Knight's Gambit 

And we'll whip the rascals naked through the world. 

Avid roses threw themselves in cherubic abandon against the thick creamy terracotta archway of our (Quenta's and mine) Spanish villa, cozily tucked under intricate Nantucket cliffs. The villa was a square squib of dull light from some art-frocked weekend escapist landscapist's daubs stuck between the unrelieved raven-cave-coalblack weight of the continent hurled to an abrupt halt (with green skirts daintily lifted) at a frothy, beery barrier and a blank sea leering its flickering eye-fleck pallors and ardent blues at nothing, at everything. 

Black Bartholomew masterfully emerged, swinging his apey arms in rustic abandon, from the netted sun of the filigreed gazebo. The hammy mass of his left fist, choked pink, bore in its churning, lavender middle the golden knob of a horsey-headed cane he swore a pious Alpine villager, seeing immediately in his noble stroll and fat head an immense likeness to 'the dead baron', had begged him in squeaky lederhosen on his old swollen knees to take back, since he had 'found' it in the moldy cloakroom of the abandoned manorhouse. What other treasure, jewelled cravats, pinky rings, or gem-encrusted crosses still hot from the baronial body the wretch had filched, Bartholomew did not know, or care to. The red peasant knelt under a weight of sun known only in those high regions, proffering the somewhat (as all who heard admitted) ill-used cane above his knobby, freckle-spattered pate like a land-dwarfed lady of the lake. Bartholomew, noting that the lifted stick was a genuine fin-de-seciele lache-coeur-de-Lion artifact of mild anthropological and fairly hefty monetary interest, relieved the crooked knave of his guilty burden and promptly brought the equine head down with a whinnying grunt on the hale apple of the old man's wrinkled cheek, opening it neatly (and bending a miniature Arabian ear on the speeding cane in the process, which is still bent in gold witness of the event). 

"Hiya, Barty!" I called out of my cave of shadows, an olive drab thicket situated at the nether end of the patio. 

"Regicorneauscydionyde, your ample wife has been spying about after you. Hustle to her or else. I, her minion, need not mention the dire consequences to be imposed. Sans merci, you understand." (Bartholomew is a tremendous bore, as you can hear, but still quite cleaver, in a fat way, for all that.) 

"Whaddid she say?" My immobile rapture was wrecked by this time.  

His face was at a loss to answer this, but his mouth pursed into a neat empurpled bow nevertheless. "Oh, um, something about squeezing your royal oranges or... A seed in the machine; something like that." 

What had that tangled woman done? Machine-squeezing my better hybrids, my precious pompom calliosi! A hardy breed with an innovative pit in its guts the size of a glassy eyeball and tough as a gallstone. I had cultivated, since brief spring's dewy onset (and at considerable cost,let me add, shaking a thin leather wallet), a quivering sample of the Italian saplings from Spumi Labs, Inc. in a bushy bed out back. As part of a pilot project, I was one of under a dozen dedicated note-taking herbivores involved. Summer had swollen them to a majestic tiger-color under firming boughs; the intense New England sun had sweetened them to prompted teardrops. Their shy birth-dimples gently appeared when plucked. They rustled lowly under a lemon moon on well distilled evenings, sending everything with the merest bleat of consciousness to a sisterly sleep. And now, this outrage! Those ruddy hands upon them, steeped in the murderous knowledge of the kitchen, yanking them with a vindictive twist from their immature boughs. 

You see, dread reader, that this man's life is a tedious one. 

Levelling my olive-visored eyes to his loony gaze, and drenched in a pulpy sweat, I asked rotund Bartholomew if he cared for a game of chess. 

"But," he blustered,"what of your wife?" 

"Let him stew," I replied, availing myself of the quaint native phrase, and fiercely imagining querulous Quenta breast-deep in a citric concoction, the dark room stained with an acidic stink, going at a rolling boil, a very fleshy flotsam among the glaring pits of the calliosi. 

"Where are we set up?" 

Everywhere, a black thought replied, but I answered: "Back in the gazebo." 

It was our usual spot, the worn pavings pitted and docile as the ranked backs of mourningdoves. We had been locked in contest pretty nearly every day that summer, rain or shine; at some point in the climbing or self-consuming day, we would always find ourselves caught, as in a slow-motion whirlpool where the frighted victims scream interminably, hands over heads, in shrunken voices, under the rickety gazebo's cosine shadowing. 

