kagablog

A hot Friday oozes in. The temperature goes up like a big red firecracker. The lagoon reaches up and swallows the night whole. Barefoot sneakings in the dark. Skinnydipping in the dark mirrors which lie heavy under the gigantic mangrove trees. Summer drops a bottle-green mirage over everything. And the night goes warm and moist as a teenage kiss. Glowflies code in the creepers. Mayflies make up ghosts above the warm churn. Chalkboy, Deloozghe, Flakie and Strawberry are strewn about a slurping shore. Shadowy kids lug coolers of frosties and num nums in the background. Gracie is swimming somewhere in the dark. Chalkboy skims a stone across the surface and shatters the moon. Frogs billow and lull. Flakie is up a tree with a mouthfull of lager and a headfull of traffic. Deloozghe sits staring at nothing at all. She is heavy orange like the way you’d call a fat cat gingery. Strawberry wisps off at some point. Probably while the stone is skimming. Chalkboy remembers a time when Flakie was their garden boy. Those days smelled of weed killer. Once he’d fallen in love with the nurse at school and had to be trucked off to the beach clinic for a shot. Now he was mostly to be found in the banana plantations up the coast. Smoking jimblejoog in some cathole, living in shit and consorting with sailors. Chalkboy can hear Gracie giggling somewhere in the swamp. But to move away from all of this, across the wet mud and into the treeline, you can hear the sharp snap of a dictaphone starting up. Wendy’s blue eyes roam the lagoon scene. Her lil sister stands next to her with her mouth open. They hover in the trees.

“I spit bubbles…” Wendy mumbles into the dictaphone. “…and crawl from my underwater cave with big halloween eyes….moving into the lagoon like an enormous fish. Moonbeams are broken all over the bottom of the lagoon and I move in the broken light…and in the weeds….and into the giant curtains of mud. And over me swims THE PERSON. Their squeaky body bobbing like a fishing floater….with hair all slow motion like….moving further and deeper as I swim underneath them. Then THE PERSON stops…The moon is hiding in the trees. I wrap my arms around THE PERSON’s softbody. Then I drag them below the surface and bite off their face.”

The dictaphone gives a sound like a rusty spring when it cuts out. Wendy comes glowingly out of the red line of night. Goldilocks hair up in tails. Her lil sister in hand like some toy laser pistol. Gracie also emerges from the blackness like a drowned and grinning cat. She crawls into Chalkboy’s shadows and quivers wetly. For some reason Wendy and Gracie have always hated each other. They catch eyes and Wendy is thinking the word:mutant.

“Sucky suck,” mutters Gracie and flicks a spitball.

Now there is trouble brewing. Wendy looks around like she is trying to decide which ant to squash first. After a bit she steps over to Flakie’s tree, her sister bobbing in tow like a fairground balloon.

“There are weeds.” Says Wendy bluntly.

Flakie’s head lolls in mute garden boy fear. A shooting star goes by but nobody sees it. Everyone suddenly realises that they are tuned in to the escalating tree situation.

“My little sister has a crush on you,” says Wendy.

And here you can see that she has touched on secret information. Her lil sister giggles hysterically and then falls silent as a potplant. The tension is unbearable. Gracie scoops up a large frog and hurls it at Wendy’s face. It makes a truly awful sound as it breaks against her head. There is a sickening moment of unreality. Then Wendy makes three unbearable noises and no-one looks at her. Her little sister screams as she is dragged painfully back into the trees. Gracie’s eyes are like saucers. She scuttles back to the black water in shock. Her frantic splashing recedes slowly out into the lagoon. Things slow down again. Some flies join the party.

“I’m going away,” says Flakie with an uncommon finality.

Everyone perks up as the tension suddenly re-asserts itself.

“Where you…going?” Deloozghe gloops wide eyed.

Flakie falls out of the tree. Glass breaks dully, but then he is standing and distanced.

“Down the coast,” he moogs. “I have goldfish to feed.”

Now they definitely knew that it had come back. Things were starting to change already.

“That’s nice.” Mutters Chalkboy poisonously.

“I thought…you came to smoke bottles and be nice…” gloops Deloozghe again.

Her words stick together, like when you leave sweets in your pocket all day. Flakie waves slowly.

“Fader.” Says Chalkboy.

Flakie idles in the oily moment.

“I have goldfish to feed…” he eventually slurs.

And then he is gone. The world fills with frogs.

Chalkboy tramps off. Deloozghe is left alone by the sucking water. A moth catches onto her nose, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

“Eskimo pie…” she says very slowly.

An ice-cream man appears down the shore. He pushes a cooler box on wheels. The tinkling bell gets closer and closer until he is there. Coins appear. She gets vannilla dripples all down her double chin. The flies have a field day.

