Note of the Week 017
The following excerpt is from Taking Jezebel, Chapter VI.
Peter made for the pier, which stuck out into the Pacific like the continent’s own corroded protuberance. It seemed to bob in place alongside the ferris wheel, which stood on stilts and swayed in pace with its ligneous neighbor. Both seemed to hang by their last fragile threads, ready to collapse at any moment. Along the way he spotted two young women holding hands. One had a mohawk, dyed blue, and a piercing shaped like a bone struck horizontally—and stiffly—through her nostrils. The other was morbidly obese and wore too-tight clothes, her love handles rolling over the sides of her dirty black jeans.
When Peter passed them, they glowered toward him. The fat one raised her plump hand to expose her middle finger, and she grimaced like a feral cat, her fulvous teeth bared.
He hurried along. As he made his way farther out along the wharf, he ran his hands across the rope suspended at its edge. He let its coarseness grate against his palms and stopped to reflect on the scene, plopping into a seated position with his legs dangling over the edge of the construction, suspended ten feet above the billowing ocean below. Bits of salt water picked up in the sea breeze and sprayed against his calves. He stared up at the big, lifeless ring of the Circular Serpent above him. It floated in place, and its little cabs swayed indistinctly. What looked like a girl in one of the lower compartments peered down at him, met his gaze, and matched his insouciance. It was only a doll.
While he swung his sandaled feet above the eddies, a stranger passed along the pier behind him, quiet as a breath.
Peter rose to leave—to find a less macabre stretch of beach—and saw the newcomer. The man waltzed unhurriedly toward the far end of the pier with his back turned to Peter. He was wearing unremarkable gray track pants, which floated around his slim form, and a black hoodie pulled up over his head. The man approached the very tip of the walkway and turned sideways, revealing his profile: a fat lip, bulged and purple. His nose dribbled gouts of green fluid. The one eye that was visible looked swollen shut, its shape bloated, tumescent with bruising.
Peter walked toward the man and shouted, “Hey! You okay?”
The stranger’s lower jaw unclenched and shot downward, releasing a flow of spittle that stained the boards between his sneakered feet. His mouth clicked back and forth, unhinged and shut with force, while his tongue rolled loosely around the repository of his mouth. When he turned to face Peter, the man released a grating, clicking sound—something akin to the noise of an electric can opener. His malformed face, now fully exposed, showed a neck swollen outward to meet the slope of his chin; there was no difference in width between the bulged shape of his face and throat. His lips were fleshed out by the bloating of his tongue, which lolled freely about its moistened home due to a shortage of teeth (the ones that were present had browned and rotted, hollowed out with infection like the small cavities of a crow’s wet, staring gaze). The skin of his lips crackled with a milky, pus-hardened casing between rows of open sores. His left cheek was pocked with small holes, like burning shrapnel had shredded out fresh, hot openings in the side of his face, to reveal his shining gums and jagged, crushed molars. His left nostril was stamped closed by a thin overgrowth of some slick membrane. The right nostril hung open, receptive. There, tiny foramen interlaced together—writhing, stringy fibers deep inside of him, attached to the cartilage like parasitic worms. When the mangled orifice of his nose dilated with respiration, those white organic threads swelled, brimmed, and then shrank down again. His ears and brow were shrouded by his hoodie, smudged with effluent or worse, but those eyes—even in the shadow of his browned jersey—were crammed with blood and emotion, like the hate of a rabid wolf. The sockets were tumefied by an overgrowth of fatty tissue, and puffy blood vessels framed his barbarous gaze like a throbbing, biotic trellis.
