John Madera

Beside a Ruin Nests the Eccentric

My hand met a glutinous paste, a jelly (from a toddler’s grubby hands, I thought), on a cozy length of cold steel pipe, the same rail my hand slid down every night after work. It was not. Perfunctory light revealed a glob of phosphorescent phlegm. Rail obliges mucus. Hand obliges rail.

I did not wipe it off. I watched it wedge into the webbing between my index and middle and ring fingers. Dorsal surface downward, I allowed it to dry: the novel narrative embedding hand. By the time my ride arrived, a calcareous cake flaked flurriedly onto my faux-croc shoe.

I was shaped like a pear. I walked with a cane. I took many breaks when I walked.

Entering a public restroom I always chose the unflushed urinal. My urine, mixed in, made the pool darker, changed it from a light beery hue to warm amber, from halfhearted lemonade into raw honey. Sometimes I found a pool murky from several anonymous streams, its color a rich malt. I would smile then. When I smiled, my face became a face. But usually all of the urinals were flushed. So I would begin one of my own pools.

Perhaps some of the unflushed urinals were the ones that I began. I don’t dwell on it. This is not territorialization. It’s a coloring book.

After I scratched my head, I remembered the dried phlegm. I was not alarmed. I did not wash the caked mucus from my hand or hair when I arrived home. After a shower dies the desert.

John Madera has been informed that he has just won the sum of 1,532,720 Pounds Sterling from the UK National Lottery Online Promo Programme that was held on Saturday, 20th of September 2009. All participants of this online promotion programme were selected randomly from numerous World Wide Web sites through a computer draw system and extracted from close to 125,000 unions, associations and corporate bodies listed online.