The Dark Red Flowers

Back I go to the room with vases of flowers. I think the flowers were there to keep the smell out. The windows were open and the white curtains kept dancing in and out, like they wanted to be outside but then changed their mind. Perhaps they were waiting for the rain to fall or maybe they needed permission to escape the smell.

I sat in a chair my feet were dangling above the floor. I couldn’t reach the floor but my laces did and I made them dance across the lino. I hummed something I had just made up in my head. I wanted to make up a song about a bird, but I didn’t know names of any birds so I asked the lady

“ Can you tell me a name of a bird?” She said nothing, but she turned her head to look at me and a tube came out of her nose. She wanted to speak but her mouth was stuck together, I could see the glue at each corner, that’s how close I was, that close to her china face. The walls were covered in bamboo wallpaper, the room looked like a conservatory. I loved that room, but I didn’t like the smell. It smelled of stillness and waiting and time and pressure and it smelled hot and it smelled heavy and mostly

It smelled like dead flies in a jar.

She had given me a doll. Its arms were turned upwards like a newborn babies arms when you lie them down on their back. She said if I cuddled it enough it’s arms would go down. I cuddled it once. I did not like it. It smelled of plastic and its eyes would not close and its arms did not go down. And I did not like it.

When the flowers all died in the vases, the vases were removed and packed in newspaper and then in boxes, and then the boxes were closed and they put big brown tape around them. I liked that room. I liked the wallpaper and the way the chairs were set up against the back wall, we could sit all in a row and I would count everyone.

I liked the way my laces dangled on the floor and I could think about birds. The smell had gone and they took the wallpaper off the wall. I was upset. My beautiful room was empty. I still did not know the name of any birds. My doll stared at me from the chair in the doorway she wanted me to hold her, but I could not. I could not bear to hold her and pretend to love her. I did not love her and would not like her ever again.
She stared at me

“I hate you”

I said, and my beautiful room was empty.

Much later when I returned to that house it was filled with new things, things which I did not understand. Words I could not read and people I did not know. There was a table and it was filled with new vases and new flowers. There were big flowers and they smelled nice. There were pink flowers and yellow flowers together with labels, and leaves in a round circle, and white flowers that looked like coconut marshmallows, they were the best ones. But then some new ones appeared and they were dark red they were the best ones of all, they were the best flowers in the world and I jumped up and down at all the flowers

“Sit down, be quiet, shhhushh you”

I had to be quiet. I thought about birds and dark red flowers and everyone was wearing black and it was like a fairy tale and I was red riding hood in my red shoes, which were new and made my feet sore. I sang about my red shoes, I would not be quiet no matter what she said and even if she kept shushing me. Everyone was happy then, and they stopped crying and listened to my new song about my new shoes. A man laughed and wiped his face and laughed more. And this little boy laughed and we were allowed to play in my beautiful room, which was empty. I could still see the dark red flowers in the doorway, my doll had gone. I was glad. I did not like her.
I never saw the lady again and I did not see the man laugh again.

And the windows were open and the white curtains kept dancing in and out, like they wanted to be outside but then changed their mind. Perhaps they were waiting for the rain to fall or maybe they needed permission to escape the smell of all the dark red flowers.

© Marjorie Razorblade

The Taking of Tea and Cake
The dull afternoon sweeps itself under the carpet, hiding itself in readiness, for the grey slopped watery windows of evening.
It’s pissing down again, Dogs and Cats on the lawn tearing out one another’s throats.
We are both mashed into a fine pulp of over indulgence, we bicker and quarrel our way though life in a seamless fluid motion; from the over arching arm of guilt, to the foot pedal of trampled obscurity, we are stitched together in unison.

Animosity and Love; Love has departed and now what remains amid animosity but the Taking of Tea and Cake?

Cake is divided, he favours coconut fingers, I am partial to carrot, two lines of carrot Cake and an evening of Rabbit teeth lie in wait, nomming silently on life’s foibles, the dust bunnies join us in silent reverie as he spins tales of what he will do and what he will be,

He will never amount to anything much.

I know this to be a fact; he will persist and coddle his beloved lost art of fuck all, taking breaks between the teetering precipice of real life and illusion, Nintendo and making Tea, moaning over everything, hiding in the shitpit of male dominated crapulence until the fall out has leeched him white.
We shuffle room to room occasionally colliding with one another on our way to another corner, another darkened 45 degree mitre joint of skirting boards which mark our boundaries.
Coming together for dinner of stew and nothingness.

We take Tea, we bake Cake; we use teaspoons and stir our troubles into wooden bodies and our crystallized veins. I inform him of our friend’s perceptions,

How we work and live and breathe steadily for five days and draw reform for two, the Sabbath being the one day we rest and conjugate prior to dissection of our lives. Friends on the inner circle know the form, no other living souls aware, until this reading illuminates the bare swinging bulb of our truth.

