The Remainder: All That’s Left — Excerpt 7

Narrow your scope for just a second of your life, would ya? It certainly wouldn’t kill you, and you might just learn something from focusing on single subjects for longer than sixteen minutes. Wouldn’t that be just awful if you learned more than the basic tutorial level of any activity you’d ever think of practicing? Imagine: you’re sitting on the shore of the Pacific (California, probably), eyeing the waves and hoping that about six short shifts of that pesky tide will yield some whoppers.

Burgers aside, we need to figure out what to do with this chimney sweeper’s moustache. It fell right off his face, straight into the soot. I wouldn’t have noticed it, though out of the corner of my eye I saw the wax glimmer with a sheen never seen in coal nor creosote. No ordinary object is this, I said to myself as I crouched and recovered the hallowed hair, somehow bound together at the roots, meant to transplant and land on any face it so chooses.

But why did you pick a chimneysweep? Is there something about his person that draws you to warm his lip? Is he more sensitive? Does he tell good stories? Will you ever let me know, or are you just going to smirk at me like that while I rip my hair out?

Advertisement

Author: Aidan Badinger

Wharved.com I am a poet. I write poems. Titles and subjects and subsequent readership are all part of one fragmented figment of our universe, and it's nice that we take it so seriously. Hopefully the craft remains and grows stronger for our children.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: