pee.

I’m walking the brown mile. Poop rained down last night and plopped into the sidewalk. The sidewalk is a long and squishy path hugging my favorite suburban road. My feet sink into the wet pavement. I’ll have to keep moving, moving quick, or I’ll get stuck.

The sidewalk ends too abruptly, spitting me into the grass. I roll down a grassy hill and into a swamp. Listen to croaking scum frogs serenading serenading serenading. Gulliver did less in a lifetime than I’ll do in a week, I get hold of those little froggies.

Let me have your liver, let me have your liver! Swamps don’t want me, I’m at the docks, chanting. Let me have your liver, let me have your liver! But here comes the head man supercop vigilante with burning eyes, ready to club me to death if he has to, gotta teach the freaks a lesson before there’re too many, set an example.

It’s a milk carton with holes, hanging from a pole like a flag, leaking into speculation. I catch the white raindrops and they bless my throat as they ooze down. I glow, calcium surges through my bones, enforcers are repulsed by my aura.

I climb the pole, hungry for more, lusting after the sky. The top of the pole runs with the sky, runs up. I’m climbing infinity until I weary and fall, arms flailing, down, down.

The mole people organize on the rusty tracks. They join hands by the glowing altar and dance to ward off the cold. When I come to visit, the ghost train rumbles down the tracks and everyone hates me hates me. The train bursts through my chest like vengeance, singeing chest hairs, failing to do much observable damage, a mere phantom feeding on externals. The mole people chase me away.

It’s cold out under the rain heavying my hair. The lightning lights my path, the thunder drums my song. Park benches call for newspapers. The trees, scarce here, ache to be chopped. Rain floods the streets. I go swimming with the cars.

Horns honk at me. Red light, green light, yellow light, flickers the lights in confusion. Middle fingers stir the air. The water level is rising quick.

Zeus spears my back. I swim faster. I swerve and veer through traffic.

Nothing fails the nobody. Nonentity never ceases. Nihilism contradicts the question. Nuclear fusion fizzles.

Insects, palpitating legs, hard eyes, crawl across the rainbow bridge, ready for an attack. I want to cut the bridge, no tools. Can’t reach. Can’t slice. Can’t…the ants are marching. I plant a rubber tree below the bridge and no ant passes. The other bugs abandon the mission or die abandoned.

The swimmer swims as the river dries. I flap my feet and arms like fins against hot black pavement. I look beyond the emotion of the thing without disregarding feeling and see another true color.

The water evaporated into living clouds. We’re stuck like fish.

I make the best of it, it being this and everything, everything being but a moment, a moment being but a vague conceptual theory, theory being accepted into facthood, facthood being irreproachable except through the invention of new facthoods. I know a chubby cow wishes she had more productive utters, even when the world drinks her.

The Tin Man hits me with a tin can. Soda stains my shirt. The tin can drops and tings. Things go crazy, things always crazy. I dance in the soda splashing droplets onto Chiclets on the floor. The Chiclets taste like some chikkies I know. The orange is bursting with delicious fruit flavor.

I throw a punch at the Tin Man, rust his armor. There’s sugar in my sweet punches. I send that tin man back a few, he’s a sticky rusty mess on the floor. Crack! says the floor when he falls, splitting open, devouring my problems.
I outstretch arms aimlessly, then with purpose, leaping backward, avoiding the expanding crack, the whole, the floor’s mouth trying to suck me in trying to swallow.

I get out of that house through the mouse hole. I’m clever. I escape.

That’s how it flows every time. Tin Man and copper dock watchers and rivers and frogs chasing the toads. The milkman leaves his mark and the gypsies sign the bark. The lepers pick a leader like skin cus they wanna go ethnic. And I’m an artist.

Statues...