April Flash #2

"statics and dynamics", from amygdala again

***

"I prefer to think of myself as reclining majestically."

It was a joke. It was almost certainly a joke, the words didn’t fit into my brain in any other shape, not a demand, not a factual clarification. This was not a stated preference which he was now declaring to have changed, I was not being informed in my capacity as his personal assistant, primary caregiver or translator. He was making small talk. Apparently there was going to be banter, now.

In the moment it took me to shift gears, he’d let his head roll back and started breathing more heavily. Lulled again into a new and slightly more comfortable sense of security, believing I could relax for a few hours in the chair across the hall, he startled me even more when he began again. "I mean it! I am become art, boy!" and he grinned his mile-wide grin, almost like he was himself, trying to sell me something. "There’s an idea – hang us all up in museums. All the useless dreck of society, the old, the terminally young, the unemployable. Pay some fine arts grad to gnash out 500 words on bells palsy as ‘the complex interplay of statics and dynamics’, nail it to the wall and charge admission. Hell, everything’s already painted white. Install some track lighting and you’re set! HA!" He laughed and I remembered that I’d yet to say anything. It didn’t seem like the time, though. I couldn’t think of how to respond.

"You were always the quiet one. Always. Makes people nervous, you know. ‘specshlly when they-are- taaalk. Taaa-alkinghto … heh."

I’d forgotten about the morphine again, that it was hanging there, gravity-fed into his limbs. Good old fashioned opiates.

Once he’d started snoring properly, I felt my face relax out of the confusion I’d caught from listening. I toyed with his idea. A persistent vegetative state, recast as a still life. Elephantitis and lion’s disease as geometrically complex cubism. Suicidal depressives and violent schizophrenics playing out man’s ubiquitous inhumanity to man,10 shows a week until they drop from drugs and the horror of it all. It made me smile a little. Mine lacked yardage by comparison, but that was all. Like his, it bent my face a bit wrong. It looked like I was trying to sell something; it didn’t telegraph the least amount of joy. I relaxed my face again, and crossed the hall to the chair.

***

prompts to hand on: "a vasty expanse of not much" "tremendous capacity for something or other" "like a bat out of dodge"