Like our probability theory of loose fractals, we reduce gradually, smaller and smaller until we reach tipping point, we simmer down, a rolling boil surrounds us and we break, screaming and fighting our way to forgiveness, venting fury in our release from drudgery.
It is tiresome. My Tiger of metal has been shaved and chained. Its cries are guttural. It’s response to danger, reactive.

He spins a borrowed guitar with one broken string and dreams of being a superstar. She swings a cardboard bass and dreams of being alone in the jungle, nameless human, creature with stripes.
The cog turners have no idea. They work diligently in smart clean and washed pressings, no idea of his existence; his obscure and wretched deviation from model maker’s son to model maker’s mess with dried up glue and airfix issues. Cake eater, Cake taker, Tea maker... His Ping Pong Paddle is still a lingering doubt in my humble mind; borne of naivety and pushed into his world of blood and teeth, filth and glue, blackened fingers; desolation. Nothing including money. All in vain.

I had no choice in hearing this tale of the Ping Pong Paddle, you can choose to close the book or skip a page.

Five seconds until you start reading….

‘His Ping Pong Paddle Past.’

A dull afternoon swept itself under the carpet, hid itself in readiness for the grey slopped watery windows of evening. He walks out into the rain, no coat no umbrella, no hope. The rain washes oily grime from his pores, he is untouched by his past, it haunts no one but the people he wants to love unconditional. Too fucking bad then that he carries a millstone of depression around, tied to his poison tail - untie it for him, help him in any way, and he’ll reward you with broken peptide bonds, pierce your vena cava and fill you with lifeless venom until your eyes glaze blackened and dead. He is pure poison; unison of Scorpion and Snake melded into a vitriolic nature.
A frightening creature of Pure Poison.

Who would choose such a bitter and dangerous opponent?
“Not I” said the Tiger.

(Shush Tiger, this is not the time.)

Boredom made him venture the street; came for him in the guise of a deceitful sexual deviant (masquerading as friend.)
Homosexual liaisons which left the poisoner with a taste of his own medicine pushed down his throat- oh he could give it to anyone could our poisoner, but he could not take it; his mouth repelled it, throwing with it his big ‘I am’ bile to the pavement.
The world’s worst dabbler, the bored and disappointed with embarrassment smeared around his face like fruitless jam, entered the arena of the perverse – (why he shared this with me is unknown) I considered my appearance in his life to be that of a Mayfly; flighty, insubstantial and perched on the wind, carried towards the Pike lurking in the dirty pond, saved only by the tentative hold of pond weed at the last minute– for the time being.

I am nothing in his life but his measure for future distance.

The bald vested man sat in the chair; I imagine orange windows with 1970’s concrete street lamps shining their vulgar eyes onto his sad and lonely living room feet. Deceitful sexual deviant (masquerading as friend) held his private parts in one hand, cheese grater in the other and began to rub the two together, high on opiate or anti spasmodic for renal colic, our poisoner (turned septic Cake baker) lingered behind the strange duo, and placed into his hand was -

The Ping Pong Paddle.

He accepted it, and joined the duo, now an amalgamated trio of ‘the moment.’

Bat bat bat bat bat, bald headed blood runs into the old mans eye, bat bat bat bat bat, bald headed blood runs down the old man’s chin.
Bat bat bat and on, ad infinitum.

But to what purpose did he paddle?
For a lift home was the answer.
For what purpose did the bald man be ping-ponged?
Because our bald vested war veteran had no hope, no wife, no garden, no grandchildren and no way out except Death.
 
No friends, no nothing. He raised his hand as a willing target for anything to make him feel human, make him complete, make him loved in his own warped and frightened way. A perverse past and an unquestioning Paddler.
I am overloaded with this information, bought to you from the poisoner who now fills my home with his despotic fuming.

“Let me out, I’ll kill him.”
(You’ll have your time yet Tiger, but wait my love, wait until his back is turned, we will gobble him up in one bite.)

Now a small pause in this flashback, for the Taking of Tea and Cake,

Tea to wash down the vileness of the Cake; its starch laden fingers of glassy bitterness, use the spoon, stir the trouble, take the trouble; lie dormant in pools of garbage like Iguanas on hot rocks, breathing out billowy clouds of smoke with white coconut marshmallow icing noses.

The dull afternoon sweeps itself under the carpet, hiding itself in readiness, for the grey slopped watery windows of evening. He spins a borrowed guitar with one broken string and dreams of being a superstar, she dreams of the day she opens the cage and runs free.

We lay facing inward, high and infatuated with one another, until it’s time once more, for the Taking of more Tea and Cake.

© Marjorie Razorblade

Comments: His honesty never ceases to amaze me.