(vignette 5) Johnny in the Bag

In the darkness of his flashbacks, there was a single light.  Memory flickered as if a flame in the wind.  A desire, and, trepidation.

Both beside the couch and within his flashbacks, he heard someone demand, Well!  It was Dominique pushing the tall, skinny one, whom Philippe knew as Johnny, for a response.  In his flashbacks, the voice belonged to his father.  It lay somewhere in the darkness.  There, the word implied something more than expectation.  Duty demanded obedience.  And, it was spoken with impatience if not disgust.

Philippe bent down as he’d been taught to, taking hold of the pig behind its shoulders.  In reality, Johnny felt Philippe’s hold of him as something of a force against Dominique’s relentless onslaught.  Now, he prayed that someone would stop her.  No one did.  No one, it seemed, would dare.  She was a force not of nature, but, of something equal to it.

The gun-shot, of course, was verbal.  But, in his flashbacks, it burst from the darkness like a moment of creation.  It was instantly blinding and simultaneously deafening.  The pig seemed to fall in the very same moment, its belly surrendering to gravity.  Philippe recalled his curiosity at the legs falling away.  It was as if they’d never been there.

His own legs buckled as he came face to face with the pig.  The wet of the earth was warmer than he’d expected.  It felt as though it was welcoming the both of them.  He held the cloth bag to the pig’s forehead, where his father’s shot had passed squarely between the eyes.  He collected the blood.  Surely, he forced himself to believe, these were its memories.  After they had coagulated, he imagined, he would eat them.  They would be brought back to life in him.  But, in this moment, they were pouring out even while the life had already drained away.

It was with irony’s touch that reality returned with a wholly different and stuttering flashback.  His mother.  In the years before her own death.  Standing.  At the backyard fence.  In conversation, with the neighbour.  Summer breezes flowing, between laundry hung out to dry.  The both of them, trading secrets.  Savouring the taste of pickled pig’s feet.  Philippe heard his mother, sharing her recipe for blood sausage.  Johnny-in-the-bag, she called it.

     

(vignette 4) The Judgment of the Ordinary

Dominique wore a mask.  To many people, it — or, rather — she seemed two-faced.  Depending upon which way she tilted her head.  Dominique was a self-made woman.  She’d survived a failed marriage.  Then, she survived cancer.  More recently she’d survived retirement from a government job.  She’d been given a golden parachute; but, having been forced out, it only seemed leaden.  She was sinking fast . . . when she’d been offered this job, come to this backwater.  Life taught her that she needed two faces — one kindly, if slightly dispassionate — another ruthless and distinctly paranoid.  The latter tempered the former, as much as the former humanized the latter.

From their ensconcement in the sitting room, Philippe’s cadre — they could hardly be called a clique, the President observed of their loose loyalties — could be overheard commenting.     . . . How life-like! reported the tall, skinny one who masked his own identity with a Peruvian festival mask.  Don’t you think?! Dominique addressed him directly.  The Venetians say that a mask affords its wearer, she heard herself lecturing, opportunity to put on another persona.  The tall, skinny one raised his mask to his forehead to meet her implicit challenge the more directly.  But, she said, removing her own mask, I think it brings to a head one’s inner-self.  She hesitated, to look after his reaction, as with a sculptor’s regard of her statue, searching for its soul.  She smiled, Don’t you think?

The stress she place on the words belied the double-entendre.  Her intention was obvious.  To obliterate challenge.  Everyone within ear-shot recoiled.  The remark struck as a bullet.  The tall, skinny one shrank away, then fell back silent on the couch.  Behind his own mask, Philippe was having flashbacks.  All, the same event.  Each, from a different angle.  Here, Philippe stood in a muddy pen.  The dark earth smelled of wet.  The flashbacks bore the tones and textures of burnt umber and aged egg-white.  The pen was one in a puzzle of pens, a maze of them.  At its center, Philippe held a cloth bag, coated in lard.  He knew what its purpose would be. 

A pig the size of a boar was run through the maze.  When it, at last, had escaped into Philippe’s pen, it stood as if stunned, perhaps relieved, maybe even comforted to have found someone.  They, the two of them, were planets in a void.  The distance faded into absolute black.  Each of them sensed that this place was both a beginning and its end.  Then, came the sound of the gun.