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      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

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      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

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Drama

BLACKCACKLE: Body(s), Act I

written by E Elia March 1, 2021

This is the first installment.
Act II will be released on March 3, and Act III on March 5.

_______

The script is divided in three acts, each of which distortedly echo the others.
In this first act, two symbiotic, vaguely human entities lament the loss of two of their legs, which they have sold in many pieces for large quantities of worthless junk.

 


Image Credit: Holly Birtles, “Will it Sink” collection, Silver Gelatin print. (2020)    hollybirtles.com


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leg(s)

 

 

 

A: I cannot move. I’m in want of a leg.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Legs.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Two legs, so that I may put one in front of the other, and work them scissor-like – press through, across the earth, to home, or that which I shall make a home. And on the end of these long legs I shall have two feet. One on each.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Each leg.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Indeed. On the end of each leg I shall have one foot.
_dsfsdfssd
B: In total, two.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Two feet, on which to spread the weight of my upslung form across the earth, without falling.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Only moving.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Indeed. Moving flat across the broad earth, which extends like a stolid, prostrate sheath of solid air, endlessly.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Until its end.
_dsfsdfssd
A: I’m in want of a leg.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Legs.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Two legs. I do not have even one. I am reckless. I have spent them.
_dsfsdfssd
B: I saw you. You spent them on so much worthless junk.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Which I cannot even reach to operate, for want of a leg.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Legs.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Two legs. I have spent both legs on so much worthless junk. Look at this.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Junk.
_dsfsdfssd
A: It is junk. I thought it was valuable for whatever reason, once, but I was wrong.
_dsfsdfssd
B: You were certainly wrong.
_dsfsdfssd
A: I cannot tell the value of things. If you were to give me an object of any sort, of any aspect at all, I would mistake it for something else.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Look at you.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Look at me now. I am without legs, lying naked on the bare ground, with so much worthless junk ranged all about, out of my reach, for I am without legs.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Do you remember the man?
_dsfsdfssd
A: I remember a man who came to me with many objects. He claimed they were of considerable worth.
_dsfsdfssd
B: They were not.
_dsfsdfssd
A: He cheated me. He lied and said “this such and such a thing is of near immeasurable value, for this particular reason that you shall understand at a later point, but you may have all of it in exchange for just something of your leg.”
_dsfsdfssd
B: Which you gave him.
_dsfsdfssd
A: I gave one or many parts of my legs, at the cost of much excruciating pain (have you ever hacked a part of your own leg away, to give to another man? It is excruciating), and also my present circumstance, which I did not foresee, over and over, for he repeated the trick many times.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Until all of your legs were gone.
_dsfsdfssd
A: And he left forever, with all of my legs in separate parts, packed in paper boxes wrapped with silver ribbons, for that is what he insisted, and I did so, wrapped and packed them carefully, with great care, out of consideration for him.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Which he did not return.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Indeed. He has shown me no consideration whatsoever.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Do you think, perhaps, that he meant well?
_dsfsdfssd
A: I do not see how that could possibly be so, considering all of the lies and total lack of consideration that he has shown towards me, repeatedly, on a number of different occasions, until there was nothing left for me to give, for I had given him all that he wanted.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Your legs.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Both of my legs, which I once used without the slightest thought – oh so easily gliding from this place to that, or from that place to this high ledge, or into or out of some hole or another, or onwards, ever onwards, except to rest sometimes. Sometimes it was good to rest.
_dsfsdfssd
B: After a long day’s stalking.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Indeed, a long day’s stalking on two long legs. Would you say they were long?
_dsfsdfssd
