Cards

 A sequel to Temples.

“A joint during the night,

Slaps the Devil, tight.

A joint during the day,

I make the cards you play.”

‘Dad, dad’, panted the little fisher-boy with an eye full of conundrums which were vexed into a distorted queue so that chipping their heads off could be sequential. The other eye was eaten by some fish when he was younger. ‘What?’, asked the dad with little amusement. ‘Have you heard of the lamb who rode the bicycle?, the boy slipped in quickly. ‘No, but I have heard of the cow who ate grass and the cat who ate fish’, the dad burst off like a chocolate bomb. ‘Really? Did the cow fly, was the cat high?’, sprinted the boy. ‘I am going to the joint,’ to eat cherry flavoured vices on double chocolate sins’, the dad took cover. ‘No Dad, you shan’t trade your soul, you mustn’t’, bloomed the boy like a speck of sunshine on a sunflower. ‘They are soles, not soles, my son. Off you go, to the Devil’shell’, the dad rode off on his bicycle. ‘The lamb who rode the bicycle’, the boy winked with his only eye. Only he knew the difference between ‘winked’ and ‘blinked’.

‘Why do they call you the Devil?’, the boy looked at the empty, mobile stand of snacks. The stand was mysterious – sky blue body with gray wheels and glassy eyes. Eyes that shone in the order of bright red and conveyed very bad grammar. ‘Because, you ate the egg?’, breathed the boy on the snail he had picked up from the open dry drain on his way. The red bodied snail flared his horns with diabolical pride.

The day is a bad bad time. ‘Dad, dad, is that you?’ the boy saw the joint walking into his dad through the rusty rib cage that served as a wicket. Wickets are better, they are less private than the doors. The doors only open to the bosses. The doors are big. The day never goes away; the day is like a disease the night has caught. It never goes away. It never does.

Cards. The fisher-boy was a fisher-boy by choice – his dad was an astronaut who sold bird-catchers to birds. The cards were laid on the roof of the monolith. The joint occupied a small place on the roof at the edge. They knew, the world was flat. ‘Do you dream, boy?’, hailed the stranger with a missing tooth, whom the boy talked to everyday. ‘No, sir, I fail the tests’, pissed the boy. ‘There isn’t any test’, burped the stranger. Play your card, birdie – the crocodile charmer nudged. Throwing the card in the air the father of the fisher boy shot at it and yelled ‘It’s birdie, motherfucker.’ ‘I have the pen where they held me till I could walk’, raced the boy, ‘I keep the fishes there’, he finished - he came first.’ ‘The fishes are beautiful – they have fins; but we humans, we are better, we have bins. Lots and lots of them; yet they don’t suffice’, the nose of the stranger dropped as if derelict of bones as the boy left with a rather fishy mien.

‘Is this your idea of a card game? - back home we had a board game, we had monopoly’, puked Sean. ‘What a waste of time. What did the yak say, again?’, cleaned up Sean.

“A joint during the night,

Slaps the Devil, tight.

A joint during the day,

I make the cards you play.”