And the brownback walked soulless among the many rival geometries of the city, and its necromancers enticed him with myriad layered putrescences and pouches of skulldust ground of the skulls of great men liberated from history’s yoke by the ætherial lightness of the dust great men who merely happened to be large of crania and he came across a lecherous little alley shunned by lanterns and streetlights alike, and there he stopped to breathe the dust out of his cheeks. The alley’s only ornaments worthy of receiving the regally silver benedictions of frozen moons and saddened stars were its many puddles, wherein fecund particles of mud danced around the moon and stars to present their dark, earthy homage.
And browncoat paid no mind to such arrogant natural effervescence as he abhorred kant and he looked instead on the pride and glory of humanity’s bosom two freshly faced six-to-seven year old boys plump of arm and betaken of juvenile jocularity. The boys were as of yet unburdened with ABCs and odes to the motherland and cared not five kopeks of Zeus’s infidelities or the happy beauty of a broken nutcracker. They were both dressed in black and were distinguishable only by the fact that the slightly bigger of the pair cuddled a strong beard of strong black that kissed the perpetually renewed scars on his exposed knees. He also bore proudly a moustache and a fur helmet and a quartet of accentuated well-spun forelocks that templed his temples and softly played with his portly white-rimmed glasses. The other boy had a Jewish nose and very small ears. They sat on the sidewalk and sipped together of a serious book. They pointed out passages to one another and made shy, cluttered notes on the ungenerous margins. Their eyes and faces moved across the lines in absolute synchronicity and not once did one of them have to wait for the other to finish or reread the paragraph so he could turn the page. Upon finishing a strenuously engaging chapter the bearded child abandoned the book, kneeled in front of the by now fully vertical proboscis’d boy, lowered the latter’s playground shorts and absorbed his impatient and delicately miniaturised spear into his mouth. The larger of the boys sacrificed with his softest aperture before the god of the pike for a good half hour without receiving any empyrean pollutions for his assiduity, but his efforts did not abate and his enthusiasm only matured into a spectacular and infinite variety of velvet-tongued magics and improvisations. The receiver of tributes had opened the serious book once more by this point, and held it with his left hand just above his midriff, and read from it in his deep, scarred voice while his right hand stood suspended above the serious book’s open pages, his thumb entwined at the fingertips with his little finger and his ring finger while his index finger and his middle finger protruded upwards with great rigidity. Upon reaching a word to which he could not lend a correct pronunciation, or a passage to which he could not offer an unclouded, penetrant mind, he called on the bearded boy to suspend his offerings awhile, and to look up to the receptacle child’s face. As their mater dolorosa gazes clashed, the upright boy absolutely karamazoved and slashed at the bearded boy’s faces with the sharp gilded edges of the serious book and started clobbering his head with the serious book as hard as was conceivable for a seven year old to do under relatable circumstances. The four-locked child did not accept this treatment passively for long, and he disarmed his assailant of the serious book with promptness and proficiency and from the first pages of a chapter on personal hygiene extracted an unused izmel in perfect condition. Meek blade in hand, he made a wild lunge at his opponent’s throat, but the blow was so powerfully built up it sacrificed mobility and adaptability, and so the powerful blow was easily dodged by the smaller boy, who took advantage of the ensuing disorientation to knock off the larger boy’s shtreimel with a swift backhand that also left the larger boy’s left cheek red and humiliated. From the lost shtreimel the smaller boy pulled out a rustily grinning machete that was longer than his arm and twice as wide. But as always in implausible cinematic combat, it is somehow inevitably the fighter facing the superior weapon that inexplicably profits from it by immediately gaining the upper hand as soon as said superior weapon is brought into play against him; this savage brawl was no different and, after a sequence of ferocious gashes and knees to the crotch that left the bearded boy nigh beardless and the smaller boy nigh shorter by an head or two, the fierce warriors locked arm and blade one last time and the quicker of the two was the larger boy and the larger boy lost his perfectly new izmel to the silenced depths of the smaller boy’s throat. The smaller boy dropped his machete – a deeply satisfying clang could not fail to emanate as the blade scratched the sidewalk – and fell flat on his back. The playful streamlets of blood singing mute songs from the silence of his throat disposed themselves organically, like the darkest skeletal lines of a perfectly dried autumn leaf, desiccated beyond color, nature, fiction. The smaller boy told the larger boy in victory that he, the smaller boy, was committing menticide, and all that had transpired had transpired following closely and faithfully the course and lifeline of his own will. The larger boy pillowed the dying smaller boy’s head using the serious book, but the smaller boy spat it out, for he would have none of it when it truly mattered. Hearing this, the larger boy was enraged, and so he picked up from the dirty street the two metres of black beard the smaller boy had severed off him during their earlier fracas, and he tied the black beard thrice around the dying smaller boy’s mouth so he would stop saying things the larger boy could not understand. He then attempted to offer penance and relight the fire of the altar to which he had so fervently and ably sacrificed mere minutes earlier, but the flame was playful and would not come back regardless of the skill vested in the larger boy’s seductions. To this the larger boy had nothing to say, so he became mute also. Thus did he think on his fight with the smaller, hatless boy, and he screamed that he felt guilty over surviving; who was the serious book to arm him and steel him and whisper him and ensure he survived, he demanded to know in his childish tongue.
