Softest shout

At the club
the loud music… noise and chatter
We belong to the noisiest places
'He listens to her every shout with the attention he would give to the softest whisper'

What is a crowd?
No PDA?
We would be behind the layered curtain of people when our lips are supposed to meet

- part of our body would spiral like the steps that led us here to sin,

perhaps.

Circus Magic

The roadshow music they are blasting made you felt like a clown walking down the street, with balloons and at times, both feet above ground.

While you are listing out what to perform, you are also thinking how circus magic won’t bring her back, how circus magic won’t remove the impact - the impact of his actions.

The noises from trumpets and tin drums are nothing compared to a rustling plastic bag in the middle of the night.

Circus magic won’t absolve his sins. Circus magic won’t bring her back.

He looked again at his only audiences, the children. On the street, how they behaved like the insane. They have shrill sound for laughter, she is pulling up her skirt and he is pulling down his trouser for no reason. They can’t stand still, they need to jump and run, cry and shout, ask questions, suck and lick fingers.
Now he can’t remember how they are related, related to what he wanted to say when he has a nose so huge and red.

Rusty Rotations

I
He mentioned about the state of those broken fans.
But without elaborating further, why they are called ‘fan with a twisted head’:
the twisted head of a celebrity found in a fatal car crash.

Peeling, cracking paint, it must be the rusty cage,
and dusty blades; the droning sound it has been making since last Tuesday; not responding to the flow of the current, after alternating one finger between the buttons on the fan and the socket, a few times.

II
He mentioned about the abandoned bicycle chained to the green railing and the street lamp post, or left at the bicycle lot…
Prey to three half-hearted thefts

the seat, one pedal, handle grips
the brake cables but not levers
the front wheel but not the back wheel, it must be the complexity of gears and chain; the missing handle

Now, this metal frame with a deflated wheel is a bad imitation of the unicycle
but
The sight transported him far away to safari
The sight is now a free trip he won to Africa.
What an exaggeration! It is only close to a free TV preview of another animal documentary.
He loves the tone of the narrator voice, his articulation…
They tied the buffalo to the tree, lions, hyenas, vultures, and flies took turns

III
It was an event then.
Though, not an event as important as his cousin’s wedding day
Not a decision as burdensome as committing to a house loan
But not as insignificant as making a choice of which set meal to have, while standing at the fast food counter; of which beer to buy, while cool air from the chiller rush onto him

To buy a bicycle, is an event:
Some persuasions, Dad…
Some promises kept, since you did well, son…
A present.
But don’t cycle too far… not on the roads… only weekends...

‘It was another afternoon after school. Tommy was on the bicycle chained to one of the pipes ‘decorating’ the wall outside the flat. He was pedalling furiously, although he could only pedal anticlockwise. The few times he tried moving forward, there were always the stolid pulls. At such moments, he was the surrogate soul of this wilful bicycle leashed to the metal pipe. He had yet to learn about the difference between the conduit that sends the shit away and the one that brings water in, but he was already well-acquainted with the pipe’s uncompromising character, like the pillars, walls and locked doors. This was he closet he ever felt to the tug a pet dog suffers when taken out for a walk. This was also an initiation to a category of worldly experiences: the-impossibility-of-forward-movement-consoled-by-stationary-rotations.

“What an effective fight against time and linearity, Tommy. I did that as well when I was young.”

He was not listening to Young Relative. Instead, Tommy was reminded when he last did that, his playmate, Cindy nagged, in the tone of an under-aged Auntie, “ Hey, my daddy says the chain will be loose if you do this!’ He was transgressing against what she admonished like a dictum.

When he is older, he would say, “Why is there always something for others to say whenever he is having fun on his bicycle?”

He would write, how when he was tired of this stagnant anti-clockwise exercise, he would tilt up the rear of the bike. With the wheel, few degrees from the ground, he wound the disc crank with his hand. It is quite hypnotic to gaze at the 36 spokes glitter, when spun. But more often he was reminded of the view of the Ferris wheel from the highway, but a Ferris wheel gone crazy, turning like wheels of the cars travelling alongside. Piercing the inside of the rim and converging at the hub, he would recall the temptation to hurt himself by placing his finger between the symmetrically arranged spokes. '

IV
The bicycle was an integral part of that year’s resolution, to exercise more often; a part of the crazy idea to cycle to work…

…the space it occupied inside or right outside the house

Mcluhan was concerned with how it is an extension of our legs;
W. read it as an epitome of relation, of many failed or abandoned relationships, the rusty, dusty skeleton of memories and afternoons which had made him sick.

Gaps - Smell

The original manuscript for Gaps, a prose of eight pages, cannot be recovered. After two weeks of procrastination, the writer came to the decision of presenting the fragments, inside his head, as fragments. Therefore, the debris, he could still find, would be presented as a series. The main reason is due to the difficulty of repeating the spontaneity, and flow of the original version, where different observations were linked chrono-analogically.

Gaps - Smell

Another morning, he made his way from the bedroom, passing the kitchen, to the toilet. The toilet facing the sink that is the toilet at the far end of the kitchen, next to the windows,
is the toilet shared by the eight members of the family:
5 children, wife, and dying mom.[1]

A young relative has come to a conclusion that the smell is
Not from the rubbish bin in the kitchen;
Not the plughole in the sink.
But the pale green mosaic tiles in the toilet.

Not the polished, well-glazed pieces on the wall, we feel with our fingers
But the matt and rough ones we step, with our toes grazed at times.

The grooves between the tiles that gave off the slight stench only outsiders are sensitive.


[1] The use of the adjective ‘dying’ is not a social-melodramatic attempt to evoke melancholy or sympathy. And by denying such attempt, it does not imply the opposing sentiment of indifference of, for instance, Meursault in Camus’s L’Stranger. It is merely to state a fact: the physical condition of his mom.

An excerpt from 'Pinafore'

Belonging to the noisiest places?
They listen to every shout from each other with attention given to the lightest whispers.