Most Places

You saw him most places you went.

He was always there, coincidentally maybe, and he saw you. He knew you saw him and you knew he saw you but neither of you ever acknowledged the other and neither of you ever acknowledged that neither of you ever acknowledged the other either. But you saw him, yes you did, and you better believe he saw you. He always saw you.

See, his mouth was a rose that bloomed in fear. His eyes were great black bees trapped behind glass, darting this way and that searching somewhere, anywhere, for that sticky and bloody nectar they needed so desperately to survive. His hair was a burning forest, full of black brambles and charred white branches that burned and shook as he moved, which his tiny little hat did so incredibly little to ever extinguish. The hat simply sat and the hair blazed around it with that strange depth of burning wilderness.

His brain, well his brain was a goddamn landfill. Nothing but rotting junk, burning rust, and discarded memories. And it all came tumbling out of that little rose mouth whenever it bloomed: car parts and scrap iron, used diapers and dismembered dolls just dropping out and hitting the floor, making little piles of rubbish. When he spoke it was with the weight of a hundred dead white men charting Indian rivers for the first time and believing themselves and only themselves to be the very first human beings ever to float upon its green waters or walk upon the sweet flesh of the shores.

He twitched and moved, like a muscle, like bonepowder, like a frightened tongue on jelly or paper. He shook when he sat in immobile motion and he stared, he stared right at you, those huge roving bees coming right for you, stingers poised to poison your eyes.

He was something like a man, but not quite.

"How do you do?" says you, one tired and quiet day, breaking the rules, breaking the taxing wax seal off the silence and awkardness. There was no going back, from now on you would have to acknowledge him each and every place you went, he'd always be there, watching waiting wondering when you were going to acknowledge him, when he could start in on you and suck you for human nourishment. Was that really something you'd wanted to do? I understand politeness just fine, but this ... well, this looked like a mistake.

"I'm starving," he says, rose blooming as cobwebbed fingers pat his round little belly which had never once, not even on long wet days spent in caverns and toolsheds, never once, not once!, known true hunger. But that wasn't quite what he meant and you both knew it.

"I'm starving," he said again with a smile and looked you again dead in the eyes.