Broad Bartholomew manoeuvered to a tarnished cane chair across the wrought table with a glass top. The poor seat emitted a stunned groan when Barty plopped leadenly down, and would continue with intermittent sighs and pleas throughout the game at strategic moments. I had a watery heart-empathy for the chirping stool pigeon, bearing its elephantine burden so bravely, but continued out of a half-eroded habit to curse the object whenever its desperately ill-timed squeaks blanked my mind. Working painfully downward, Bart's woozy dimensions were eventually pinched into the tight seat. Bartholomew was a fearsomely concentrated competitor. 

For some reason, Bart's pants were always too hugely voluminously for his legs, flapping ludicrous semaphores, like a limber clown's droopy drawers, or even Hitler's duffy floods. Withered limbs, no doubt. Scarred appendages which necessitated the clacking cane he simply refused to abandon. Glancing abruptly up from the concentrated shadows of his curtained groin, I caught his beached eye and smiled. 

We set up our stone men, complex horses, ivied castles, and cold respective queens in churning silence. 

Somewhere past the dim orbit of my discerning, a contented female voice trilled over steaming bowls. 

We wrestled under summer's triumphal panoply and argued in autumn's restless leaves. Parades and harangues entertained us. Bart and Quenta, like two peas under one trickster's cup, huddled into the rasping car and drove off to every new film of local theatrical production. Perhaps professional curiosity egged them on. Whenever I questioned this arrangement, they became expressionless, solemn as theives. Nevertheless, we made many outings as an impromptu family, picnicing on an isolated rock in the acetylene-blue sea, champing for our winners at the races, or all of us getting smashed at the town bar's open poetry reading nights (where I sometimes offered lively snippets of my own devout verse, and Bark barked his gutter doggerel, learned from the hot tongue of some Spanish whore). Etcetra, etcetra. In any case, we were soon deep in the bouts of our traditional winter tournement. Fifty precious matches to burn away the season, with the victor to win by a preponderance of at least two. 

After our fifth heated contest, in which I had given showmaster Bart a thorough drubbing on the squares, despite his Lillian Gish sky-glances and rolling baritone protestations, we found ourselves hunched in the medieval dark before a violent-hued velveteen curtain held down by weighty fringes. We were locked, like astronauts, into narrow constraints (and by the thought of all that good money paid to secure a slipping bench spot on the wild ride), sharing an uncomfortable equator of elbow space, shifting in our new sutures, a mass experiment, unable to execute an individual volte face at all. Quenta, seated to my royal right, consoled the loser in a series of furtive communiques. Her Sicilian digits trembled on the brood veins of his inner wrist. Her delicate culinary palm patted the butcher's mass of his knuckles as she exhaled a blue sigh and looked away to the greater dark of the unenlightened stage. We all sank forward in our foamy sockets and waited for the hanged sandbags to fall and split the bloodpulp curtains open, rolling them back with a tremendous flutter into the hidden wings. 

The expected happened. Lights blazed on tiny, chirping figures that opened their pale beaks full of teeth and, performing a few rambunctious motions as preface, emitted the gauzy sounds of Parsifal, or some such other speary spectacle. 

Late in the play, half the cast dead or broken, a mechanical horse spinning its wheels against a false sunset, black and mauve, a gigantic woman jumped naked out of deep purples, stage left. The false horse agitated mechanically. The dead shivvered. The commodious stage itself groaned portents. Quenta grabbed the barbed knob of Bart's cane, which had tipped sideways to slouch against her nylon thigh sometime during the evening's interval. The ogress pounced. The breath stopped in my mouth as she hopped to her fallen lover, her assigned erotic cadaver. It was then that I saw, for the first time, that her enormous nudity was false; an ornamented something was clasping her breast. It was a supple plastic armor sheened with an almost human bronze. Instead of a white, uninhibited naughtiness, the stage had produced this, a sculpted relief. 

I do a mawkish penance at these flaky carney shows. Dying horses or heroes in their final thrashes make me choke back howls at their choreographed deaths. Puny deaths. Beating a life out under a spotlight is bound to produce some quirky effects. Nose shadows flare about horribly, for instance, masking lips or dribbling over weaker chins to join with a permanent swag of heavy dark that depends from the ears and obliterates the throat in an inky bee-beard. 