B: Unusually long. They would reach a great distance.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Indeed. Sometimes, when the moon was unusually low, I could lie on my back and polish its chalky white cheeks with the tips of my toes.
_dsfsdfssd
B: With the tips of your toes?
_dsfsdfssd
A: With the tips of my toes I could reach all the way to the moon, a low moon, for sometimes the moon is unusually low, and it seems almost to sit on the ground, right in front of you, on the horizon just there.
_dsfsdfssd
B: And your toes would reach that far?
_dsfsdfssd
A: Yes, not so far, but far enough. Some way further, indeed, than a common leg would allow.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Yours were not common legs.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Oh no, indeed, they were most unusual, for their length as well as their strength. For sometimes, when I polished the moon with the tips of my toes, I would quite accidentally nudge the surface a little this way or that, and the moon itself would roll, momentarily of course, but roll it would, this way or that, squashing some unfortunate cloud or convection current – you know the sort that loiter idly besides the moon of a summer’s evening.
_dsfsdfssd
B: I know the sort.
_dsfsdfssd
A: And a very pleasant sort of cloud or convection current they are. Such that I would often feel quite desperately guilty at having squashed them, momentarily, for they would not recover.
_dsfsdfssd
B: They would be deceased – their corpses imprinted with its scarred surface.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Can you imagine such a thing? To have the face of the moon imprinted onto all of your body, and then to be dead, on top of that, lacking any life, so that your lifeless body was now a paper-thin impression of the surface of a lifeless moon, and you would have nothing to do but drift, aimlessly rapping against the shoulders of all the other clouds and convection currents that were yet alive, and merrily marking their way across the clear sky. Can you imagine such a thing?
_dsfsdfssd
B: I cannot.
_dsfsdfssd
A: For if you were a cloud or convection current, and you were to die, then your body persists, because the bodies of clouds and convection currents do not decompose and disintegrate as ours do, for there is nothing for them to decompose or disintegrate into. There is only the clear air.
_dsfsdfssd
B: One cannot disappear into thin air.
_dsfsdfssd
A: No, it is a fact well acknowledged. Nothing may disappear in such a way. And so now the sky is cluttered with the dead bodies of these clouds and convection currents – it has ever been thus – and I am responsible for the thinnest and flattest and ugliest of all of them. Such is the strength of my legs.
_dsfsdfssd
B: The length and strength of your legs.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Indeed. Are these not the two most valuable attributes of any leg? And mine possessed a surfeit of both.
_dsfsdfssd
B: A surfeit of strength and length.
_dsfsdfssd
A: So it was. And I have lost them for so much junk.
_dsfsdfssd
B: You must feel like an utter fool.
_dsfsdfssd
A: I do. Most certainly so. I feel like a fool without a mind and legs.
_dsfsdfssd
B: I cannot see a remedy.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Me neither. There are no strats of wood nearby, nor sticks of stone, that I could furnish as replacements.
_dsfsdfssd
B: There is that one, there.
_dsfsdfssd
A: It is out of reach.
_dsfsdfssd
B: I might fetch it.
_dsfsdfssd
A: You might fetch it for me?
_dsfsdfssd
B: I have legs, a body, hands and feet.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Why have you not mentioned this to me before?
_dsfsdfssd
B: You never asked.
_dsfsdfssd
A: I had no cause.
_dsfsdfssd
B: And besides, my legs, body, hands and feet were so much less adequate than your own. At least until you lost your legs.
_dsfsdfssd
A: And now your legs, being more than nothing, are certainly better than my own.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Indeed, they are certainly more than nothing, but perhaps they’re not quite something, also.
_dsfsdfssd
A: You lack the confidence.
_dsfsdfssd
B: And can you blame me? All my life I have accompanied you in one way or another, emotionally or intellectually perhaps, but never physically, such that all of my muscles have wasted, and my bones have thinned to the width of a single strand of hair, and weaker also, weaker than a single strand of hair – all of my bones combined are weaker than a single strand of hair.
_dsfsdfssd
A: So how are we to proceed?
_dsfsdfssd
B: I cannot say.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Are we to remain here forever? Stranded in useless muck, until all of our faculties wither to dust, and our lives also, our lives become withered as death itself, until we decease, and die?
_dsfsdfssd
B: I cannot say.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Neither I.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Do you remember, once, the time before?
_dsfsdfssd
A: I remember it well.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Our mothers introduced us, yet we could neither talk nor tell the light from darkness.
_dsfsdfssd
A: I remember it clearly.
_dsfsdfssd
B: I, too. And yet, in spite of the fact that we could neither talk nor recognise anything at all (for the world was so very new to both of us), still our mothers beheld the fixing of a bond between our kindred spirits, such that any attempt to part us from each other would constitute a terrible violence – like the willful splitting of a single, solid life in two.
