The Rough Sketch of a Pew

“Count to four, breathe deep,  visualize perfect silk lungs, plentiful  oxygen…” So told herself Constanze. In  the midst of her usual panic attacks, she  would mentally recite such words of  wholesale comfort to get her through.  (Many people talk out loud to themselves  to digest or upchuck the shit they are fed.)  These attacks would always leave a  spasmonic echo through her body. And  her veins, one big tangled mess. Like  mush thrown into an anxiety-powered  centripetal spinner. Only a couple of  scratches were left on the surface to ignite  flashbacks of comparable illness. After  such an attack, she would hide her fingers  in her hair and laugh the whole thing off  like someone trying hard to appear  nonchalant as it starts to rain dildosiand  squid.  Saintly figures have always  embodied the half-supremes, half- mystical white glow and  the fuz|zy  Hypothesis which iheavenly onlookers  inspire.

Lone fingers of; instantly- consumable favours descend from the  invisible barrier of fathomless skies. The  long fingers take hold of expired hopes  and disposed-of wishes that have been  pissed away after multicolored nights on  the bar stool. As ah alternative for the  hopeless, for those who find; themselves  lingering in frozen stance awiy from thjeir  blüe-printed desires with théir canaux  vitaux all empty of lifeblood> the saints  are around the córner of religious  skepticism, picking away at their ruby- covered gums while “on call«” Once on  duty, a saint hardly has time to pick away  at his gums. His demanding tasks often  require indispensable reminders of their  necessity and beneficiaries. By simpje  means, adoration symmetrically fits the  description if indispensable way of  reminder. Here comes into play the flesh- filled subject with his wish held out like  a counterfeit document. A few routine- like sessions of ass-kissing, numerous  times a day, with the help of intermittent  verses of desperation and voila…wish  granted and sifted through the long saintly  firigers.

Having never been a subscriber to  the wish ordering list associated with  domineering characters who might be  living “up there” Constanze shrugged off  all possibility of her own hopes in a  waiting room where agnostic dust  gathered. Her birth happened somewhere  inside Mahler’s Fifth Symphony  (adagietto)j The symphony’s movement  stems from a long sigh of the; what-now  that follows every great cataclysmic  episode and all the imaginable personal  disasters in one’s fucked-up head. To  acknowledge her own birth in such a  secure place amiss the middle of a thick  musical score was a feeling of great  cbziness for Constanze. The coziness  which forcefully-fed; religion had never  transmitted to her with all its broken  circuits, cheap bribes and staged  miracles. With complete precision,  Constanze could recall from her  childhood how, in church, she  dexterously explored underneath the pew  to find old pieces of chewing gum. As  her expertise in this domain grew she  could correctly identify how many  Sundays ago the gum had been hidden  underneath the bench. (Purposely,  Constanze never took into consideration  that sometime during other weekdays,  some solitary faithful could have privately  placed the gum there.) Sundays were her  only instrument for the measure of the  gum’s value. When she was busy feeling  the familiar landscape formed by the  gum, tedious sermons would soon  become vaporized samples of cheap  cologne that quickly evaporated away  from her consciousness.  From that time on, Constanze had  trampled on the path of we’ll-all-be-a- bunch-of-bones-soon-anyway. She drew  herself down to a modern sector of  unattachment to everything and everyone  who made out through her narrow cracks  of privacy. A la débauché was her official  destination but even that was not  something that she would admit to  herself. Her head mostly hung diagonally  like someone who never really could find  the necessary balance to walk wide  beams of low altitude. All of this was  before the odd day of reversal came.

The  odd day when beggars don’t pay attention  to the twenty-dollar bill that falls to their  feet. The odd day when new celebrities  pawn their precious fame for a few bags  of obscurity. Such an odd day was not to  appear unnoticed, even to the eyes of  Constanze which had long been covered  by curtains of indifference.  When individuals’ wishes or desires  send them into turbulence, the ball and  chain of pursuit can be carried around  by them without many signs of  awkwardness. Constanze was no  exception but the odd day straightened  her head’s angle and had her throw  superstitious glances from the corner of  her eyeball.  On the day previously mentioned,  Constanze woke up and for a long time  she sat on the bed’s edge, avoiding to look up to the ridiculous picture on her wall.  The sight of it just confirmed a new  unwelcome insecurity that had crawled up  her slimy doorstep. Another curtain was  needed. So she let her hair fall in her face  and tipped her head downward where the  sight of her feet waited for her. Her  penguin-positioned feet. Hard had been.  Constanze’s protective shell which had  never failed to absorb the high-frequency  oscillations of change. Now that the shell  had fallen off, an outer lining of scabs and  rattling pus attracted the many predators  whose fingernails shine through the  thickest of clays. From the odd day on,  Constanze had a wish and she held it out  like a counterfeit document, the way a rat  would hold its sawed-off tail.

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