(Part One)

By Aaron Fleming & Duke De Mondo

Duke De Mondo 

Stresses stressing me - the sudden pressure exerted by unknown entities upon my easternmost testicle. The curious noises sweeping and darting about my arsehole - folks nearest eyeing me with yaps all skewed to one side, and me shaking the head, saying no, it’s just making funny noises, I didn’t go guff or anything. The fact that a woman across the way looks a bit like Maggie Gyllenhaal and I very much desire to court her - a desire forever thwarted by that far-too-interested inclination of the head she gave in response to some slanderous gabbling about psychoanalysis.

Panic! Thinking - Dear Christ in Heaven, I gave that self-same tilt of the bonce not five minutes ago. What’s that Jay-Z lyric about his mother tells him never to argue with idiots, for from a distance folks can’t tell the difference…

Sir Fleming gives a raise of the eyebrows upon approaching, his tester waddling behind. "Sorted?" says I.

“Sorted,” he echoes with a just-perceptible wince.

A sweep of the arm the tester gives then, gesturing toward a doorway beyond which two or three individuals of staggering beauty sit gazing doe-eyed at other like cherubs fawning about the frescos in a cathedral, mesmerised by their likenesses.

A person of indeterminable sex and nationality smiles at me as I pass. I offer a stilted approximation of such, careful not to reveal the sore lamentable state of my teeth, lest they set upon me here and now with flames and nunchaku and daggers, Sir Fleming left to watch aghast as they beat thon Devil’s pegs from out my screaming, squealing maw.

Up a narrow, ill-railed staircase the tester takes us, leading us to a screening room situated on the first floor. On the wall by the door hangs a framed movie poster replete with images of lovers embracing in triumph and foulest villainous bastards clawing the flesh from their bones in rage. The Story Of Book One, it says. “I was hoping it might be Cocktail,” says I.

“Or Battlefield Earth,” says Sir Fleming, sighing a vast, fathomless sigh.

Her fidgeting for the light switch proving fruitless, the tester shows us to the screening room, a horizonless hovel shrouded in robes of the pitchest, densest black. The black of the deep afore kissed by the light of Yahweh. The black of the dreams of risen Lazarus. The black of infinity.

“Take a seat,” she instructs, assuming that we know where there are seats to be taken.

Groping blind at the air, robbed of spatial awareness, knowing neither the size of the room nor the shape, my fingers presently brush the soft arm of a chair, sending signals then to the pole of my arse - “Come hither, ye cheeks, come hither…”