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Sep. 25th, 2010 01:42 amI made an impulse purchase I initially enjoyed but then regretted. I’ll explain.
A man named Minky, famous here, makes large, deep wooden frames and then moves in. You buy the frame but with it comes this Minky. He stays as long as he likes. He likes to stay with me.
I say the frame is deep, but not so very. What Minky does is assemble his wooden frame in your home (in mine it’s between the aquarium and a bureau), then stuff it with sculpted foam and hanging rags and other things stapled to the frame. In mine there’s a tire in the middle. He spraypaints everything black and glues black textured bits about, to make a sort of landscape. The frame’s just deep enough for shadows to form, to where you can’t tell paint from shadow. In my frame there’s a kind of forest seen from above at a bit of an angle. Dark celluloid across the tire makes a forest pool.
I come in from a terrible fight in which my only two real friends both turn against me. Minky’s face, you can barely tell, is behind the pool and he moves black-lipsticked lips as though black ink were dripping and spreading then fading – sucking his lips away into his face for the latter. He’s awfully good at this.
I come in from a date interrupted by finding out my date’s a friend screening me for her girlfriend who’s undecided whether to date me (the friend says her report to the girlfriend will be favorable) and Minky’s ten blackened fingertips move in the pool like an inquisitive, lost school of shadowy fish, the motion of each being reacted to just slightly by the others to create that gracened fractal effect of a fish school.
Like that. But you get the idea.
I don’t know what that added to my life before he started talking. He put on fuzzy black gloves and pretended his hands were reflected bits of a hill just past where the frame ends and told me stories about what happened behind that hill.
I get back from a botched root canal and he tells me how starting down the far side of the hill from the top you hear a hushed quarrel in the bushes and a bundle of money wrapped around an ancient key gets tossed into a pool below a waterfall. You chase it through a hollow full of leaves, down a rusty tube, through a submerged locomotive, under a spoon factory, through a paintball picnic. At the end most of the money has peeled away and the key turns out to be a giant novelty paperclip just twisted to look like a big key but there’s enough left to pay for a really good salad bar where you can eat a lot of grapes and green peppers and cottage cheese. Because the far side of that hill is for losing weight.
He acts it all out through suggestion by moving his black hands a bit in the off-black water. As though you could barely make out the moments when some stretched body part or thrown hat would clear the slope. He’s very good at ripples. His face is the bottom, I think, so it’s all these slight twitches of muscles that do it.
I return from a morose walk and he explains how if I’d gone over the hill I’d have seen a beautiful woman in the valley town mowing her lawn, then another fixing a mailbox, another soliciting local paper ad space, all different, leading their different lives, but all a bit underdressed, like in expectation of warmer weather. A fifth riding a bike left one too many buttons open, a sixth walking a dog eccentrically chose to wear pajamas out. In a window one sips a milkshake in a bikini. On the far side of the valley nude sunbathers sleep in the grass, one here, then one there, then in groups and small piles and at last a snaking uphill continuum of women stacked overlapping, clearly tormented by erotic dreams growing more feverish with altitude, exposed pairs of sweat-bedewed legs gradually opening wider and wider, hands reached out toward you in less and less ambiguously inviting undulations up past where the hill beyond the hill has its own beyond.
My bed’s nearby. I wake and see the blacks and darks and shadows windmill there inside the frame. It’s sometimes like a tarry wind through jade wheat, sometimes like an endless cone of absent stars, sometimes like night birds asleep on wet winter branches. Sometimes it’s a tangle of pen whirls violently rubbing out Minky’s face inside a tire. Minky eats old socks and splinters and dust bunnies. One day Minky will go away. Who knows what makes him stay.
A man named Minky, famous here, makes large, deep wooden frames and then moves in. You buy the frame but with it comes this Minky. He stays as long as he likes. He likes to stay with me.
I say the frame is deep, but not so very. What Minky does is assemble his wooden frame in your home (in mine it’s between the aquarium and a bureau), then stuff it with sculpted foam and hanging rags and other things stapled to the frame. In mine there’s a tire in the middle. He spraypaints everything black and glues black textured bits about, to make a sort of landscape. The frame’s just deep enough for shadows to form, to where you can’t tell paint from shadow. In my frame there’s a kind of forest seen from above at a bit of an angle. Dark celluloid across the tire makes a forest pool.
I come in from a terrible fight in which my only two real friends both turn against me. Minky’s face, you can barely tell, is behind the pool and he moves black-lipsticked lips as though black ink were dripping and spreading then fading – sucking his lips away into his face for the latter. He’s awfully good at this.
I come in from a date interrupted by finding out my date’s a friend screening me for her girlfriend who’s undecided whether to date me (the friend says her report to the girlfriend will be favorable) and Minky’s ten blackened fingertips move in the pool like an inquisitive, lost school of shadowy fish, the motion of each being reacted to just slightly by the others to create that gracened fractal effect of a fish school.
Like that. But you get the idea.
I don’t know what that added to my life before he started talking. He put on fuzzy black gloves and pretended his hands were reflected bits of a hill just past where the frame ends and told me stories about what happened behind that hill.
I get back from a botched root canal and he tells me how starting down the far side of the hill from the top you hear a hushed quarrel in the bushes and a bundle of money wrapped around an ancient key gets tossed into a pool below a waterfall. You chase it through a hollow full of leaves, down a rusty tube, through a submerged locomotive, under a spoon factory, through a paintball picnic. At the end most of the money has peeled away and the key turns out to be a giant novelty paperclip just twisted to look like a big key but there’s enough left to pay for a really good salad bar where you can eat a lot of grapes and green peppers and cottage cheese. Because the far side of that hill is for losing weight.
He acts it all out through suggestion by moving his black hands a bit in the off-black water. As though you could barely make out the moments when some stretched body part or thrown hat would clear the slope. He’s very good at ripples. His face is the bottom, I think, so it’s all these slight twitches of muscles that do it.
I return from a morose walk and he explains how if I’d gone over the hill I’d have seen a beautiful woman in the valley town mowing her lawn, then another fixing a mailbox, another soliciting local paper ad space, all different, leading their different lives, but all a bit underdressed, like in expectation of warmer weather. A fifth riding a bike left one too many buttons open, a sixth walking a dog eccentrically chose to wear pajamas out. In a window one sips a milkshake in a bikini. On the far side of the valley nude sunbathers sleep in the grass, one here, then one there, then in groups and small piles and at last a snaking uphill continuum of women stacked overlapping, clearly tormented by erotic dreams growing more feverish with altitude, exposed pairs of sweat-bedewed legs gradually opening wider and wider, hands reached out toward you in less and less ambiguously inviting undulations up past where the hill beyond the hill has its own beyond.
My bed’s nearby. I wake and see the blacks and darks and shadows windmill there inside the frame. It’s sometimes like a tarry wind through jade wheat, sometimes like an endless cone of absent stars, sometimes like night birds asleep on wet winter branches. Sometimes it’s a tangle of pen whirls violently rubbing out Minky’s face inside a tire. Minky eats old socks and splinters and dust bunnies. One day Minky will go away. Who knows what makes him stay.
