Snakes on a Lounge Chair

In a suburb of Paris, the past is full of animals

Sometimes there’s a good coincidence. I’m not much of a workshop guy most of the time, but I had an intestinal yen for a random but quality prompt, to help me talk to the other half of my brain. I was ready to take my felt dolls to an open mic and ask the audience to tell me who the dolls should think they ought to be. That, my friends, is desperation.

I’ m not saying Substack is an oracle, but that is when

Edith Bow

‘s new Stream of Consciousness POV Workshop popped up on my timeline with the perfect thing—writing from the point of view of someone else, by internalizing three of their favorite words.

The prompt, drawn randomly from a vessel full of Edith’s own words, comprised:

Champagne weather, cellophane, and snake charmer. (A third person’s POV got mixed in by accident, because the prompt “cellophane” brought her to mind, but that’s the kind of thing that happens when you let the left field of your vision get off the leash.)

Cinnamon Cellophane stirred slightly on the couch,

but I can still see her dream floating around her, like in that portrait of La Reveuse that I saw the last time I was at the Pompidou, that lady painter who was shoved down all the time by the men in her life and now I can't even remember her name, what a shame life is. Have you ever heard that Morrissey song? When I get stoned it goes relentlessly through my head:

"The passage of time, with all of its sickening crimes"

—when I walk through a crowd of tourists and see how old and frail they are, now they finally got their dream to go to such-and-such a city and it's already too late, well no, I hope they've come here before and they have many happy memories to revisit...

Oh like your memories of your friend? The one who is dead? The one you didn't see last time you were here and she was alive because of that asshole?

My husband gets pretty annoyed when they especially mention that the painter was a woman, but he enjoys her paintings anyhow. He's correct, some of them are too caricatural. It was the style at the time. I think they had just invented comic books that year. You're not suypposed to talk down to trash art forms, but then why does every trash art form sweep along so powerfully and ruin everything that came before?

It's not the underdog, the trash. We need to stop treating the stupidest 75 percent of humanity like they've been cheated somehow. You've got to be kidding me.

But back to the present moment, Cinnamon Cellophane stirs. She's a beautiful woman, so she gets harassed on public transit, but not physically like I do, I don't know what kind of extra thing I bring out in these high class courtesans (to be very generous) but between last night and today I've had a soda dumped down my leg and a woman try to fight me, both because of the same minidress. I'm trembling with energy, in fact, because as soon as she touched me she realized she shouldn't have, the strength of my arms and the look in my eyes. I've been looking for an excuse to punch in a cunty face for a very long time.

Not Cellophane, though. I can see, through the crinkling film, that she has a mind. She's brought the entertainment.

In her sleeping hand is a snow globe, in the snow globe a figure, on the figure's lap a small cat. It is all so marvellously detailed that at first I do not realize that the figure is me and the cat is my cat who was murdered. She licks the figure's face, the small black purrring body. Like the way she lay under my enveloping arm the first night I brought her home and promised her, shielding her with my big body, that I would keep her safe forever.

I did not keep her safe forever.

I bathe the globe in salt and I look in confusion at my friend. Why do I have to look at this today? It is rotten in me. None of this was my fault but I was the only one who could stop it. The globe fills with snakes, a thousand snakes, and each one eats the cat in a different angle of torture, breaking her precious little bones and making me watch, every organ, most of the good fur and her poor little body wasted on the ground, over and over, slithering bodies, brainless desires, horrible flesh, tearing her body until her spirit is gone, the thing I loved is gone and the only thing they asked me to protect.

None of it was my fault, and I was the only one who could have stopped it.

I do the predictable, I smash the globe on the floor; the pain remains and the snakes slide up the walls, disappear into the attic, where they will curl in hidden baskets of family secrets and heirlooms full of old-fashioned moss, to come back devouring when everybody thinks everyone else has forgotten about them.

They're never the secrets you expect, smug pigs, foul animalism, cruel beasts.
You are nature, brute nature, only too self-interested to think about it.
The small black cat never wanted anything but for her little meow to be heard.

When I lived on the fourth floor, where I was attacked, the laundry was in the basement. When I ran down to move the towels from the washer to the dryer, the little black cat would begin to cry. She missed me already, she cried till I got back, and I think she died looking for me. It burns the skin around my neck and face, but it's nothing compared to her horror in that instant she knew she was never going to find me, we would never meet again...
because of one pig's greeeeeeed.

I'm the only one who cared to stop it, and I was the only one who couldn't.

Cinnamon Cellophane lives in a house, not an apartment full of monsters down below. She stretches on a velvet couch. I'm safe here with her now, until the next time the bottom drops, the globe explodes.

There's a gentle music playing in her house, it isn't glumness rock, although it's in a minor key; if there were another Ravel in another world writing in a slightly different mood, then Bolero might sound this way. Soft and dignified, Eastern and Western, old and velvet, leather and the musk of something new. She breathes, and I can see the mist of dreams around her legs; she lies like a posed odalisque without knowing it; of course she had to hide away. There are suburbs cité, and then there are suburbs with pavilions, and both of us are afraid of my cité.

The music calms the rage, the snakes hiss almost inaudibly.

The sky outside is finally bright, if still a bit cold for May; I'll let her sleep, there's no point, but it's still cool enough to use her little box outside the window-sash to chill the wine, despite the sun. Ahhhhh, that’s why they called this champagne weather. There was a time when you had to wait for things to work, and they were savory.

Neither she nor I have drunk, much less wine, for a very long time, but tonight will be our delicious exception. She will need her strength; there are more glass snowglobes coming for me, I know, and for her, I fear, but we will be cheerful for a little while, for once.