20 July 2009

In a familiar café we sat by the window and discussed moondust. Astronauts say it smells like sweet gunpowder. Fair enough. "Picture yourself in a desert," he says. "What do you smell? Nothing, until it rains. The air suddenly fills with sweet, peaty odors because water evaporating from the ground carries molecules to your nose that have been trapped in dry soil for months", the period on his statement was punctuated with a long and rather loud sip from his cartoon-sized beige coffee mug. Later on, the same day, I ran into this cat named Michael at a fundraiser on the Upper West Side. As I busied myself piling cantaloupe balls into my $5000 buffet plate he said: "Both of us must be suffering from the same unending aches". I didn't know what he meant and I told him so. He said he'd gone to see a magic woman who made medicine from rain. "Fair enough", I thought. I scanned the room for someone else to talk to. Just then a guy they called Silverfish walks in. He didn't walk so much as he crawled and he didn't crawl so much as he scaled the ceiling. He was known to eat glue, book bindings, paper, photos, sugar, salt and dust. Silverfish was notorious for hanging around the shower stalls of Turkish bath houses dining on shampoo and soap but I'd never seen him turn a ghostly white as much as when Scutigera Cleopatra walked in. She was the house centipede. 15 pairs of long legs. A real man killer. She came from the Mediterranean. She was an insectivore; meaning she ate guys like Silverfish alive, and he knew it; he knew it quite well. He trembled with his back against the wall; you could see the expensive complimentary champagne in his gold Lalique flute quivering. He started crawling backwards up the ceiling. Tuxedos in horror. Suddenly the music stopped and a man cried out: "Look! The house centipede is stalking a spider!" There was an audible sigh across the entire ballroom. Her legs were like jaws and at once the big band started playing dramatic music to score the cinematic scene. Suddenly I felt trapped within the pages of a still wet with ink comic book. I knew Cleo was nocturnal but despite her big eyes she seemed to mostly rely on her scissor-like legs when she did her dirty work during the daylight. This way she could lasso several small "insects" at the same time. She was cruel but she had her reasons. For WASPs, she retreated after applying the venom to give it time to take effect. When she was in danger of becoming prey herself, she could detach any legs that have been trapped at a moments notice. It was a wild fundraiser to say the least. I am looking forward to next year as the cantaloupe balls were exquisite.

Very Truly Yours,
Earwig

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

funny, how you always called ME Cleo and spoke so much of MY big eyes. you should run some new game, son. ;)