The Bottom fell out
And the Bottom fell out. And it did. The bottom fell out as Sebastian peeled his eyes open and felt the cold clutches of his world shudder up and wide and usher him outwards and beyond and send him gone falling through the dark echoey anals of incomprehension and the rancid stench of finished lovers. Then there was only really the wet underbelly of time pulsing in its incessancy and Sebastian’s eyes blinking lucid like the oily reflections of a moon winking night after night in the furtive puddles of the after dark. Lucinda rushes into the green house shouting go, go go go out of her little sweet mouth and into the horrible bitter gloom. And Sebastian attempts to obey this command etched with so much prophesy and implicit direction which he so craves more than anything, more, perhaps more than Lucinda. He swears like a f*** and gets to his feet like a sleepy calf that’s just gone been spat out of its mother. Lucinda’s just staring there with eyes burning up and getting bigger by the second, Sebastian’s glassy eyes slid off of them juggling like an imbecile they fall and smash on the floor and he stoops and picks them up but now he can’t really see.
Sebastian fumbles for the door with his stupid hands, his eyes screwed up like paper filled with all the useless scrawl he’d been bellowing out and into the ether of forgetting. They were done and gone and ignored and eaten up by the nagging pangs of doubt that in fact they were far too crammed full to the f*** with past participles and useless metaphors about nothing. Sebastian felt like he’d just been born. Flung from his foetal form in ecstatic contempt for childhood and into those f*ed shoes and that shirt smelling of last week and the burnt-out back pages of his reeling adolescence. Lucinda saw that half cooked post embryonic soul wallowing in and amongst the flowers and tomato plants and the stale wreaths of breath and she felt the under swell of regret for her harshness because above all she loved that broken wretch for all it was f*ing worth. But she also knew he must be gone and done and moving far far away and on into forgotten prophecy. He had a flight to catch that wouldn’t leave without him, he had new shoes to fill that burnt like hell every time he wasn’t moving in them, and he had a black bike that howled if he didn’t often use it and get going and on with wherever he was supposed to be headed to. Thus, with Sebastian now being unequivocally free from the womb and from institution, from which he had so suddenly been ejected, it followed without question that all that pent up energy was to explode out of his naked eye balls and send him hurtling over horizons in a blaze of restless frenzy.
Lucinda took Sebastian’s hand and guided it to the door of the green house. Then she looked at him hard in the face, that blinking bespectacled face that looked so new and raw and she took off his glasses. And she took a fistful of his hair and grazed his cheek with a slow to fade kiss of the morning rushing upon them both. The sun started bleeding through the clouds, like hot yoke as the syrupy opaqueness of Sebastian’s vision tantalizingly distilled her blurred beauty and mercifully her blurred sorrow. Sebastian smiled a queasy sort of yellow smile and looked thoughtfully around him at the plant-muddled confines of that night time refuge. Lucinda’s green house was red. There were pots here and there and tall green tomato plants all coated in that same glaze of undefinition, and to one side slumped a dusty bag of soil which he had used as a pillow. Sebastian was torn between bathing his senses in this numbing honey coated vision that made the world seem almost bearable and the raw, unflinching definition of the world which his eyes had long since given up depicting naturally and which he needed the aid of spectacles to see. He was also torn between staying in Lucinda’s red green house, with its amiable microclimate and its four well-foliaged and intimate walls and hurrying off on that mad quest to chase down and corner time, which now lurked on behind the fourth wall of the green house which Sebastian knew was there, but couldn’t see beyond the clutter of tomato plants. Then Lucinda replaced Sebastian’s spectacles and adjusted them so he could see, and the world was cut open by that razor sharpness and bleeding into his mind and tearing at his brain and he could see all the cobwebs in the four corners of the red green house, and the blinding light sweating through the clouds and the spiders watching waiting and the grit on the ground and on his shoes and he could breath the stench of death and his latent mortality fresh upon his clothes. Then Sebastian looked at Lucinda and the raw but untainted nature of her beauty emanated from her alabaster skin, rouged at the cheeks by the surprise of finding him there that late summer’s morning.