A headlong incendiary, no greater than the others except in its threat, only nearer. An aeroplane flying low flying wildly, as if almost out of gas its engines down stalled, heaving forward, convulsing, its womb opening slowly, to birth: a bomb on your house, a bomb on your heads, one for each ear. A lone, ribhuddled heifer, the most starved around, the weakest and slowestdriven, the gruntiest, runnysnouted runt, it’s tearing at this huge hulk, an enormous round of gleaming ordnance or mine netted underneath a knot of corpses, an alien body amongst bodies hard and strange, a pearly prickly fallen thing presently parturient from a tangle of fleshy kelp and weather: two keratinous juts coming out of its sides, curving up to the sharp taper of blades; twin chitinous growths, cutting the air to pierce at the sun — strongstalked, one’s a rock, the other’s a stone. Or else, they’re horns. Around these volutinous spans as white as bone, streaked with blood, a mass of lackluster, thinning more than ever but lately kinky hair, unremembered this shade the dark of underground night, such a saddening change from the previous blond, and lately infested, too, with every kind of louse known to mensch and mouse alike: a few lousy species no sage has yet managed to identify, other louses they don’t even know yet exist, though no one does, and the lice hardly know themselves: they’re just simple creatures; all they want is to steal life from the living, their existence an effortless halflung, to suck the blood of a host — which explains these stains trailing to blemish the crescenting moons that are icicles; that are horns. Up from the unbarbered forehead, which is peely and flaking and dandruffed with drift. About that head proper — amazingly, a miracle, we’re speechless, please, still, give me a moment, I’m being torn up…the horns, they’re grown from a head, and the head, it’s grown, is growing still, from a body, out from the earth, a wrigglingly living wracked sac of a soul: it’s B, me, over here, the Untermensch, unto the mensch under the Under-mensch, udderly menscheddown, demoted and dirtied, I’m full of filth and sick horny, having buried myself to hide, amid a copse of corpses, for safety, to think and rest up, to wait it out, eternity and all, just my luck.
My hide uncovered, and with what left of my hair stuck fast in the heifer’s hurl, about to be ground down into the cycle of putrescent swallow and putsch (it can only be hoped)…I raise my head then my body to elbow the earth, to toss from me the corpses that skeinstick my legs, go to poke at the dumb, animal eyes of the heifer with my not sure which they are whether of brilliantined bone or extrudingly calcified brain, newly grown out, you like them, what do you think: windsharpened, weatherfrozen, their weight, the cumbersome balance…goddamn it, they’re giving me a terrible headache. Attacked, wounded staggery and flabbily farmisht for a fodder on its slip-shoddy hooves, the heifer lets out a rounded vowel, a planetary low, which is swallowed into the echo of the explosioning around us; its mouth opens wider, more, as if to take my head in all the way as a cork to its call; it tears my hair to throw me up not into its gape but onto its back again, hairy if warming…I’ve been here before. I’m saddled in reverse, my face to face the heifer’s tush, my eyes, my nose, my mouthy ears, how to tell it to you so fetid with flies, with maggoted dreck…the entire field around us as if flesh itself suppurant with flesh reeking, putrid, a skin smutted with bodies bombed to fly high and land messy and the butchered carcasses of big innocent cows, turned the same bruisy colorlessness of the blasting around; with the cinerulent singe of such undone, letdown, blowncrazy hair filling the air with a gas of bright blond; how we’re wildly spooked through all this in a stampede of one and of me not guiding but turnedaround riding, more like holding on not for my life but by instinct, with one hand on the nape of the heifer’s neck as thin as a sinew of spine and the other why’s it gripping hard to one of my horns as if I’m riding, I’m guiding, myself — our lonely trek out toward the open, with our four horns slashing at the slash of the wind, how we separate the smoke from the flame.
