Calico
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Sir Thomas Browne dug up an urn and wished it could be twenty times larger, that he might crawl inside the grey-green cavern and sleep under the fur of a fungal blanket, that he might hide like a spore for the time that remains; Thomas, the urn is a tomb, not a feather-bed; Cleanthe, beware of the well-rot; a well-rot earns a farmer no real reward, not least because he has to go and clean the damned thing, clean until the brooks run clear; this requires a perilous descent to the bottom, where the skeletons of sunken toads and cats of ill-fortune crunch under his chest-waders—incidentally the skeletons at the bottoms of wells are the chief ingredient in many of the recipes listed in the Libro Islandica Diabolica (1601), a book which details with great liveliness countless gems of shimmering Icelandic esoterica; for instance, the volume tells of a wrecked longship at the northern reaches of the island, the scowling dragon-prow still uncannily intact after many centuries, to which a number of occult properties have been attributed: on a moonlit night in December of 1549 the elderly fisherman Snorri Guðnason witnessed long purple wisps emanating from the hull—the wisps reached out to him, entered his body, and cured him of the dreaded Cod-Lung; a priest in the nearby village of Landjokuller made a cross out of pieces of the derelict vessel and was instantly stricken with the dreaded Cod Fever; a cod cast onto the deck of the ship by an errant wave was instantly transformed into a human and shouted, “I have been cured of the dreaded Cod-Cod!” (thank God)—but we are serious scholars and give little credence to such salty tales, preferring instead to meditate upon the grander mysteries, like those of the stars, which sail out across the black night like so many windborne snowflakes, tumbling and melting and forming, no two exactly alike as my sources never cease to inform me (or if they do not sail like snowflakes they sail like owls, who startle themselves with their own turpitude and take flight—hence their perpetually startled countenances); or speculation about the circulatory systems of animals we have not yet discovered, or the pleasures of freshwater aquatic botany—the modest yet not inconsiderable charm of pondscum, pondscum the colour of Thomas’s urn, of Cleanthes’s well-rot…all of this talk of decay has made me hungry, so I permitted myself just now to put down my pen, go to the refrigerator, and test the readiness of my pears until I found one that was to my satisfaction on the three main points by which I judge pears: first, that the pear be not too hard; second, that the pear be not too soft; third, that the pear be not an apple, a quince, or any other cousin-fruit—upon sharing my criteria with King Bruisemaster XI at the last Conference in Maastricht, he suggested that I more adequately demonstrate what constitutes “too hard,” what signifies “too soft,” lest the list be simply of tautologies; I like King Bruisemaster XI, I guess—and he also happens to be excruciatingly important—so I will patronizingly attempt to fulfill his request as best I can: a pear that is too soft is a pear whose skin seems ready to slip off, skate away; a pear that is too hard resists the impress of the finger or thumb as though a rock, a tough nut, or a human skull; the best pears preserve the teeth, ask politely, are full of no surprises—O but surprises are desirable in their way, I admit, particularly when the colours of the streamers are ultraviolet, the streamers flash like livid intestinal eels with enough electrical power to both kill and defibrillatorily revive a horse, the tickertape parade pours cold beef dip on the heroic Members of Congress, the descent from Everest is interrupted by the delivery of a large novelty cheque from the Publishers Clearing House, or Sir Thomas Tomb evades the long reticulated worm that stalks his muddy English garden like Milton’s Jaggerian Satan (muddy not because of rain—that would be too easy, and play upon facile tropes, England being known for rain—but rather because the inflatable pool burst on account of all the golf shoes) or the Norwich jungle floor, or Cleanthe cleans the well-rot with a special brush he made last summer to pass the time while bedsick—these are all charming diversions, but I fear (yes, real, cold, wake-up-to-the-sound-of-your-own-strangled-screaming fear) the night, and I fear the moon, I fear Icelandic night on the bittercold crystal coast when the black pupiline shore seems to stretch forever in both directions and the ice floes offer no chance of escape by sea, and the land behind is jagged geysered rock with no honest (or even dishonest) soul to be found for thousands of wretched miles, I fear this, and I dream of gigantic capacious urns and long reclining Buddhas who seem so peaceful, but the moon turns into a fork and plucks me out of my brief reverie, I only got one clause in, anyway it plucks me and casts me back out into the smooth sweep of grey icy sea where even the swift merciful plunge of the narwhal’s tusk, O speckled ender of desperate lives, fails to materialize and the night goes on and on and on and the frigid sea pretends to boil and no Homeric epithet could make me remember what it was that I lost to be here in the eternal tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight.
Geoffrey D. Morrison is the author of the poetry chapbook Blood-Brain Barrier (Frog Hollow Press, 2019) and co-author, with Matthew Tomkinson, of the experimental short fiction collection Archaic Torso of Gumby (Gordon Hill Press, 2020). His stories have previously appeared in The Temz Review and Shrapnel. He lives on unceded Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh territory.
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