And the brownback drew no pleasure listening inner debates neither wise nor witty, for another man’s casuistry or heuristic was a drunken torch in the wooden barn of brownback’s conversational twinning with him, even and especially should said man be a young boy unable to sin, and this was given down unto them by the law. And he silverwalked in the moonlight instants long and wistful, all so the screaming kid would shut the fuck up, or at least stop shouting and start sobbing, since sobbing is quieter than shouting.
upon reflecting further it has been decided both boys should be six. six years old the two of them, producing a total of 12 years and change. and one of them will stay six for a long long time
And browncoat sleepran inside the morning and he stopped by an house with an open window where he heard a man tell a woman that she smelled like cock and morning breath after she had bestowed upon him an half-heartedhalf-forced morning blowjob. And he sleepran past morning people with faces like photocopies, thin and washèd-washable. The people moved in one way and the people moved in the other way, one direction and the other direction, and tall people in a short building were doing push-ups 99 98 97 96 94 93 92 91, and so it went, and short people were drinking tall cups of coffee and paper, and the paper broke from the coffee and floated in the coffee and in the paper, and all of it all of this did not, most definitely did not, lead to something old something fierce.
And browncoat climbed into a cab and snuggled and told the cabbie to drive to anywherever and the cabbie listened and drove and then the cabbie dropkicked brownback off in front of the city courthouse. And many people were walking up the courthouse steps all courthouses must have steps and lots of them and a nice view off their courthouse steps so people can go on saying courthouse steps and go on thinking about courthouse steps and the view and what a lovely imageëxpression courthouse steps makes. And the browncoat did not forget the view.
And all the people walking up the steps carried gavels and there was not a rotting soul to be seen among them without a gavel, confidently manipulated in their left or sometimes their right hands. And the begavelled people stopped occasionally and pounded on the steps us
ing their gavels and sometimes crashed their gavels atop each other’s heads and some thought this was funny and some thought it, musical and lyrical and there, were great orchestras of a great and many gavels and people blew into the,ir gavels and fiddled their gavels and plucked at, their gavels; and the noise of the courthouse steps thought the brownback something old and something fierce. And brownback simply thought (:) something old something fierce.
And the browncoat and other people knew no night but their mournings were for their sleep and of their dreaming.
And of course the browncoat knew it would be anticlimactic for him not to walk into the courthouse of punishment at this point and the idea smiled him but he forgot to backsmile so he walked into the courthouse.
And of course something was going on in the main courtroom. A scene was being rolled out like a red carpet the cleaner sent back uncleaned because it was too large and too cheap and unwieldy. Although it was early mourning, the jury of twelve had already clicked on a verdict. It may even have been the same verdict but no one knows, not really, and that is for history to judge anyway. For the jury of twelve liked the verdict. Also they liked the concept of verdict. And jury and defendant and public, they all rose when someone said all should rise but without the should since it didn’t seem that optional. And the Greek chorus addressed the defendant directly but left him curiously nameless, maybe it had forgotten or the defendant had forgotten his name or perhaps not, and it enumerated the many charges the defendant had faced down valiantly and eloquently over the few insignificant preceding seconds when the browncoat and his parasites hadn’t been there in the courtroom, and all were solemn. And the Greek chorus asked the jury whether they had boarded a verdict, and the twelve people in the jury of twelve were naturally very well-behaved and completely silent, their silence was very disciplined and the jury said nothing for over ten minutes. So the defendant, who was already up and bored of it, adopted a pompous stance and stood higher and declared that the defendant finds the jury guilty as charged on all counts. And everyone exchanged alarmed looks, but no one was genuinely surprised since everyone verily had agreed this was what this trial had been racing calamitously towards since the very beginning. And the defendant sat down and he was wearing an unsurprising orange jumper and he rose again and manœuvred his shackled hands into the inner pocket on the left side of his orange jumper with great difficulty, produced a smallish handgun and shot each of the twelve assholes in the head twelve times. Eleven freeform and a single proverichniy between the globes. People in the stands seemed uncomfortable and some decried the lack of separation of the judiciary and the executionary branches, but they did so in hushed banter and in a manner that made it clear they didn’t think they knew better, it was just a friendly outraged suggestion ‘twasall. Before people could exhaust their bored conversations and disperse, the orange jumper identified the person with the largest gavel in the courtroom, commandeered said precious gavel and giddyup rode out of the courthouse, leaving of course an heady trail of fetters and falsetto.
And there he, brownback, was, the paced cutter. Although he had never cut anyone in his life. Life all fancy and proper popper pauper sorry properly capitalized made him chuckle but he thought it inappropriate although it wasn’t and so he didn’t laugh.
and the old man (had) said
‘you are hereby found guilty of being a cliché’
Chapter vii