Cyclops by Ranko Marinkovic

Author:Ranko Marinkovic [Marinković, Ranko]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-300-16884-6
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2010-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Quisisana was crowded and the air inside thick and noxious. The smells of fried onions, black coffee, and human fumes. Melkior felt sick from the medley dropping to his stomach via the nose. That’s from hunger. He blocked the spasm and hastily inserted some small change in the automat, which congenially offered him a sandwich. He downed it in two bites. The piece of pickle instantly calmed the sickly roiling of his insides. He inserted another coin or two: the miniature lift dropped to the floor below and the open door (here you are, sir!) revealed a sardine’s tail between yellow figure eights of mayonnaise, both covered by a disk of salami and a thin triangle of riddled cheese. This “still life” received different treatment: he ground it methodically with his teeth, letting the hungry mouth caress its fill of yearned-for love. And the mouth seemed to whisper its ahhs and ohhs in a vulgarly sentimental way, exactly as in a genuine orgasm. The stomach, for its part, gratefully acknowledged the divine poetry from up above and went about its business humming contentedly. Flooded subsequently by a beer shower it gurgled delightedly, overjoyed. And burped “thanks.”

Up above, Lord Melkior was already perched godlike on thick clouds of smoke and, in an Olympian mood, allowing voices into his pampered presence.

“Peculiar, very peculiar indeed,” said a tall man gloomily bent over an unfolded sheet of newspaper on which he was eating something. His short interlocutor was standing on tiptoe with an important air, displaying full comprehension of what he was being told. “Even when contemplating the crucial decision to take their own life, people can be quite peculiar,” went on Gloom & Doom, and Shorty raised and lowered himself twice in agreement. “Some have been known to invest remarkable effort in their suicide. The most bizarre suicide of our times was certainly that of a very rich Texan farmer. One day, while flying over his house in an old farming-cum-produce-transport aeroplane, he leaped out, impaling himself upon the pointed stakes that supported the fencing around his farmhouse. The impact drove the stakes straight through him, for he landed flat, back first. Apparently he had settled on the spot in advance.

“But the most romantic of all was the suicide of a certain Frenchwoman. She checked into a hotel, asking for the room in which she had first slept with her lover, who had subsequently left her. For five days she brought armfuls of fragrant flowers to the room, sleeping meanwhile elsewhere. On the sixth night she locked herself in, never to come out again. She was found two days later in her bed, covered with flowers—dead, of course. Suffocated by the flowers. How about that?”

“Yes,” said Shorty, self-important. “Some even drive nails into their skulls!” “Right, right, right!” responded Gloom & Doom with curious elation. “They even choose which sort of nail in advance! Not just any nail—it’s got to be a particular sort of nail … The selection sometimes takes years.”

“Right,” said Shorty with gusto.

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