The cloistered curtain raced from its socket and closed. The dead arose, and bowed. Rich griefs suffused my frame. All applauded. I raved aloud. "Encore! Encore!" Yet already dead, really dead, was her querulous voice, that electric quaver urging love on all sides from Sensesurround speakers. We arose among other human thunderers still obliterating their hands, and, nimble cane and furry purse gathered, made for the fake halfcolumns at the back, traced in shellpink neon under a red X, the only, forebodingly alone, letter still lit in the pulsing exit sign. 

Rooty wanderings rend our roads. Here in the sooty north, lacking enough room for even a headcold, the salty asphalt contracts all winter long like a struck snake under the incessant ice. Then spring and fiercer summer come burning into our remotest valleys, and even the oldest oak warts up with a new welt, new bark breaking the black sheathing until a more horrid autumn roars them back to rest. Thus I thought as we went flying and hopping headlong down the troubled road home. 

A fussily dressed Quenta and silk-scarfed Barty reviewed the evening's oratorios in the leathery dark of my humble Hudson's quirky backseat. Bart, busy with his critical battering of the baritone, expectorated a quick indiscretion into Quenta's lacy Rumanian handkerchief, which, by some prognosticator's miracle, she always had to hand at such moments, everready to receive life's dissolvable foibles. Squinting into the shaky rearview mirror, I caught a glimpse of Quenta rifling amongst her furs as she eventually recovered a lump of sorry lozenges from her slick purse to assuage Bart's bark. A cherry droplet was cracked from the quartz knob, which was then returned to its feather tissue and jammed quietly but firmly down among her things. 

Coming around a dark downward turn among pines, heavily lidded with snow, a flasher in red socks and hiking boots (no matching cap) zipped into the headlights' highbeam emanations, making a brief rouged appearance (with dark patches) before (I believe it was a he) ducked, stage left, into the larger darknesses of a shivering rhododendron. My passengers' faces moved, like moons, from half to full as they took note of the freakish happenings on the cold mountain road. Bart coughed. 

What mourned love had driven him from his cave? The wedded memory of his adorable doe plastered hither and thither by the indiscriminate mass of a big red Mack truck? With, no doubt, some "compensatingly" odious absurdity tying him to return in dead December to her death's scentless tracks and rehearse once again, naked, her fatal ballet. These pathological cases are always of the highest interest medically, but their poor Freudian poetics pan out dubiously at best. 

"Hey," protested Quenta, snapping her sweet neck back towards a dark Bart slouched in the backseat gloom, "that guy looked like you!" 

"A mere shadow, dear," he calmly assured her. "A trick of the lights' convergence, utterly common." 

Sporting a murky villain's inky-batty mustache and weary tan lines (not to mention a lagging limp), that awful beggar with the hairy belly really did seem to resemble a wintery version of a summery buttery beached Barty. The car coughed in a hideous way just then, to mark the onset of the anti-vernal equinox perhaps, and Bart and Quenta's chittery arbitration lapsed soon thereafter. We drove home in a queer silence shattered only by the icy slithering of my tired car's thin tires. 

The old Humberston came to a roseate rest under the flaring arclights centered above the double checkeboard of the twin garages where I live. 

Quenta spilled from the still hovering vehicle in a richly interleaved waterfall of furs. Her squeaking haunch was the last to go, wriggling furiously on the interior leather as she jammed herself past the awkward angle of the bulbous door's metal wing. Bart hopped out next, a tremendous shadow flowing in his wake. 

Drawn together by the pinch of hunger, a gurgling Bart trailed an anxious Quenta into the shuttered kitchen via an alcoved entrance topped by a dark, splattered bough. It was missing the season's sprig of dusky mistletoe; a dull root, at any rate. They swept under the solmn swag of the connifer, self-escorting twins of appetite, mumbling something about still-steaming pies lying in melted wait beneath the condensed dew of a silvery tin; a dainty something that dear Quenta had whipped up under her arch caresses with a French whisk. Apparently, she had left it squatting behind the bender,-- or blender, if I misheard. That busy room was chock full of gadgets. 

The six pale panes of the side door flamed incongruously for an instant as it yawned wide, allowing our burbling and giggling couple to gain entrance to the cold kitchen and all those friendly pies. I was left to re-tie my recalcitrant shoe in the humble gravel of the crunching drive. The moon's face reminded me of itself. Fuzzed creatures receded in a black scrabble of dead leaves. Walking away from the parked car's aura of heat, and leaving a fat snail trail in the cold snow, I dodged a dogwood's icy lick, tocking my entire body sideways like a railway signal, and eventually came to settle in a blankly lit circle of the intensely craggy wood that had surrounded my house, furred hands deep in bottomless sidepockets. 

