A story that can only lead to a second part, should it dare to do so
“There hasn’t been a day without rain this month,” The Hunched Cornish frets as he takes his plants off a ledge he’d especially made and fastened to his balcony for them to catch the rain. But now, he senses, it’s been too much.
“They’re not liking this.”
His flowers and plants sigh with relief as he moves them back to their usual positions.
“It starts out fine, a little muggy, maybe, and then the clouds just gather and gather, and boom, all the rest of the day – you get this.”
“It should have rained in April, but it’s been doing all the raining in May.”
He shakes his head. He understands the weather no more than anyone else.
“Humph…”
He walks back inside his living room. As he closes the balcony door, the music he’s been playing since early morning fills the apartment. The Hunched Cornish’s Debussy collection is set on random play. A small smile emerges amidst the scars and gouges of the awful face as the “Rhapsody for Saxophone and Orchestra” flits and trills in whimsy’s here and there. The monumental chest expands awesomely with lungfuls of air and half-closed eyes bespeak a stirring of the massive beast heart.
He opens them and again looks disconsolately out the balcony windows and into the broken courtyard. Noisewise, he is insulated from the street, that’s true, but here, there’s all this junk – concrete blocks of some sort with their rusted prongs sticking out, and some kind of inexplicable railings. The Hunched Cornish just shakes his head and shakes his head. He groans – “Ugh…”
He goes to his kitchen and brings out the coffee, setting the pot on a ceramic tile on the coffee table. As always, he pours coffee into a cup from his second-best china set and stirs in some sugar.
No sooner he sets the service for one on the end table to the left of his armchair than, like a child, he rushes back into the kitchen to get the nut-filled brownies from the fridge he’d bought the other night at a café he sometimes passes on his way home, depending which way he returns. At the café they’d already grown used to his startling gruesomeness and don’t begrudge him the brownies. He pays the right amount for them (27 hryvnias, with $1 currently at around UAH 25), even though most times The Hunched Cornish doesn’t pay for anything at all.
One brownie is on a plate on the coffee table next to the pot. The other one is on another smaller plate on his lap, now that he’s finally settled back in his chair.
The brownie is delicious, and the coffee, ground this time from a different variety of bean The Cornish has ventured to try, is rich and heady, with a mellow bitter aftertaste that is velvety and oddly pleasing. He rinses his gullet with a drink of still bottled water and bites into the brownie again.
He looks fondly at his bookshelf – all those volumes. He’s collected them diligently, lovingly, in all the places of the world and in all the cities he’s been over all these years. And in all these years he’s read so much, and yet, mankind… “There’s just so much left to read…”
For some reason, Debussy’s “Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune” – a passage, a note, perhaps – provokes The Cornish to flick a furtive and suspicious glance at the fireplace, that cosmopolitan artifact of the merchant’s good life under the czars that is now purely ornamental, the flues having been closed off a long, long time ago.
There, above on the mantelpiece, the head of Josh Davies has kept a restful vigil ever since The Hunched Cornish wrested it out of an ice-roiled Dnipro at the start of 2015, on the eve of Ukrainian Orthodox Christmas. The Cornish remembers using an old rotting fishing pole he’d found along the river’s shore, possibly abandoned by one of the many fishing bums of Kyiv, and line and tackle of his favorite Mycenaean manufacture. He remembers his friend John Smith finding him and looking on, perhaps commenting on the action, although of the substance of his speech The Cornish has no recall.
From his chair The Cornish now studies the head.
Surrounding a nearly bald pate, the peppery-white whorls of hair from the head’s back and sides are plastered against the jug ears, wrinkled jowls and hickory cheeks. The Medusa-like twists and curls are still soggy with the winter waters of the river’s yesteryear.
“There’s nothing extraordinary about that,” says The Cornish.
Also Medusa-like, the mouth is open in an expression of eternal shock, as if stunned by its own death.
While thinking about what John Smith might be doing, The Hunched Cornish places the small plate bearing his half-eaten first brownie on the end table to his left and gets up out of his chair.
He walks up to the head. He looks at it and looks at it.
“So, you want to live forever? Hm-hm-hm…”
The compact disc changes in the player.
Opening his fearsome mouth, The Cornish lurches at the head with his giant own and bellows into its face full-on.
The head opens its eyes and bellows back, contorting its grizzly old man’s face into the most frightening evil grimace it can muster.
But it sees The Cornish, and dismayed, the head closes its eyes and opens its mouth – back toward the shocked expression and back to death again.
The sequence sets The Cornish off into roaring laughter, which is now swept up by a rising tide of “La Mer”.
With the music ascendant, The Hunched Cornish quiets down and wipes the salty wetness from his eyes.
He closes them. He did not know this would happen, but he will not open them again until the following morning.
It could have been worse.
Covered in night, through the balcony windows, The Hunched Cornish resembles an ominous rock cropping a jagged tower up and up in the dark bleak wild.
6.6.16