Strawberry strays far into the twisted trees. The mud is warm between her toes as ghostly curtains contort in the breezes. The night is like something breathing. She finds the rickety fishing jetty mostly by touch. Just like the last million times. A million nights on her back counting stars. She lays flat as a fish on the creaking boards and tunes into the chitter and billow of the swamp. After a while she turns her head to look out across the still waters. The mirrors of the lagoon echo the sky along the treeline stitchwork. And the world begins to form an ocean of stars around her. Suns twist between her toes. A shooting star arcs its shivering tracer above and below. She breathes outer space, opens her palms and falls breathlessly into the limpid universe. Bubbles slither away. She sinks into the warm, greenish depths and drifts out. When she breaks the pearly skin, the moon ripples off her hair. She swims farther and farher out into the root tangled corridors of the lagoon. And then she stops suddenly and bobs in the dark. She raises her dripping chin above the waterline of the lightly rolling waves and gazes out into the nearby trees. She can see Flakie stumbling over heavy root systems. She watches him stop after a while and turn his gaze upward into the canopy. And high above him is the angel. Suspended upside down like a spider. Somehow naked, and breathtakingly beautiful. It’s stomach and thighs sticky with light. Strands of light cotton off it. They wisp and cling to damp flakes of bark and the skin of sweet swamp fruit. To pregnant droplets of water and passing moths. Illuminating each from within, like film burning in a projector. And the angel gusts softly in the elastic scratches of light with its knees up under its chin. It edges down through the trees, almost as if it were shifting in a chair. Then it unfurls a luminescent limb like a ballerina in a spotlight. A long hand gathers up Flakie and pulls him high into the leaves. The pale curvature of the angel’s form vanishing like an overexposure on old celluloid. And then the swamp trees are just gusting in the night breezes. And nothing stirs in them except looping fruitbats and the many silent highways of sap drunk insects. Strawberry sighs and begins to empty her lungs completely. She sinks back into the warm starry voids below, watching the bubbles string from her face as the world floats away. Her next breath would be from a different world now. She blinks silver from her eyelashes. The murky depths seem to have abruptly taken on all the dark saltiness of a womb. A womb in which the bones of something enormous are just beginning to form.

Chalkboy tramps all the way down to the highway. Then walks till she can see the beach. It lies naked as a bone in the moon. The sea is boiling black. She stops once or twice, certain that she is being followed. But the highway always seems to blow dark and empty. Once she is almost sure that she sees a little grey boy dodge into the cane. But she doesn’t trust her eyes on the road at night. She carries on walking along the side of the highway for a while before cutting down to the sand. She realizes that she is walking to the Judge Tree just before it comes into veiw. It stands alone in the wasteland stretch of beach, towering like a black cross against the ragged skies. Coconuts wait like heads under its lashing fronds.

“There’s always one…” Chalkboy speaks into the crash of the surf.

Then she notices that there is a shadow standing beneath the tree. She wades across the bleak landscape toward it. The shadow becomes Bantam. He turns when she is near but doesn’t wave. They’ve been avoiding each other all week. The two shadows stand beneath the monstrous tree for what seems like hours without saying a word. The moon does not ever move. Further down the beach is the ancient carcass of a beached ship. The black waves fill it like an empty skull. There is a machete staked in the sand.

“It came back.” Says Bantam.

Chalkboy rummages in her hat for a cigarette and manages to light it against the wind.

“After so long,” says the shadow of Bantam’s head. “I thought it was a story somebody read to me…..Or maybe a dream.”

Chalkboy blows out smoke but doesn’t see it for the breeze and moon. The fronds of the black tree lash like razors above them.

“Flakie came here tonight,” says Bantam, and this time Chalkboy looks at him.

His face moves like gritty film. Blue and washed in the light.

“He didn’t see me. But I saw him,” Bantam murmers.

“He picked a winner.” He adds after a pause, kicking over a dark, headlike shape.

It squelches slightly. A briny, fermented stench escapes from it. The moonlight reveals a coconut with oil black flesh.

“There’s always one.” Chalkboy re-iterates bleakly.

“It’ll take us just like it took Glennie and Fry when when they were children….” Bantam says staring out at the dead ship.

“We were all children,” mumbles Chalkboy.

Bantam looks right through her.

“And now we are again.” He states flatly.

A bitter wind blows in from the ocean and the tree begins to thrash maniacally.

The weather turns sour and indecisive. Slow sliding visions blur the streets at night. The alleyways bleed black shadows and the town seems changed somehow. Like it is growing a moustache. All the angles are quietly wrong. That Friday the moon was as ripe as a maggot, or a suckled breast. If you listened to the wind you would have heard the baying of black dogs over the cane. Deloozghe’s cat died on the stroke of midnight. Choking on a white locust. An awful quiet falls on the town. Like christmas in the middle of nowhere. And they all know that it was hanging around again. In all the old corners. Waiting silently for them to come. Like everything in the town had turned to lean imperceptibly in its direction. And the moon even seemed to stay ripe and full. Like any moment something big would come by and just pick it.