Wraithlike, suffering from flu, slumped in bed, the world outside storm-ridden, the Book Murderer languished. It was the dead season in his seaside town, tourist-less and better for it. But there was a loneliness in such pure authenticity, and the lack of unfamiliar faces staring up from the thoroughfare below his balcony cut deep. Stumbling back inside, togad by circumstance and a bit trussed, he managed in a muddled languor to fumble his way onto the internet, spent idle time, fever-burned, buying up derelict facebook accounts from their indifferent owners--twenty bucks for what I never go look at? sure--and then lashed them together like a virtual flotilla of rusted, holed crate-freighters, launched against a hundred authors’ vanity. Hidden in the gaps and confusion caused by a thousand pseudonyms, he turned faux relatives professing book lust to stare with horror upon references to “shit” and “puke” and “turds”, secretly came close in shallow water and boarded author pages, putting all to the sword until, binging on blood and blocked, he cast his net elsewhere. Blocked, retreated, thrust forward again, blocked, creating ever-wider ripples, sometimes slipping from his sinking ships with knife in teeth to swim close and whisper in an authors ear, preferably one who had just humble-bragged about his goddamn sales, Your characters are all wine corks and your settings tell me you have mommy issues and you appropriate inappropriately and your plots are as satisfying as if an undead Jackson Pollock slung dog shit at a wall with an arm stump. This was total war to which he committed single-minded, but in the midst of which he was burning up, burning true, the sheets and blankets their own turbulent sea around him. Until finally the pillage ended from exhaustion and he fell back against the bed into his own sweat-imprint--only to (seemingly) plunge to his feet from the icy shock of that...and now oddly unsatisfied, the Book Murderer got dressed, pushed his way out the front door with his jacket hanging half off him and shambled down to the sea wall. No one walked there now but the night herons, delicate in their urgency to avoid him, wings taken by the black swell of sea, of sky, so that in flight he saw only the glint off their eyes and beaks and they dissolved right in front of him as they grew distant, only the rough coquina of the wall to orient him now and the faint promise of stars, and him balanced atop arms out palms cupping the wind taking in the taste and smell of the sea the mud flats beyond and their rippling that he could not see but could blessedly hear and half-blind and taken over and given up and so far removed there came a kind of peace as if the sky held him close the kind of peace that he knew could not last would not last unless he walked the sea wall forever and even then would not last because nothing could outstrip his one true impulse even should he want it to. - the Book Murderer, novel in progress (cannot sleep...)
Posted on: Thu, 07 Aug 2014 06:54:48 +0000
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