14 06
Luch2 en
Piercing rays of light break through his eyelids like forcing into a door. Luch crowls to his feet, gropes about in this dank house. Get up and about, there must be warmth out there. Walking into the fresh, a glare gets hold of him. He totters a bit, closes his eyes – what a delight. He takes a deep breath, and with it, a biting smell he knows well. There he is, trotting off to the main road taking the dung, the droppings with him under his soles passing piles of silage bales and all those things the neighbour has dumped over the years, broken furniture, toilet bowls, old mattresses, ropes, rusted machine parts rotting away sinking into the ground. But everything looks to him like new, the waste land which stretches left and right of the narrow winding asphalt road hill up hill down, all the colours in that sea of winterly faded blades of moor grass, drab haulms and reddish-brown rotten fern, pale waves floating around tiny islands of moss, goarse branches, rushes, and shrill spots of freshly upcoming leaves of lillies and grass in it, even the light violet gleam on the grey, round rock humps jutting out from underneath like petrified waves of a subterranean ocean. He puts his nose into the air taking a sniff towards the north where the wind is still droning from, drawing a muffled rumble with himself. Looking round Luch sees them come tramping swaying their ponderous bodies like battleships on a too narrow a fairway pushed from the back by a closely following pick-up. Like in slow motion he sees them pass in a spin, a pack of cows struggling along in a desperate effort to get forward splaying their stiff-kneed legs out to swing them round their huge udders standing out and dangling to and fro under their broad bellies.
Barely been by, a stampede breaks out in the front mooing, lowing, bucking. The driver gets out of his car. Luch instinctively rushes there spreading his arms out as if embracing them all trying to help somehow. Mingled with the crowd he is overrun. He sees a monstrous udder hanging over him before he runs out of the picture.
A wobbly bag of dusky pink with yellowish speckles on it fills, expands, gets bigger and bigger, begins to hurt weighing down distressfully. A congestion, something that can‘t be discharged, a spot where pressure grows to every limb of the body to paralyze it. The bag stretches to its limit, is near to bursting. Then a jerk, it is shaken, lifted, hooked into a gear. Heavy soles clatter on a tiled floor. Somewhere something rattles. The weight under the belly gets lighter, the pain dissolves, very slowly.
Come on, let‘s go.
Where to?
Anywhere. This life is not good here, after all.
Are we that good, after all? Are we still what we used to be? Eh, get me rid of them!
Exactly.
Even when making it to the main road, they‘ll catch us there then.
What if, crock. Don‘t you see? I don‘t want it anymore.
They use me, yeah, but at least I‘m of some use to somebody. And I‘m not bothered.
Not to be bothered, is that all? What has become of us! Degenerated inferiors hardly able to walk, shut up in crates, properly yielding machines withering away. What have they done to us folks! Have you forgotten or are you just forgetful? Haven‘t we had it? Didn‘t we frolic about and did our own thing? Didn‘t we roam the country together picking the cream of the crop? Now you eat your own shit and let yourselves be shut off. It‘s all right as long as you‘re fed, isn‘t it?
Yeah, the meadows were greener when we were young, weren‘t they? It‘s how it is.
I leave you to the living dead, so. The more they squeeze out of you, the less they‘ll get! Think of me, I‘m off then.
Hey, stay… you… moo… wait a minute… yo …. loooow!
In a daze, Luch picks his hat out of the hedge. Nobody around there anymore. In a straight piece, the road lies ahead of him, empty. He takes to the side, sits down. After a while, he hears the noise of an engine, sees a car approaching, lifts his hand. The cars stops by him. It‘s Conor. He looks over to him:
How‘re ye keeping.
Not so bad at all.
Want a lift?
Where’re you going?
Just driving about.
Fine.
Well, then.
Very good.
Luch at share-iDea