Saturday's Exile 

The shack sagged into its four corners of oblivion. Dirty light crept under the sashes. Inside the burnt-out bulb of the room, the wiry remains of a man flickered under a ripped bedsheet. Dull shoes struggled dully under the poolblue cover with the electric swishes of a zipper. Unconscious hands coiled at the sheet's uneven edges. The entire wire of the asleep body convulsed, and a blank astonished head appeared. 

Phosphorous odors rose from stiffening stains that pocked the used boxspring at random intervals. "Ugh," the old man raised a tender interdicting finger to the shocked skin of a bloodblister. "A new one." His exhausted face recoiled, tumescent with the red eruptions. 

Outside, a solitary rooster spun the prism wheel of its neck against the sky in a rolling series, or serrated spray, of bright screams. 

Purple shadows, hazy in the slant atmosphere, curled and broke in the sheet's recesses. Shaking oil-blue and violet as he clawed the slipping shawl of the sheet to his dwindled chest, the old man perched himself on the bed's edge and retched. Vibrant echoes announced themselves from the hardwood floor. After a meditative minute, huddled under the watery wimple of the sheet's darkening pleats, and hunching a hollow of cold air to his belly, he swung erect and swayed towards a rickety table across the room. 

A split square of black cherry hovered uncertainly above three knotted paws in front of him. He hoved against it with a halting clack, his oversize workshoes leaving a murderer's outline of dust and mud behind him. The tapped table rocked back on a chiselled claw like a kangaroo on its fat tail, the frozen forward pair rising with a dire creak to touch his sheeted left shin with the impetuous piety of a wooden Mary Magdalene. 

Smashed hands, appearing instantly as hooks, saved an obsidian lizardskin bible from the tilting tabletop with a grainy scrape. 

"Ahh...." 

His briary throat hacked as he stepped backwards. 

The cracked wood fell apart in dark wings, spinning to the worn floor. The empty pedestal rocked flat to its equilateral claws, the central pillar sticking up like a black bone. The old man's back curved towards the broken-open bathroom door as the sinking sheet dragged and erased the clumsy ovoids in the dust behind him. 

An enormous face, rash as a raspberry, floating in a slashed mass of conflicting azures, staggered like a balloon on a jerked string into the simple box of the bathroom, stalling on invisible hinges against the hard suavity of a chipped sink. Lumps bulged and dissipated beneath the misty sheet. Mountains soared and failed like some ephemeral consolidation of angels under the confused blue. Pale swirls condensed out of the mist to extend a fast, hundred-knuckled fist of shadows to the bulbed silver cross of the hot water faucet. Instant steam arose in the pit of the sink, accompanied by a holy shaking of the slim shack. 

Vapors erased the tense indecisions of his clubbed face. 

Dangling the ripe knob above his hung shoulders into the blitzed absence of the steaming sink, he screamed. 

After a time, a dripping spot of rose could be discerned behind all that swift whiteness. Scrubbed sounds emerged in effortful puffs. Hickory hands pulsed under the hiroshima steam, beating an old rug. a tired blade of carefully tended soap popped out of the furious mist and folded like a disappointed diver on the exhausted asphalt tiling of the floor. The solid roar of the water stopped. 

Wavered air interrupted the deflated image of his mirrored face. Tangled notes of a hymn flickered from his distorted lips. Smoky debris drifted slowly clear of the mirror's liquid frame. A rash haze sifted from the moody frame in sharp shifts and vanished. Before the beaded interference of the condensation could lift, the old man aimed his blasted countenance at the smoldering door, navigating past its drunken posts as he coddled his refreshed flesh in the bedcover partially congealed between his twin fists; the stout bible tucked squarely in the back of his pinched sheet. 

Dropping the blotched ball from his stiff hands, he pulled a slouched hat from its snapped hook with a vivid twist. Swept light singed the faded rim of his narrow silhouette as the thick door heaved inward. 

Long shadows shafted past him out of the low sun, burning construction paper cut-out. Humped glitter of the rooster silently mounted a detached fencepost in icy violets. One flower scarred a bent tree with its fiery spikes; the nailed corsage of flames burst beneath the heavy sky. 

And the midnight bible, tugged in uneasy ascension from its blue holster like a scab, broke open in heiroglyphs. 

His scalded body blazed and raved.