sclerotic.


==

The father hopes his son will pre-decease him.

He himself was raised in luxury, slurping at the oystered world. A golden boy, gilt if not gelding.

In dreams he sees the finish line, already spattered with blood.

this was the dream:

she knew her mother was coming, soon but not yet.
the threads of web stretched from the sill to the pillow. the spider web in the corner of the window, testered to the bed, helped her distinguish between this and yesterday, for in her head they were reduced to little snapshots, jpegs almost.
in the web, the little spider with its deep red back was moving, housekeeping, making adjustments.
did she mind that she had slept with her head near the spider? should she kill it, remove it?
she had a fuzzy, sunny, frightening feeling in her head. the light weighed on her, the morning.
she went to the phone, and when she checked back she could not see the little spider at first. she could see the bee. a big bee, lodged in the web. the web seemed to have thickened. then she saw the spider again. near the bee.
she thought, now, with fear, that she would definitely have to remove the spider.
but already there was a cockroach next to the spider, next to the bee, and then there were two spiders, she saw at last - one must have come across from the space beneath her pillow and joined its fellow in the web. they were either sisters or identical lovers, she couldn't say, but she realised, with a kind of basking horror, that there were many big insects in the little web now.
there was the big hairy bee, the cockroach - immense beside the spider - and a blowfly, a moth, and other large insects (maybe a beetle or locust) too large for the tiny web or the tiny spiders
it was as if the big insects were not simply becoming trapped in the web but had flown there on purpose, flocked to it, lodging themselves on impulse, in abandon
and the tiny spiders were moving about them, curating, checking threads, adjusting
and they were still, and they hung impossibly large - the black roach, the big round black and yellow bee - with the little red-striped spiders moving about them
not hungrily, not to drink
but as if they were curios in a museum, or exquisite artefacts, or totems.
the little incestuous spider couple moving with that calm, molesting silence.

she didn't just want me tamed, she wanted me topiarised. if she could, she would have pruned me into shape, choosing on purpose some ridiculous design: a teapot, maybe.