francisco javier es una (pesadilla) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-06-06 16:44:00 |
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Entry tags: | cheshire cat, door: tales |
Who: The Cat
What: A discovery and a question
Where: Home that is not home; Wonderland
When: Shortly after this.
Warnings/Rating: None.
First, Rabbit? But, no. He did not part with parts of his heart, neither the ticks nor the tocks, that much the Cat knew. He had seen and he had heard the scream. No, not Rabbit. Second, Mouse. It fit. Yes, scritch scratch teeth skimmed, offering a message, a later. Mouse, yes. So it was. A small thing meant as a coin under a paw, a sovereign, picked out in alligator jaws, in the design of the mother of thousands, red, green, blue, gold, a diaglyph of nature gone awry. (Was that possible? No. No.) The brambles where the Cat rested his head at night, laced as lovers' hands, were a lococession, meant to collect tithing, it seemed. Yes, he was a priest. It was a box meant to mandate redemancy. Meant to take. Or perhaps they were but a simple depository, supine palms of the earth, a vessel of amarulence offered to the Cat when the sun dipped so. It was difficult to tell. The night was dark and hung from the branches in wispy shadows one might pick and stitch together, if one wished to join in. The Cat sat kneeling in the veprecose copse he didn't call home, as 'home' was not a concept he accepted, but that he called a sleeping-place, a sleeping-place he had inhabited before, a place Mouse knew as well as her tilting, plaster of Paris hallways, if the dear remembered. And the Cat did not doubt that his brother remembered. If it was later after one looked, then the brewing, campanulate storm in the watch, trilling with the hour, was not to be looked at. It must be now. Now. Now. Now. NOW. The Cat felt a lunate grin break on his lips, jewels spilling into the rushes, and he took the gift. He laid it carefully on the carpeting of lush grass, going so far as to think of his brother while he did it. It begged him to rethink in a frantic fit of ticking, but he refused. His own face was reflected, reticular and brutish in its femininity. It was an act of angry gold, desperation reigning at the skeleton arm of the gallows, a bending of a particular reality to throw the Cat off and give him pause. It did not. The mask cracked and footing fumbled. Ivory blanched. There came no pause, no reprieve. A crazed heart thundered, arrhythmic, scattered. Blood clambered chamber to chamber. Without a ripple in the unearthly pond of his eyes, the man fetched the earth's missing tooth, a shovel-shaped incisor rough beneath hands soft as the pansy's petal, and he smashed the watch to nothingness in Wonderland's trochiline dirt. It is always later, after you've looked. And so it was. The Cat’s eyes were bright and ecstasiate. He righted a curled lock that dangled over the perfect skin of his forehead, sweeping it back with earth-black fingers, and he stood, the tithing now a shattered galaxy of sideral glass, springs, and minute gears. It was ugly. He held it a moment, wondering, wondering, wondering, wondering in Wonderland—how did a mouse differ from a morning or a morning from a mouse? Later, dear. How obscene was the cleverness of children, of boys turned girl. It was a gravitational pull, strong and sweet, that he couldn't deny, a fraternal tug of the cuff. Sugar on the tongue. Yes, that was it. Alice? He dropped it, this cosmogyral universe of clocks and stars and things he did not want, and left to find a new sleeping-place. The Cat's lips split in a grin that would have been a frown on any face but his own. “It is not the red. Both bleed red,” he said to himself thoughtfully as he went. It was something else. Certainly, it was something else. |