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UNDERGROUND VOICES: FICTION
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TOM CONOBOY
Bittersweetness I have eaten all the stuffed pygmy limes that were in the fridge. I have eaten the salmon flavoured yoghurts. I have eaten the bread seasoned with copper and nickel, the potatoes sculpted into a representation of the Hallelujah Chorus and the melon-ball chilli tortilla wraps. I weigh 322 pounds and, until today, it has been my intention to undulate around the world, serenely, eating, eating. It has been a dangerous pilgrimage, but I embraced the challenge. Soon, I shall be the number one gourmand in heaven, and my fat-besieged heart is glad that it will be able to relinquish its burden. I am on the final quest, the search for the perfect taste. It is a bittersweet knowledge that my love of sensation will be my downfall, and my aspiration, my intention is that such bittersweetness will be matched at the last by consumption of the ultimate ailment. I am approaching my last supper, and I do so with the equanimity of our Lord. The Judas hand, however, is mine own. The pinnacle of flavour experience, to date, is one I discovered in a street cafe on the corner of Rue Saint Joseph in Vielle, Nice. It is a single flounder, flattened, rolled, boiled in roe deer's blood and battered with woodbark chippings. Deep fried in seal oil, it is left to hang for three weeks from the vaulting of the nearby Chapel Saint Denis where it soaks up the pain of three hundred years of fruitless communal prayer. Served on a cheap communion tray, it tastes of late medieval civilisation, of murder and revenge and fear and retribution. For maximum effect it should be eaten in the dark, by a wood fire, with an owl screaming in the distance and the church spire lowering in the night sky. I believe it to have taken five years off my life, six months per mouthful, and I would gladly have consumed ten years more. En route now to Brazil, on a dirty British steamer with a salt-caked smoke-stack which smells of burning books, I saw a basking shark basking in the sea. It was glory, it was grace. The truth is, I fell in love with that shark. Maybe if I were a better man it would have loved me in return. Maybe if I hadn't imagined eating it with monkey testicles and angel grass and mary malmsy, then it would not have floated away with such disdain. That shark is my nemesis, which is to say I am my own nemesis, beauty and despair, love and indifference, hope and repulsion all co-existing within my bloated frame. That I, "base creature", should aspire to perfection is an irony to be treasured. I believe I am in a transcendent state. My soul is in that shark, swimming to paradise. All that is left in me is sensation, the unfixed experience of emotion, transient, ephemeral. Nothing has meaning, not any longer, nothing connects. There is no purpose in eating other than to experience. Once experienced, the experience is lost. We stay in our temples, contemplate infinity, and all the while infinity is gliding effortlessly towards us, like a shark in the sea, like a child with a toy. Later, I shall eat my own flesh, marinated in lies and tears, grilled with champignons and served on a bed of honesty. I shall raise a toast to my lovely shark, shall embrace the moment to come. I shall taste myself, I shall chew, swallow, consume my body. I realise now that here is the perfection I have been seeking all this time. It is the marriage of life and death, that knowledge we all seek, all of us, although we do not realise. Tom Conoboy has been published in a number of journals and ezines, including The Harrow, Eclectica, Reflection's Edge, Mad Hatter's Review and others. |
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© 2007 Underground Voices |
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