A pocked semicircle of frosted rhododhendrons was encamped beneath an awning of bluish trees. The tittering branches slowed to a morose lowing; thick trunks groaned to a sighing stop. If the sharp spurt of a pistol had released its pea there and then, only an incurably insomniac princess would have been able to detect its presence under the snowy pillows of that enclosed grove. All denuded nature had lapsed to its wintery quietus. Our model is that Athena owl asleep on the crumbling stump over there. I blinked once at the near grey of the stars and let out a yelping yawn. 

O I opened a vault of weariness then! My soul was a rusted out barge stuck in the sugary Sahara, spitting the dry sand aft to no forward affect. Great trees swooned down to whisper an ancient counsel-- yes counsel, for I was lost! Lost as the endless nether acre of the night shorn from day and condemned to spin, a severed peach, with its dark face forever turned away from the hypnotic glory of the sun. So my anchorless angst revolved in my mind, still lilting to the tenor's spotlighted sorrow, a decaying spite-bitten peach, spinning its clear thread of syrup to a wry lip, glistening in the white hair of a beard sprouting from what I considered, gazing up through the indifferent trees, to be God's laughing face. The stars' ratty light assembled it from its box of constellations; a toothy grin winked over a stringy beard made of xmas tree lights, the minor flameshaped bulbs of warmhearted youth. My swollen heart's configurations contracted with the drift of stars. Beat, pulse, flub, dub. My red organ was already counting down to a beglittered dreamland that would contain a fiercer splutter, and a higher translucence of a palm before that flame, than this silent midnight's dim blue could ever offer. 

Then the stars withdrew their hooks, and the blinking letters of that countenance in the sky became slowly indecipherable behind an increasingly bitter racket of branches. 

I trudged dejectedly out of the frozen dome of rhododhendrons and followed a marginally glowing impulse around to the creaking rear of the darkened house. All available lights had been dutifully clicked and snuffed. The punch-out of the dead windows was a wicked black. Even the porchlight's usually subdued amber, cupped in a sea-green nautical glass, had been extinguished in my wife's routine pursuit of sleep, Bart trailing. She drooled a special claret of her own decanting, he chucked wood. 

I noticed with a dear eye the conspicuous lack of footprints (other than the spurred peace-imprints of a million birds obliterating each other in their race to the sturdy feeder, still warmly half-full with its golden charge of grain), and drew myself by an obscure route-- never fully puzzled out, yet almost genetic in its quavery insistence-- to the itinerent memory of my much beloved, actually, by the weight of his fulsome laughter (and my powdery aunt's crackling testimony), loaded with love, Uncle Bud. Laboriously, with a stick, and with special red boots which a child's increasing sheaf of rheumy-eyed nostalgis enshrined, Uncle Bud woul enscribe the snowy narration of a heavy sleigh skidding from icicled gable-end to chalky chiminey, complete with an artfully articulated confusion of hooves. Idiotic old Uncle Bud! Tramping all over the roof in the treacherous darkness. We had uncovered his Santa masquerade eons ago. A bony Viol and lizard-lithe Viola, incestually intertwined schemers and dull cousins of mine, panted in the hollow hallway of childhood; creeping into my borrowed bedroom, they had dragooned me to be the cynical spy in their huddled triumverate at least three christmases before Uncle Bud was undone by a skillfully reflectionless slick patch near the charred lightning rod and fell, heartfirst, to the evil paling hemming in a writhing rosebush his wheezing widow had had removed. Such thoughts traced me to the delapidated garden shack, with its cobwebby windows and broken back saddled with snow keeping a spilled fistful of imported columbine seeds and their accompanying starter cubes of dirt dry. 

It was a good night for my experiment. The prop room was wantonly full. Clawed implements and 'svelte stilletto' trowels, dangling downwards, phospheresced softly in their racks. A lazily daubed Dutch hex haunted an ebony apex, displaying its pallette of bladelike leaves. Dismal mixtures of imported fertilizer fermented in a sullen array of tubes and glued pots; and there was even a goliath of a discarded water-heater, drunkenly guarding an ancient corner, which released a hollow boom when kicked. But the bit of stage machinery that I was interested in was that half-hidden camera snout sniffing the thick dust behind a dead geranium. Behind the burnt petals lurked a dark, solemn eye. 