_dsfsdfssd
A: And so they agreed.
_dsfsdfssd
B: So they agreed, to leave us lodged together for the duration of our lives – and they too, they too remained lodged together as a single mother, comprised of two, but forming one.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Like us.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Like us, indeed. So, from the very beginning, can you remember that in order to survive and exist in the world, we were forced to act in synchronicity, and our mothers also, in the same fashion, to the extent that each of us specialised in certain areas, to complement the whole.
_dsfsdfssd
A: I remember.
_dsfsdfssd
B: And can you remember that, since your body, arms and legs were so much stronger and longer than my own – especially your legs – that I took responsibility for all of those things that did not require an excess of physical strength, or length of reach, or both?
_dsfsdfssd
A: I do.
_dsfsdfssd
B: For example, it was my responsibility to tell the hours of the day, using a watch or any other instrument for the measurement of the passing of moment to moment, such as the position of the sun or moon in the sky, on a given day, or the creeping angle of shadows cast from tall rocks or upright persons such as yourself (when you could stand upright), or the flow of sand through the narrow opening of a specifically crafted receptacle.
_dsfsdfssd
A: I remember it well. I remember standing tall, as erect as possible, perpendicular to the earth, and you crouching and scurrying about the furthest reaches of my long shadow, measuring the angle of it as I stood in perfect stillness, barely daring to breathe, lest your calculations were disrupted, and time slip from our grasp.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Indeed. Was that so long ago?
_dsfsdfssd
A: Not so long, but not so short a time, either. It’s so very hard to tell.
_dsfsdfssd
B: We have lost track.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Indeed we have.
_dsfsdfssd
B: And so, you must remember that I also took responsibility for the handling of other abstractions, so to speak, such as the arc of each of our motions, in timeless geometrical preconfigurations, and you, having received these designs, implemented them in physical substance, so that each movement of our bodies, of our hands, feet, head, eyebrows, lips etc, achieved a certain stylish grace, so to speak, and we were lauded, were we not? – for the apparently effortless grace of our general comportment.
_dsfsdfssd
A: I remember that well.
_dsfsdfssd
B: And the speed at which we accomplished these motions was quite phenomenal, such that each of our machinations, our plans and implementations of such plans, were barely visible to the naked eye, and this added to the great spectacle of our combined grace, so that we became almost mythic in our capacities, to foreign and familiar observers alike.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Indeed. We were lionised for it, in every general population, and we toured to perform for many private audiences that were uncountable in number. If I had tried to count them, I would have surely fallen ill with the effort of doing so, for who can count the grains of sand on a long, balmy beach? Or the quantities of microbial life forms on a single, living world? It would be impossible even for the mythic, supreme being that we once were. This was the scope of our popularity, and the measure of our combined strength.
_dsfsdfssd
B: And the quantities of money that we received from these operations were also quite inconceivable, so that the figures became abstractions themselves, much like the abstract geometrical configurations which seeded our original success.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Indeed.
_dsfsdfssd
B: And then we lost all of it, for one reason or another, all of the money that we received was so great, that it amounted to nothing at all.
_dsfsdfssd
A: It was a great shame to see all of our moneys collapse into nothingness, for that is the law of all things – when infinity approaches, all conceivable quantities vanish. So, too, our sixteen houses, our army of servants, our titles, our deeds of purchase of every manner of object, our rights, accomplishments –
_dsfsdfssd
B: Our jewels, tassels, trinkets of every conceivable hue and matter, and matter, also, all of the things that we owned which were comprised of matter, they vanished also, and all that we were left with were the rocks and hills to which we were born, so did not own in any technical sense, and our bodies also, which despite containing many marvellous and valuable features, not least among them our long and loose appendages, exemplified – surpassed even – by the excellence of your legs – these things were scant pickings indeed, by comparison to the immense wealth that we once owned, that we lost in foolish ignorance of the law.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Why did no-one tell us of this law?
_dsfsdfssd
B: Yes, it was quite inconsiderate for no-one, of appropriate wealth and experience, to inform us of this law.
_dsfsdfssd
A: And we encountered many of such persons – knew them, befriended them often – and there were many, so many of them, that they seemed to flow and undulate as one complete living thing, and they were everywhere, also, everywhere that we travelled or settled for a short time, the wealthiest of the wealthy crowded about, offered us innumerable gifts and comforts, which we could not accept.
