East of the Chocolate Deep Runs the Conversation Without an
Audience
Meanwhile,
the painting went unfinished.
“I just
can’t seem to get into it without drugs,” Chance Frackle confessed. There were those who advised that he pretend
to be on drugs, but they were drowned out by the cheers for the arrival of the
band (or the team or the caterers or whatever).
You could hear it across the marshes, indistinctly, a sound like a
prelude to alligators.
The old man
sat on the stump. You couldn’t say that
he was waiting, because he no longer expected anything to happen. You couldn’t say that he was patient or
impatient, because he no longer cared.
You couldn’t even say that he actually believed alligators would come
and eat him up, because he had seen the reports before leaving home and
apparently there were no deaf alligator puppets scheduled for dispatch in this
lifetime.
.