I screwed a lengthy night-adaptive lens to the heavy unit to uncover the secret pulses in my moon-belilaced pompom calliosi. All that was left from the dusty basement darkroom I had inherited was this wilting, accordian-model polaroid. I believe my erstwhile uncle enjoyed to an unusual degree that flavorless exhilaration that accompanies those candid, weirdly framed shots when, following the diligent photographer's ten-mississippi pause, the captured subjects are revealed to the still picnicing family pair, still devouring to their sugary rinds their newly memorialized, vermillion watermellons. 

Slipping into the orchard, arrested by frost, the obscure weight of the polaroid swinging from my neck, I bobbed among the cloudy globes of the oranges. The moon hummed over my shoulder. All aching fruits samba through a cycle: inhale, tense, release, recoup. The millimeters of bloat and exhalation may be measured on film. The question was whether my Italian hybrids, stiff with a New England winter, would continue through their repetitive links of growth. Would they swell like little citrine bankers, and diminish to exasperated ember in a slightly larger version than their previous iteration of burning throbs? Load, lock, unload, lapse. Such a diverting version of that childhooded patchwork hopscotch. One, two, left, right-- stand still as a stalk or a stork, no matter how intense the nagging ankle itch of a treacherously slipping sock becomes. I hopped through the tinsel grasses until I found a suitably lit orb, and lifted my instrument, centering a plump subject in the twitching crosshairs. A monsterous window and its sepulchral casement made a perfect magician's backdrop for the easy trick. Click-click. A miniature sickle of light graced the depending bulb. Wretched ratcheting whirr. I gripped the exuded photo between my pinky and ring fingers. Click-click. Ruling ring and loyal pointer pinchered a petulant, bluefaced child with bulging eyes. Click-click. Sloppy whirr. Obscene outburst put the shadow of an aura on the toupeed crest. Click-click. I think I could just make out a coaxed laxness in the model orange's posture. Stormy whirr. Intelligent index and rueful thumb curled closed on the fourth, refridgerated ace, a spade. I swayed on locked kneees for a cold moment, looking around the moon-lit and snow-lit orchard, breathing deeply. The summer's innumerable pleats had folded to this simple end. I felt supremely moved, standing among the chill presences of my calliosi; their dull, Italian arches opening smaller and smaller under the moon's corrosive perspective. Each one harboring an inward eye. Nine Mississippi. Ten Mississippi. I ripped the black membrane from the first shot. The orange itself was admirably clear. Sign of a steady hand. But far left in the photographically foreshortened frame, in what would normally be a great laconic distance-- too great for the weary nightshaded eye to pursue to its deceptive depth-- an angel-hued smear appeared, a flickering phantom of some moon's afterflash perhaps, lodged as it was in the closed window's bleak blank. A harmless marsh-mist settling over what I then computed, squinting through mysterious trees, was Quenta's ribald bed. Ten-ten-ten M-i-ss-i-ss-i-pp-i. I hurridly tore the second photo open. A lurid smudge stained the air, with just that gentle degree of sweet blurr that indicates the presence of an ambient motion swooning just beyond the range of the film's abrupt focus. The thin developing membrane of the third and fourth photos detached with a single kink each. A slurry of whites, dragging their prismatic penumbras, formed the diluted image of pair alabaster bass instruments, or more exactly, a pale bass and disconcerted cello intermingling their strings, so that only their cradled backs showed through the shop-worn veil of time and deceit. The intrusive moon had melted some of its more prominent features with a dulcet overexposure. Demure catastrope! Something lifted into a clearer air by Quenta's headboard, above her shapely face, safely cauled by the protective shadow of my thumb, which had left its oily imprint, but what was it? Was that underdeveloped articulation a bludgeoned, misshapen head softly attached, like a pupa's goggling globe, to the indistinct mass beneath? Well, my rapid, panting reader, I tell you it was impossible to discern. I shifted my attention to the last, premsaturely played, moon-mangled, card that I held. Nothing. The smutted photo had reverted to its silky angelic hue beside an enormous orange. Only madness or manic inspiration could discover any sulking figures in that irridescent spur. Perhaps the techniques of film animation could aid me in this prediciment. I stacked the deck, aligning the guilty corners, and proceeded to rifle through the sequence, letting the sharper corners stab my hand. The numb fruit coursed through its routine. Ingest, digest, void, wipe. I could make nothing of the rest. Maybe a visceral interest made me stare too hard. I tried again, and among the repeating whiteness of the cards' wings, and near the wavering moan of the orange, came a third, more minor, cadence: clasp, clasp, commune, collapse. I swear that that faint sheen in the window, that barely perceptible rainbow refraction, shivered with a lusty action. One could almost make out a drowsy spouse wrestling with the moth-soft flutterings of seraphim. This was proof enough. I would wrest her back to my breast, away from that infernal agent of desire, that tubby, wingless anti-angel, Bart. A powerful knowledge of what my next step was filled me with the unbearable brightness of certitude, and an entertaining little rhythm rumoured through the four quarters of my dumbfounded heart, smacking its steel taps: kill, kill, kill, kill. 

