...a deathly serenade...

want to know, I said in my mind, but if I did, I
may have felt a schizoid paranoia by the situation
as it stood. Bon then peaked his head around into
the room, a floating head, just staring at us for a
moment and smiling his jagged teeth at us. He
said that he wanted to show us something in the
garden, and Lucia hardly responded, only
nodding her head slightly, so I said that we would
be down in a moment. I was tempted to ask Lucia
what was wrong, but I was afraid she would say
everything. I walked out of the bedroom alone
and after I reached the top of the stairs, I could
hear Lucia behind following. Bon then said that
we had to see this, and started walking, from the
landing at the bottom of the stairs, to the garden,
through the dining area, kitchen. Now at the
bottom of the garden I saw about five of them all
stretched out across the garden next to beds of
flowers. —They’re flamingos, you like them? Said
Bon excitedly of them. And I just looked: at their
wings (which were all clipped, apparently), at
their strange movements, at their distinct
exoticness: their long necks particularly. And as
Bon continued to explain how he had them
imported from the Caribbean I sat down and
observed Lucia, or tried to, without her noticing,
whilst feeling a sense of surrealism as if an axiom
to the image of the situation. She, at first just
watched the flamencos too and said nothing, not
even at my ebbing (I had said that they were so
exotic) did she respond much: a grunt or a sigh.
But there was something in the way that she
looked at them that I found sultry, unequivocal.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
200