PET SHOP
The meannest hour. Chill wind finally defeated. In all senseless dullness, a pet shop window and its contents blankly examined. Plastic brass cages. Plastic wicker baskets. Plastic wooden hutch. Freak show props. Haunted kennels, silhouette bones. Glass rubble fish-tank, razor-blade fish. Death camp rodents huddled like friends, and a scorpion driven schizophrenic by a shorting neon. The arse of a bunny. Something the reptile refused to eat. In the spotlight, tonight's special: six mongrel kittens, the littlest no longer shivering. Back there in the half-dark, the skin-trade counter, brooding through massive, guilty oak. From a room beyond its shadow, now: the croak of a nightmaring bird of paradise.
Altogether a wakeful cast.
Other eyes, savage and vague, no longer scrutinise. Lose focus.
Reflected black in black black glass.
The rope-noose halo of a shirt collar.
Paradoxically, next door is brightly lit with closing time. Crumpled beer cans expelled by an Asian ghost in overalls. He flicks, flicks, flicks habitually at new indelible stains. Radio noise, relentless, is mixed with the troubling stench of wasted food.
Drifted away. Swallowed down hunger and drifted away.
Twinned doorways, cracked paint. Cracked windows, cracked street numbers. Two posters freshly soaked in rain glue. A pair of sleeping men, slumped down faceless. They sleep as they live, without dreams. At the next corner, a dustcart, its driver sucking a bottle. A pigeon, almost dead, sucking up gutter-fluid. A handbag flipped inside out. An automobile, the last or the first, ignites to rip through the rain.
That awful skyline is dragging down sky.
Flakes of moon, ridiculous clouds. The jeer-threat of a new sun. Under the anorak, under the scalp; ant-dust and clotted hair. Somewhere below, shoes fused with the feet of a corpse. Filthy garments sopping...
At last a frown (at last!):
'Where is my bed?'
Recollection - then a smile all wrong.
The old women had locked the outer doors again. That bloody barricade. So he climbed the back wall. Noisily. Over the trash. Through the mud-filled flower beds. He stood, cranked up to the last. Swayed under quick-motion clouds. And stared through a scarlet-green window.
On a broken morning hers were the only sleep-dealing shadow-lights.
(ENOUGH! ENOUGH NOW!)
But the witches had barred the back door, too. Hands to his mouth, he hissed out the name. Waited and snarled. Gripping the portcullice he shrieked out her name.
Then surrendered to silence and kicked through the slats.
A life, more or less, afterwards:
Bad time bitten off; thrown off with half a wardrobe. The body: kneaded and scrubbed and quenched. Though the terrible shade of a face unaltered.
A second vision, angelic and white; only a little more drawn tonight.
I said I'd fix the door. I said I'd fix the door. I said I'd fix the door!
Under her sun, he fixed the door.
