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Fred the Brown Chapter 1, Tangent 2
The small child slept alone in the dark house for perhaps the second time in a week that night. Lips trembling and white-faced, she presses the sheets to her burning mouth and shakes until the traces of the tears have faded into the mattress. Six inches beneath her, bedlice swarm in the rotting cavern of the bed where her sweat and tears have corrupted the wood and feathers into one gaping hole punctuated by coiled iron springs like arrowheads buried in a long-healed wound.
There is a lamp by the child's bed which if you spin will make a slideshow on the wall. Now, the dancing animals are still, and a bird carved into the lampshade in a flat, painted sky now illumines the child's forehead with a single ray of light, like a martyr's in some Renaissance fresco.
The child is not a good child. When she grows up she will be manipulative, and she will at the point when her friends have finally given up on her finally introduce a false story of her parents sexually harrassing her and so grapple them to her soul in rings of terrible pathos. She will entrap them in the conspiracy of painted secrets and she will laugh at them from behind her carved smile as she spins, casting shadows across their faces.
Whatever her sins, uncommitted or otherwise, her parents have comitted upon her the sin of omission. It will never be understood by her friends, when the lies fall down, that the most damage that can be done on a child is that of neglect.
Far away, her mother dances in the arms of another man while the father looks on restlessly, tapping time with his fork on a wineglass while his absent hand trails the curvature of the table-leg below the fringes of the tablecloth. As if prompted, the other man's hand begins the descent down his wife's thighs as she is whisked out of sight and across the dark cellar that the club resides in to the other side of the room. No one sees this; and the one person who can feel it does nothing but laugh and pinch his elbow as she clings to his body, hanging within the epicentre of the spinning room.
Behind her painted face one would observe an illusion of zaniness, like a thin stetch of clingfilm running with oils: behind this a wound, as if one had savaged their soul with fake nails and had stopped up its mouth with blusher and a bit of lippie. In this hole something wept, something seeped; fingers pushed at the zaniness like her husband tracing her breast and the dream kicked at her - she laughed the louder to cover it up and recklessly pushed her body into the nook of the man's hollow chest.
Fred the Brown pushed the two closer together until they seemed amorphous; their thin thoraxes pressed against each other until they seemed like the leap of a fountain, like the back of a dolphin. The child, who had wet the bed, surfaced upside-down above them and her dark voice screamed in spirals as Fred the Brown sapped her future from her until she was a pure, shining thing without eyes or mouth, like an angel would look.
The three adult lovers chased each other like liquids in a drain, never touching this thinning droplet of the child; and then like bubbles they burst and were gone. Fred the Brown rose like a light from his writing; and he crossed the room to the window, where the landscape was spread as always like torn sheets over the broken furniture of the city. Fred the Brown understood that when you diminish something, you transcend from it as well.