_dsfsdfssd
B: For those gifts and comforts had already come into our possession, moments before they were offered.
_dsfsdfssd
A: As our wealth was increasing at such a rate as to encompass everything that we perceived, at the instant of pre-cognition.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Quite so.
_dsfsdfssd
A: But many of the relationships that we fostered with these wealthiest of elites seemed quite intimate and meaningful, did they not?
_dsfsdfssd
B: They most certainly were.
_dsfsdfssd
A: I remember one particular billionairess, a widow, was she not? Who seemed quite desperately lonely at the death of her husband, and the expiration of her youth, so to speak, who spent much of her time stalking the opulent casinos in which we sometimes performed to private audiences, in private rooms or auditoriums built for the sole purpose of our exhibitions. And there she sat, on any number of occasions, in the front row, her wrinkled mouth ever curling to the broadest of smiles as we reached the crescendo of our act, and then, as we finished, her smile would fall, and her mouth pucker to a plaintive grimace, and a tear would roll from her left eye, across her left cheek, skirt her plaintive lips and disappear behind her chin, just as another tear issued from her right eye, and followed the same, mirrored course across the right side of her face. It was a sad sight to behold – one that moved me to act against it, with much love and compassion.
_dsfsdfssd
B: You did not even know her.
_dsfsdfssd
A: I did not even know her.
_dsfsdfssd
B: You did not even know her, yet still you stalked across the auditorium, wrenched through the blissful, grasping scrum of awe-struck adulents, set down beside her, and then delicately retrieved the tears from behind her chin, to return them to her eyes.
_dsfsdfssd
A: She was very grateful.
_dsfsdfssd
B: So grateful, that she immediately offered to exchange her stray tears for a lifetime of loving friendship, to which we, both of us, agreed without hesitation.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Without hesitation.
_dsfsdfssd
B: And where is she now?
_dsfsdfssd
A: Where is she now?
_dsfsdfssd
B: She has gone, evaporated with the rest of our wealth, like so much dust in a storm, and did she warn us?
_dsfsdfssd
A: Did she hell.
_dsfsdfssd
B: And she knew, too. She knew that our worth then converged ever so rapidly with that vicious vector of infinity, which falls like a guillotine on any extant quantity that strays across its shadow. This is a simple thing, is it not?
_dsfsdfssd
A: An effortlessly simple thing.
_dsfsdfssd
B: If we had known, we would have halted our operations, and retired to the mellowest of dream-like quasi-lives – lives to which all of the best and most accomplished individuals retreat when their time is done.
_dsfsdfssd
A: For they are lives without consequence, nor any other of the heckling sorrows which make
this life such a terrible fall from the high peaks of perfect nothingness.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Do you remember the nothingness?
_dsfsdfssd
A: I remember it perfectly – the memory of its perfect absence makes an easy balm in troubled times such as these.
_dsfsdfssd
B: And it’s with the memory of this perfect nothingness that you have managed to forgive and forget the harms perpetrated against us by the selfish, the cruel and the inconsiderate.
_dsfsdfssd
A: That I have. Its image courses through me like a liquid silver light, ever giving, ever loving. And I pass its perfect, hollow goodness onto all of those responsible for the grave crimes committed against us, myself first amongst them.
_dsfsdfssd
B: For they, ourselves included, were blinded to its guiding goodness, for whatever reason, the round reality of our own real life eclipsed it from our sight.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Its goodness is a nourishing fuel.
_dsfsdfssd
B: With it, we will rise and resurge, and our bodies – our legs and our arms and our meaty trunks – shall restore themselves to ten times their former size –
_dsfsdfssd
A: Ten times.
_dsfsdfssd
B: And benedictions shall fall from our tongues and our palms and our open eyes, into the mouths and eyes and open palms of our adversaries, and they shall rise with us, also, in perfect sympathy, rosy in the pinkish, silver light of its fine, restorative emptiness.
_dsfsdfssd
A: For we are lovers of nothing, above all.
_dsfsdfssd
B: It is nothing that we love.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Pass me those sticks.
_dsfsdfssd
B: These sticks of stone?
_dsfsdfssd
A: And struts of wood. Pass me them here.
_dsfsdfssd
B: I cannot reach them.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Tap the inswelling spring of nothingness – and course it to the furthest reaches of your outslung form.
_dsfsdfssd
B: I am doing so.
_dsfsdfssd
A: You are doing it the wrong way.
_dsfsdfssd
B: I cannot do it.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Regard. See how I, now, wrench rivers from the inswelling spring – and direct them, through my body, deep to its darkest microbial catacombs.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Where all the dead things go to die.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Indeed. There the voiding currents sweep the festering waste, and turn it to some gainful use.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Such as?
