Botchi

Mar stepped outside the cabin and looked up at the silhouetted, labyrinthine pattern of the trees’ branches which scored the moon-illumined sky. The night air was as cool as milk, circulating around the out-house, pleonastic in its delivery. Mar contemplated the spirituality of the Franciscan order, though not without questioning the importance of Saint Elstein. More of a hobby than anything else, theological philosophy was simply another string on Mar’s wrought-iron bow. Turning to peruse the model of the womb, now snapped at the top end of fallopian tube 2, Mar formulated several courses of action to run by Sizz, who appeared from the bistro, specks of vomit splattered over his blazer sleeve. Looking visibly distraught, Sizz pointed at the womb and vomited once more.
“The female genitalia is complex kit Mar, how can I ever satisfy an engine as finely tuned as that?”

Mar turned back to the time, and felt it appropriate that she keep stumm on the subject.
“Sizz, be quiet. Listen carefully to what I have to say. I think I know a way to trap Kluzens and win the war. You will have to be the decoy, a troubled retailer looking for a new line. By spinning the simplest of yarns, we will incarcerate K in a web of sin, extracting the confession from him in a way so devious I feel that I shall keep it to myself for a while.”
“What?” replied Sizz, all at sea.
Mar turned to Sizz, placing a loving hand on his comical shoulder.
“Come, Sizz. Let’s go home.”
And with that the pair left the square to return to the labs, conversing little as they made their way, under the constant glare of Three-Mile Ford. The streets were almost deserted, the bustle replaced with sorrowful howls of poverty and the idle chatter of chaos. Four youths discussed the frenzied tactics of long-ball as they gathered around the blazing trashcan. Sizz kicked at a stray bison calf that had found itself in the urban wasteland, just over the boundary fencing from plane delta l. Licking his lips as he chased the animal, who was bolting around in an apparently aimless farce, Sizz withdrew his scientific calculator from his pocket and hurled it at the hapless calf. The deg button had stopped working several weeks ago but Sizz’s act still exemplified wasteful futility. The calculator bounced off the cambered asphalt of the gloomy side-road and the small screen of the mathematical computation device shattered. Sizz collected the electronic abacus from the floor and gazed at the destroyed instrument, for a moment ignoring the loud grunts of the young calf which was now circling around him in a frenzy. As well as the shattered screen, several of the numbers had become loose; Sizz wobbled the number ‘8’ from side to side with the tips of his fingers, eventually dislodging it from its chronological location. He held the miniscule numerical wedge up to the sky and was taken aback by the incongruity of the item now that it had lost its validity as a functional member of a calculator keypad. The number now seemed something of a curio as Sizz held it vertically above him at arms length, the Drowning Harp constellation providing a striking background.
“I know how you feel,” came a voice from behind him, the accent unmistakably Schelswig-Holstein, “you feel like your whole life is just an absurd dream within a dream, a fiction trapped in a bubble floating over The Four Seas of Marquez, a hammer busily pounding a rubber wall.”
This was undoubtedly the most profound thing that Sizz had ever heard. He was just about to demand that the philosopher reveal himself when two people emerged from behind a large cart that was two-thirds full with wheat. As they stepped out of the shadow of the cart, Sizz could make out an old man in a refuse collector’s hat and a younger man following a couple of paces behind, his head bowed. Sizz span around scoping the lane and realized that the three of them were alone. Mar had not followed him on his cow chase and was probably enjoying a game of eight-pin douche with the locals in the central boulevard. The younger man kicked the panicking calf as he approached Sizz, sending the immature bovine scuttling down the lane towards Five Paddocks. He drew level with the old man and raised his head, assessing Sizz’s posture with an icy glint in his eyes.
“Good evening Sizz” the man began.
“Who are you?” Sizz gasped in response.
“Ha, Ha, Ha. Someone you have been trying to locate for a long time. I hadn’t realized that you were still in town. Why, I even saw you in the window of Foe’s with Mar but did not realize who you were until this smelly old sage informed me,” the man stated whilst patting the ancient fool on the back.
“Kluzens? But you look…”
“Nothing like the photo-fit that you have assembled at the lab,” Kluzens intervened deftly. “That man is Botchi – our intelligence network easily fooled Milko Horst and he conflated our identities. I was hoping you would find Botchi and destroy him, but you were too slow and I had to liquidate him myself. I did not think that Mar would be so ravishing, what a cruel knob of fate: to be the nemesis of such a beauty.”
Sizz noticed a gentle crimson finch plucking insidious maggots from the gangrene infested right cheek of Kluzens’ face. But the innocent creature was more selfless than Sizz comprehended. For the finch did not undertake this task as a means for topping up its protein levels, as would befit a self-interested creature of this level in the evolutionary chain, but popped each maggot carefully unharmed into a specially developed compartment in Kluzens’ splendiferous head garment. Dabrind, the finch’s name of choice, was thoroughly opposed to mercantile barter and exchange forms of societal organization – he was the ornithological equivalent of a late Victorian philanthropist, replete with fascist modes of categorizing inter species relations. He wanted to be remembered as the first in what he hoped would be a long line of self-sacrificing finches. Unfortunately Dabrind hadn’t developed his theory far enough to realize that the species would surely end in vainglorious starvation would but all finches to follow his deluded example.
“Nice hat”, blurted Sizz, heavily pregnant with the notion that his time on this crumbling lump of rock was close becoming a state of emergency. Kluzens, conducting this encounter with his back to Sizz, holding up the ubiquitous vanity mirror which was to become his trademark, thus avoiding direct vision of Sizz snorted,
“Why thank you, my good man. I thought no one would ever notice. I suppose you’re intrigued as regards that maggot compartment, no?” The old man chortled, and Sizz’s weeping eyes glanced lightly over him. Wasn’t he clean-shaven earlier, now sporting a Marxian facial decoration too leftfield to be true.
“Yes, I was intrigued by this little scenario unfolding before my eyes.”
“Well I suppose you will always be intrigued little man, because I am terribly unforthcoming as regards my personal details. Besides, this here gentleman has got some assassination work to complete, haven’t you Alan?”
Old Man Alan smiled, and removed his woollen hat, to reveal a thick head of flaxen hair which he ruffled with his medium-sized hand. Sizz barely had time to detail the oscillating movements of the man’s hands, the refined mescaline pumping in to his buttocks at the shortest of notices. As he fell due to the overwhelming dosage, Sizz heard Kluzens whisper,
“and of course we have arranged for Mar to lose by three pins…”

‘Three pins, pins, pins, pins, pins, p, p…’

Sizz’s consciousness spiraled uncomfortably downwards, through the concrete image of world and deep down to the pits of despair. The very nature of sight melted in mere seconds, a watery conglomerate of Kluzens, a grinning Alan and the bison calf swirled in to one central point, before combusting into the Libyan nose shape of Mar. Sizz felt the nightmare wash over him, the pain unbearable, the ecstatic visions forming and receding with alarming frequency. A deep throbbing pain arrived from somewhere, (the left nostril of Mar?), and soon enough the light faded to nothing.

Kluzens cast a discerning eye over the shaking, sweaty excuse of man that lay before him. Turning to Alan, Kluzens nodded simply; the old man’s cue. Dragging the glistening form back behind the wheaty cart, Alan disappeared into the night, struggling with the lab assistant’s mass.
“All too easy,” muttered Kluzens to himself, walking to the square where he knew Mar to be.

Next chapter…