Pulp trash with big words for your pleasure

 

The levee was loaded with gongoozlers when they pulled him from the drink.  They pushed against each other to ogle the scene.  A hum hovered above the crowd like a swarm of bees lost in a mytacistic trance, with staccato titters of excited women and children punctuating the air.  Nobody knew why he was in the water, except me, and I wasn't about to tell that I dragged him there myself.

 

I had been minding my own business when I overheard him tell how he illicitly obtained Toulouse-Lautrec's "La Dompteuse devant le tribunal" from an old Nazi's estate.  The heating vents in the palatial manor house echoed with the slightest sound and proved to be pipelines into every going-on.  The original, they say, is in Buffalo, New York.  I heard him say that the original was in his bathroom.  I'd worked for the pig for five years, putting up with the jeers and come-ons of the unctuous snake because he was at least willing to pay more than the others for my services.

 

I wasn't sure who he was talking to, but I expect he was trying to seduce another neophyte gold-digger.  What the women didn't realize was that the old boy had been around, and around.  He played them right back.  He'd done everything.  He danced naked in the rain at Woodstock and marched in the  protests.  He'd parachuted, bungied, rode elephants, climbed mountains, taken the waters at Baden-Baden,  been everywhere and done just about anyone who was anyone.  He had all the privilege of wealth but little of the headache of worldwide recognition and I almost liked him for who he used to be.

 

Only the uber-rich knew him intimately, but when he followed me to my broken down Jeep and laid his hands on my breasts, I fought him.  It was fortuitous that I'd left a pipe wrench on the front seat.  My moon is ascendant in Mars.  Nobody messes with me.  No oracle in her right mind would advise even trying.  Apparently, he only consulted with his penis.  That was his last mistake.  I don't just look butch.  The arms I've built from years of manual labor aren't just for show.

 

I watched from the hill and inside my melancholy started to lift.  My heart was racing, adrenaline made me heart beat in tarantella-time.  Who knew that being evil could be such a rush?

 

I'd cringed at his bombastic sermons on the righteousness of Republican thought.  He plowed through every article about the first family, even adoxographies about the first ladies' dogs.  I knew that he kept me around for fantasy.  I knew when he watched me sweating on his roof or mucking out the stable that I was flesh for fantasy.   It's feasible that the pineapple he offered guests as a sign of his hospitality was a prop in his daydreams and irreverent apodyopsis of virtually everyone.  Lord knows, I myself had dreams about licking juice off the backbone of the lady veterinarian who came to the stables.

 

The scene was farcical as cops and rescue workers buzzed the scene like bees around their queen.  He may have been a millionaire, but really, he was nobody.  His gravestone would soon rest beside his mother's on the estate.  I'd done the world a favor with the runcation of another callow scumbag. 

 

Sure, what I'd done was barbarous, but had somehow lifted me from the abyss of drudgery and depression I'd been in since she dumped me.

 

Suddenly, I just wanted to go home, get cleaned up, honk on my bassoon and check the journal of the artist who'd brought "La Dompteuse..." to my attention prior to hearing the old kumquat prattle about it.   An arduous glee overtook me as I removed the work from his bathroom and replaced it with a three-color pencil sketch of an armadillo I'd found in storage in the basement.  The frame was the right size to cover the walls where the older work had scratched into the flat ecru paint.  The dusky gray went well with the dark marble counters lining the sinks.  (I could have chosen another sketch of an aardvark, but we don't see many of them in Florida.)  No one would be the wiser. 

 

 

 

(Thanks plittle)

Link here to discover the essay contest (in which this is an entry) and the artist who originated it!:

http://journals.aol.com/judithheartsong/newbeginning/entries/1440 or click on the word "journal" in the essay.