Stumbling back to the purloined warmth of our marital bed, I looked again at the first, brief blurr above her body, that small, partial whiteness hovering expectantly in the infolded fabric of space and time, perhaps even shimmering slightly (although this is not sanctioned by the immobility of film), just slighty above her and to one side, and noticed that somehow, by its timid shifts, its hesitant ghost and afterimage, it had left an elegant rift in fate.  

The yatter of grackles pried my eyelids open.  

The sun squandered itself over the peaks and valleys of my swelled, purplish Victoriania, like one of those writhing VanGogh-by-numbers my tender Quenta was always polluting her afternoons with or begging me to hang, in an elaborate, public cruxifiction-type ceremony, in our recessed 'Red Chamber.' The solar presence raced to an angry wrangling of lights in the mirror, ebbing to a grey illumination of mere dust as it sifted into the echoless hallway. I had never known what to do with such a Floentine abundance of citric anti-shadowing, and was completely at a loss as to whether I should keep my wriggling eyes popped open as they were, or screw them shut against the simmering window, sunk by their cruel load of fairy dust, in boundless ruby protest. 

I tried to drown myself in that consolingly warm and lucid blood-wet. Drowsily curdled limbs shrank back to their incomplete fetal positions, waving in an amneotic quality of a dream I couldn't quite catch up to, paddling on chubby legs,-- not yet the shaggy, hooved things of adulthoodedness-- diving into dream-furrows or cresting hazy, nightmarishly fleshed hills, as panting infant lungs inhaled a heavy, motherly liquid. It was into that misty wishfulness that I desired to dissolve, but the foredoomed scenery still intruded with its corner of sunlight, demanding to be staged. 

Bart and I went out for a post-match stroll and chat by Lunar Lake, which nibbled up to the west side of the house while the ocean ranted on the right. My meek summer cottage was thus the unintentional focus of these water antagonisms; a blizzardy winter could really whip them up ferociously. The normally docile whitecaps, extending their lax sighs on the undulating tips of the waves were first excited into frolicsome little terriers, biting at their neighbor's tails, and then eventually, sometime in null November or slightly after, were maddened by storm and wind to an indiscriminate froth, and, until the raging lake froze over, howled at each other in inhuman galeic. 

We ducked out of the shadow lip of the pines with a voluminous huffing. Our unexercised middles complained at the pace we had set for ourselves. Everything was nicely iced. An unsteady skater or two sliced across the lake.  

"Let's get out on the ice," he suggested. "Gives one such a lovely hovering feeling." 

We glided stiffly onto the lake, swiping with slow feet at the ice. A snarling root reached up to tap Bart's lead foot. 

Bart grunted an unexpected basso profundo explitive as he smacked the flat ice like a stroke victim. A dead thud followed by the retreating thunder of a pale crack that zagged into a faintly burnished distance. His cane scampered into the perspective and disappeared with a low splash. For one awful moment the normally exaggerated activities of his mass seemed to have adopted such an instant cessation that one could almost dream him dead at last. But then a gallon of white smoke escaped from his face, the black expanse of his belted midriff heaved in a gruesomely animated, jellied response, and a deeper engine than wicked man could devise kicked in, rehearsing its cold-start splutters. 

I leaned genially over to offer my gloved hand. He took my velvet prop and, shaking his shaggy rhinocerous head in an attempt to dispel the happily dancing stars that formed a perfect circlet about his brow, wincing on and off in ribbony multicolors as they whirled, tried to get up. 

