stunt_muppet

I know, I'm surprised too. Haven't done that since I was eight. I got the idea after my seminar today and then I just picked a bench (it was a nice day outside), sat down, and wrote it. Hmm.

I don't really know what to do with it so it's going here.

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When I was small I found something washed up on the beach.

Memory is quite unreliable – I remember the object as a long cardboard box, four thin rectangular sides topped off by a perfect cube on the ends. Cardboard would fall apart in the ocean.

And so I wonder now if I really remember the wriggling, muscular bodies of the things attached to that plank, glistening with wormlike segments. I wonder if I really remember how they teemed like Medusa hair.

I wonder if it’s only now – now that I’ve studied the subconscious and how our culture has lapped up the most sensational stories of Freud

Now that I’ve seen the woodcuts of women engaged in coitus with a squid

Now that every campfire horror story needs its very own Nameless Thing From Beyond Space and the tentacles of Elder Gods twist bonelessly in shadows where werewolves and vampires used to hide

I wonder if now that I know that humanity has dredged up its nightmares and its dreads and its desires from the bottom of the ocean, or seeded the seas with our obsessions and waited for them to sink and grow in the pressure and the dark –

I wonder if that’s why I remember the long plank on the beach, covered with tiny, squirming purple phalluses with split white heads like pistachio shells.

I remember when I saw them on the beach back then they reminded me of the deep-sea creatures I had read about, eyeless stalks that lived on the sea floor and fed on the heat and nutrients of the Earth’s lowest reaches. I remember they reminded me of the illustrations in my books, of the ocean-floor things that I thought looked like tulips or tubes of lipstick puckering their mouths for a kiss –



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I actually did find that plank on the beach, incidentally. And the critters attached to it looked pretty much how I describe them looking - at least I think they did. I still don't know what they were.

Also that's some inconsistent imagery I've got going on there. Hmm.