Outland

My banjo accompanied me to the South Bank of London this past week, where I supervised the construction of yet another sandcouch, this one more massive than the first.

Oop—the stewardess is now sternly advising me to pack away my laptop for takeoff, but I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh bucket of chum for you hungry landsharks.

Cheerio.

Workship

The empress towers above us, her mammoth curves blocking the sun's light. We labor in shadow, pushing her cuticles back with dull scythes, buffing paint from her nails with acetone-soaked towels. Demarcus faints from the vapors. I revive him with a quick slap. 'Wake up, fool. It's time to harvest the nail.'

 In a few hours the sun will crest, and work will become impossible. 'Marcus.' He rattles his skull around in his head for a moment, then picks up his end of the timber saw, muttering under his breath. 

It takes us half an hour to get through the foot-thick keratin on her big toe, pulling back and forth against each other with the weathered longsaw. When it falls with a loud crack, we pause for water and admire its abalone underside. 'Better than last month, eh?' I ask, noting the deep burgundy in the pearled curve. 'Shit, better than all last year,' Demarcus snorts. 'If we can get these clippings past the guards, we'll make a goddamn fortune.' 

In another hour we have finished the toenails of her left foot, with the sun threatening to crest. We rush through the right foot in silence, our arms like pink pistons, blurry in the gathering light. As the sun peaks, Demarcus is finishing the final buff, cursing with spite. I load our cargo into the wagon, surprised by its weight, and pause to finger the iridescent pits that flare now in the noon light. Looking up at the blinding halo ringing the empress's silhouette, I smile, running my tongue over my teeth. The guards will be asleep any minute now. We only have to wait.

And then the long walk home, down the sweating gravel streets. 

And after that, the feast.

Evidence

The bones are calcified and stubborn today. They refuse to be whittled.

I pull my femur out through a small incision above the knee. The yellow deposits scarring its length blossom like lichens in the dim light. I marvel at the bone's heft, the way its enamel chips and peels beneath my touch. In books, the bones always gleam, as if the anatomist polished them himself. But here, in my hands, the body is no gem, no painstaking work of art. The body is savage. The femur is a war club, not made for dancing or walking up hills, but for battle. 

88 Keys

Fresh from the shop and ready for a spin
around the proverbial soapbox.

Slog

Apologies my absence, children. I left cousin Cleve in charge of posting this past week, but it seems Scout's burial proceedings were arduous and ongoing. 

Fear not children, as I have returned, and will get back to whittling my bones into sap-amber gems for your consumption tomorrow afternoon.

Until then,

Nonfiction

Jenny like to faint when she caught him out there yesterday. Him with his shirt off, and his eyes all red and rolling in his head, digging with that shovel in the rock-dry dirt. Said he called the machine men with their diggers but they couldn't come today, said he would do it himself, same as he did every thing.

But he couldn't do nothing. She'd seen him standing in the field a week before, holding a shotgun to that horse's dumb eye and shivering in his sweat. He couldn't do it, and anyone could see that Scout's dick was eat up with that black rot, and someone had to do it. Doc Harper gave him cream, but he couldn't rub it on without it flaking scabs and dropping brown blood in his hand, and he would cry then and couldn't do it. 

Look at him out there, digging still and that blue-gray body swelling in the heat beside him. Neighbor Dan said he never slept last night, just hacked at the ground and made low animal sounds all night long. I tell him he'll never get deep enough like that, but he's not here, he's somewhere in that dirt already, pulling it over him like a blanket, that blue-black body a pillow tucked beneath his rolling head.