Читать книгу How Festive the Ambulance - Kim Fu - Страница 8

The Pig Man / Women That Love Too Much

I imagined them in small, idle rooms, sharpening their beaks with nail files, women that love too much, as on a magazine cover: women, do you love too much? On the desks and patterned-papered walls, rotary phones that don’t ring and require a switchboard. Doors with knockers glued in place and disconnected doorbells. I imagined them waiting for me in a universe where there are no other activities, or all other activities are meaningless, and every action is inverted into denial: don’t eat for me, ladies, wring the oil from your feathers, ladies, don’t sing for me, ladies, save your voice. My life, meanwhile, like a boar in a china shop. Behold the fragile things that shatter on my tusks and bucking hooves! Worship the god of destruction! Then they descended. Instead of nipping at the ticks on my back, grooming my bristles and dropping fattened worms into my mouth, instead of riding my back wherever I felt like going, they lifted me in their talons like predatory eagles, like I was a mere fish who could suffocate by the gills. They were silent, swift, black. Their mothers stayed on the telephone wire, watched the spectacle. A murder of mothers with that look in their eyes: You should have known, pig. You should have known.