Tripped by the decietful ice, but unwilling to admit it, Bartholomew shushed me away even as his tremendous grip increased its pinch on my palm. He heaved heavenward, flummoxed shoulders shivering below a rising rear, and started to propel himself forward with one foot on the slick ice. But his glossy shoe was never trained to tackle fresh water in its stasis state and slipped hilariously out from under him. I once saw a street clown in Milan attempt to balance on his flattened nose a striped straw and perched grapefruit, with the same slow-motion results. The wayward foot slithered from its designated landing zone while a second intrepid sole tried to get a purchase on the same bald spot. It raced out of any useful position as the first lurched drunkenly forward again. Soon Bart was treadmilling on the awful ice in a manner identical to any of those delightful little animations you may have seen, and soon found himself starfished on the ice, sprawled as a dog. 

I cannot say how, exactly, but somehow, through some subterranian contact with his gelatinously buried skeleton perhaps, I had stopped helping Bart onto his big feet and started herding him towards a moist hole in the ice, an awkwardly dark absence caused by the warm jet of an unknown spring spurting its guts out under the clean surface. I kept him up, and precariously, with one hand while, with the other hand, I kept shoving him towards the sopping opening. It gently winked at me now, in murderous camaraderie. My vernal paw, claws stylishly retracted as with a cat that knows he will not have too much of a messy fuss dispatching his meal, looked as small as a leaf of his gigantic back, which still struggled powerfully, and with a bullish self-possession, to right itself, coffined in its padded black parka. 

I sought to keep him off-center. From my teenage days as a wily wrestler for the Blue Boys, a nappy dad and son frat organization that exulted with brio in the manful testing of us young leathers, I had a few dirty tricks in mind that would always win a slender slice of pizza and a hollow half-can of beer drenched in a cold after-match sweat. Surefooted as any nickering mountain goat, turning a golden walleyed stare at the huffing hunter it is about to out-wit, and with luminous exactitude, I placed my waltzing right leg before his frenzidly minuetting left. Not far from our little father and sone dance lesson-- the hungrily slavvering goal only a few slippery bootfals away!-- in perfect counterpoint, as it were, one of our bladed witnesses across the thirsty way lifted lightly from the ice, executing a diminuitive pirouette in glassy silence. 

Just as Bart was entering that uncertain zone where thw playful face of the ice had been scraped thin enough to let the depthless void of the black waters filter through, he began to apply a peculiar brake to fate's downhill wheel; he yoked my neck with one long lank arm, using an illegal hold he'd learned as one of those hated hall monitors in a military-type school for wayward lads, I think, during one of the numberless sun-dazed summer sessions of his adolescence. We stomped around the scabless spot, still all wet and tender as the warming breeze which flattered it. I reddened in his crush. The water shivered for its feast. But how could I have thrown the fat tidbit in and escape a fatal drenching myself? It was impossible. He squeezed religiously, and I, a dark, Darwinian god, had to answer, not his scarlet knocking, but rather the deafening uphill tread of my own labouring heart. 

With a turtlish retraction of my inflamed neck and a fishy twist, I was free of him again, spinning on my ass a dozen feet from his unstartled shape. 

A sinuous dragon'sbreath pumped from his wincing mouth. His visage, vomiting smoke, alternated with a progressively panoramic view of crowded pines, the open lake, a belching furnace, somber men in green bristles, the open lake, a burning madhouse, a dour crowd of therapists, the open lake, a flaming ash can, martian somnabulists, the open lake, fire, darkness, heavenly emptiness; and fire, and darkness, and etcetera, all began to whirl in a limber sphere that contained its own penultimate chaos. That blurred triad of images, so artfully arranged that I would not alter one pang or sting of their sinister trio, nudged me in the back towards the dazzlingly stippled, pointillest brink of consciousness where dot and daze shade into a pastel interchangeability and hang there, beautifully undecided, multihued, until some meaner spirit stoops to blow the candle out. I fainted in a dizzy heap. 

As I lay in those white wastes, frilled everywhere-- on every receding blankness or heave of fog-- with a hazy ornamentation of lights my blitzed brain supplied, a fuzzy face again appeared, this time Bart's, mottled mauve and thinly smiling under rippled layer of skin and chicken fat, hanging above an enlarging spider pain centered-- it seemed-- over my wickedly fibulating heart. "Die. Now she is mine at last," he whispered, the floating face clenched in a lacivious anticipatory sweat, the saber-thin smile pinching into his out-of-focus cheeks. Or was it, "Fire. Wake the kline, fast"? It hardly matters. The ice receded. My enlarged heart deflated, administering its poison-pickled bite, ack-ack, ack-ack, and that was the end of poor me.