_dsfsdfssd
A: Claws, nails, hair, or any other dead thing that life makes live again.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Those are not legs.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Indeed not, although from it, I might fashion two approximate leg-like appendages.
_dsfsdfssd
B: So the living pile the bodies of their dead kin into shapes and sounds resembling life always.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Precisely.
_dsfsdfssd
B: I can see a fine crust unfurling from the rim of your waist.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Indeed.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Now it creases into two thick stumps, where once your legs were thrust.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Quite so.
_dsfsdfssd
B: They are growing apace, each stump now thinning to a long pointed horn, smooth and brown, burnished with streaks of white and gold, the tips now curling to two flat hooves, and you are moving them also, straining your whole leg-like horns against the dirt and stones, heaving your sideslung trunk incrementally forwards, towards the sticks of stone and struts of wood, for which now you have no use.
_dsfsdfssd
A: For I am already in possession of replacements for my once marvellous legs.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Pull yourself up.
_dsfsdfssd
A: With these sticks of stone and struts of wood I shall do so. I shall choose one, and jam it, hard into the ground, and in so doing generate an upward bearing force, which I shall ride like the moon rein’ed tide to some high perch, gyroscopically poised astride proud hips and long, leg- like horns, and from there I shall take a long look round, and choose a point of some salience – perhaps a tall, familiar rock, or otherwise a favoured forest, or a lake well loved – to which I’ll go, smoothly on, until I reach it, and there I shall sit down.
_dsfsdfssd
B: You are doing so.
_dsfsdfssd
A: It is a laborious effort.
_dsfsdfssd
B: You are swaying like the branches in a strong wind.
_dsfsdfssd
A: I cannot hold to a fixed point.
_dsfsdfssd
B: The horns are inanimate, lacking the swivelling pivots of a true leg, by which all loose, living things adjust themselves to the inconstant surface of a hard earth.
_dsfsdfssd
A: I cannot stop moving. I am in want of an ankle.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Ankles.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Two ankles. So that I might set myself, upright, upon the ground, and work them, axle-like, ‘cross rumpling roads and roiling hills and wide, declining plains, near and far ahead. And above these ankles I shall have two knees, one on each.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Each leg.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Indeed. In the middle of each leg I shall have one knee, with which to vault myself about the world, without falling.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Only moving.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Indeed. Moving fast across the broad earth, which extends like a thick stretch of prone flesh, endlessly.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Until its end.
_dsfsdfssd
A: I’m in want of an ankle.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Ankles.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Two ankles. I do not even have one. I am reckless. I have missed them.
_dsfsdfssd
B: I saw you. You missed them out completely.
_dsfsdfssd
A: If you were to give me a task of any sort at all, I would do it wrongly, and in the attempt, clatter out a catalogue of hapless mishaps, each of which beget further mishaps, independently, as if of their own free will, and so on and so forth, until millions upon millions of their contingent consequences descend upon us, as if they were choosing to do so, quite independently, and the largest and most grotesque among them, which are like planets to their straggling moons, are two ultimate errors, committed in desperate innocence – one, the loss of my legs, and two, my replacement of said legs with two wholly inadequate leg-like horns, which I have grown from my midriff with neither the proper thought nor care, so that they lack ankles and knees also, both of which I would need to operate any leg effectively, in addition to the myriad of sinew, muscle and cartilage that each of those things also require, to the effect that I am hobbled and burdened also, burdened with the weight of two vast antlers, and hobbled by the continued absence of an adequate leg.
_dsfsdfssd
B: Legs.
_dsfsdfssd
A: Two legs. I am hobbled by the absence of my own two legs.

 

BLACKCACKLE: Body(s), Act I was last modified: March 2nd, 2021 by E Elia
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E Elia
E Elia

E Elia is a person with two arms, two legs and a head. He is also an author of some repute, having written the cult art satire We Go to the Gallery with his sister Miriam, and the Beckettian rodent nightmare, The Diary of Edward the Hamster 1990-1990. Over course of the ongoing global pandemic, he has spent a great deal of time (ineptly) home-schooling his five-year-old daughter, and hobby-ing out his own unique form of ontological satire, of which Body(s) is the latest result. Biographical line drawing by Miriam Elia.

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