What Comes After

One on a finger, feeling lowly, writing like I mean it: I wrote the word beauty. The U was missing. Tensely spinning from the inner lane, and coughing, some of all of the labels failed to take interest, or feigned not having any, not sure which of which is worse. By beauty I meant this:—When, in the course of entering the room, he turned his head, and mine, I noticed the pocks about his face, and how they lent the whole something. Strange--hadn't thought much previously about it. But then it all seemed very deliberately sculpted, not yer usual scattershot craters. The moment went on forever, though it didn't actually (I had to escape it to write this up). It zigged and zagged and danced like a ball of electricity.

Something red, then green, then red woke me, some hours after. I pegged the lace blind. Outside it was [weather event]. and therefore unsettling. Alone but for the other people in the room, I picked myself up — I had been carelessly strewn about the room the night before — and made myself go to the kitchen, where I ended up, having succeeded. The near-definition of beauty, outlined above, and befitting both spellings, further solidified in my estimation as I watched its incarnation drape banana peels, imprecisely erotic, across its face, and dog down a fat American breakfast. I wasn't yet able to observe noiselessly, and the ensuing sound was embarrassing for all concerned. Feeling wholly holy, basted by sunlight, lips crackling with scabs, stretching partially, some of all of me made it away from temptation.

It was, to a small and slight extent, a revelation of colour. Once a monochrome rainbow drooped mechanistically from the clouds; now contrast. My eyes peeled back, as they don't usually do, and it took several hours for me to be persuaded, by the undiminished spectacle, that I had not been drugged, or had something comparable done to me, or that I was not simply in the midst of a fever dream. It turned out neither was true but the last. The heat and doona had done a number on me, or a number of numbers across the night. Everything was as was; outside was mute; the walls were the colour of dolour.