A Thousand Pig Heads On Sticks

A Thousand Pig Heads On Sticks

Posted by A Great Liar

It’s a day to be quiet; spent in anger and disguise. Because it’s a kind of day that scares you, scares you deep, and scares you good, real good I mean. When you are afraid of nothing more around you, but only yourself.

Afraid of what you have become, if only for a day.

And so you take a day off, a day off from yourself. The trick is to just take a back seat and watch the world go, like a small tin can rolling down the slanted street.

And if you would watch it for too long, you would realize that it’s never rolling in, nor rolling out. Because it never grows too near nor too far, it just rolls.

So what do you do?

You just light the bloody cigarette and take a walk down that street. You simply roll with the can, and never take your eyes off it. You watched it dance, and follow suit. Watch it pull every god damn trick from the bag that is there to be had, and you watch. And ask no questions.

No questions ever. Because there are no answers to be had.

And once you have walked far enough, long enough, you realize you are not alone. No way near! There are people, and always more people. It’s a form of rejoice, a bloody festival out there. Like an ugly welcome, watching them grinning, or somber to the core.    

Walking down the street, filled with walking sticks, moral harelips and hunchbacks, people all around, it was like watching a thousand pig heads sticking out of thousand human torsos, made me feel like a captive walking down an Indian gauntlet, walking down to the scaffold. 

And continued on. Walkin’, and humming, trying not to finish my cigarette in a hurry. Trying to make every moment count. Knowing this is as close to fun as I am capable of being.

And then, from the corner from my eyes, I see a beggar approaching. A beggar with a shine. A physical matchstick of a man with perhaps only enough blood pumped each day to keep the chest heaving.

As the beggar neared, smiling, I spotted a set of healthy white teeth unveiled as his lips widened.

What a smile? I wondered. Now realizing where all the blood in his veins was spent. Like every fiber of his body and soul, the heart, the bones and the blood, committed for one jingle of glory; to keep the teeth shining.

And I moved on. Ignoring him as soon as I first noticed him.

Straight down my eye line, a mother is comforting a little punk ass of her son, a fat round spoiled brat who had just found out that the world isn’t something to be taken granted for. While mother cuddles him, telling him things that like most parents do, things that little punk ass kid like this one has no use for, nor the care.

I watch the kid sobbing, making economical use of his limited set of tears. Spending each with prolonged intermissions, while filling the gap with noise that, with their varying ebb and flow, perhaps represented more grief than there was a genuine case for.

And the woman with expensive embroidery around her hanging cowish motherly skin, the kind of skin that has given birth to hordes of such brats, one too many perhaps, and dark eye shades, kept telling him to trust her, and to have faith in God, though which of those statements she actually meant to be true, it was hard to guess.

Apparently the little kid has taken a fall, face first, into the hard concrete ground, chasing a wild puppy in the street, apparently meaning more harm than love to that innocent creature of God.

And his nose bled, and the bleeding wouldn’t stop, and each drop only brought him closer to death, closer to the unknown, or so the fat kid in big shorts thought. Knowing that he only meant harm to an innocent soul, to a puppy that was now nowhere to be seen, and there would be hell to pay if he dies now, without repentance.

And deservingly so. I mused and moved on. All men should burn for what they do. 5 years old or 85, what’s the difference?

Leaving them to their perils behind, I reached for the cell from my pocket, wishing to make a connection. Recalling an earlier conversation I had, or the lack of it for that matter. Because a phone call spent in silent misunderstanding is not conversation.

Make a connection. But with what? I fumbled in my thoughts. It’s hard to understand the man who woke up in my bed today, it’s hard to look him in the mirror and reach out.

I slipped the cell back in my pocket, wishing nothing no more. Afraid of the disappointment that might await me on the other end of the frequency. Because a hope of being loved, and of being understood, of expectations, bring along with them a hordes of fear and apprehensions.

[Do leave a comment, it matters...]