pencillead

There’s no need to explain. There’s no need to explain yourself. It’s rude to ask. You see a one-armed man – it’s rude to ask how he lost it. Don’t ask me why I’m like this. Talking it over will not grow a new arm. Let us proceed with the matter in hand. I feel on edge. Electric. When you are walking beneath power cables in mist, your hair stands on end; you hear the buzzing and become the humming charge.
The device is as follows. An empty jam jar with black card inside. The black card seems to absorb heat, attract and focus it. Use a magnifying glass on it and the tightly-focused point goes red. It smokes and will soon burst into flames. In the jar you place a wasp. The whole thing is like a joke. Some people automatically swat a wasp. I always trap them in a glass. It’s easy – put the glass over the wasp when it lands on a window. Slide a sheet of paper between glass and window. Then release it. Alternatively, the glass is a jam jar into which the wasp is sealed. It’s already furious. Wasps are like an incarnation of rage; bees won’t sting. They’ll die if they sting you (is that true?) Wasps will though. My dad’s allergic to the sting. One got him on holiday once. His arm swelled up and got infected. It was nasty. He was holed up in the caravan for days. I remember trooping down to the TV lounge to watch “The Invisible Man”.
Well, I’ll give you something to be angry about. I’ll give you something to cry about. Direct the beam of light. The jar is a smoky hell already. The card sits in its tarry blood from my first experiment. I play the golden-orange spot of heat over the card. I am a Martian with a heat-ray. I stop to put the record on. Richard Burton begins the narration – “No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century ...”
The wasp is not dying. The jar is just a suffering magnifier. Just turning up the heat, the rage, the burning. The house is on fire. It’s a lesson. It’s a kindness to hurt people. It shows them their mortality, their vulnerability. It’s a wake-up call. Bite them, they bleed.
It’s happening now. This is how I describe it to myself: “in my mind the smooth swaps itself with the corrupted.”
It’s a vision of reality. The smooth is like the surface of blancmange. It’s a vision. But it’s more solid. Like some kind of smooth-textured stuff. The corrupted is the same thing but scored across and over and over with dirt, scratches, decay, damage. It’s an hallucination. They swap. On a heartbeat, every second, at the end of the time it takes to think one thought, every breath. I can’t tell. It’s a mirror. I can’t stay calm enough to tell. It’s my suffering magnifier. My bedroom door is locked. I can’t bear to watch them swap themselves. The house is on fire. I don’t want to see them flip back and forth. My senses are on fire. It’s a kindness to hurt myself.

take a pencil and ram the palm down onto the point that is what i did a brief shock to reset the system the house of the senses is on fire the door is locked the smooth can stay smooth featureless pure uncorrupted there will be pain but it will not damage the smoothness the lead in the palm will not seek out head or heart not like the sliver of mirror ice was it but the lead is still there today i look at it now as i recall it

Wasp out of jar, un-harmed. Do wasps suffer trauma? Dad got a ladder to the window. I did not explain why I’m like this.