Eluthia Ch2

During his first sober Christmas, Minus had an existential nightmare in a waking state. Mostly Uncle Willard’s fellow blue-collar workers populated the scene who ascertained themselves far up the pedestal of their own ego, caroused loosely, drinking eggnog and metropolitans. Besides Minus’s father and mother being dead, the Wellington family as a whole dwindled down in the numbers.

 

Minus seemed removed from his surroundings. A strong case of anxiety robbed his chest of breathing. No dialogue could articulate that Alice in Wonderland feeling. The whole lot of them looked like caricature cutouts. Freddy, one of Ted’s mechanical engineers on the scene with his blowfish like cheeks cackled like Popeye with a pipe in his mouth, patronized Minus with his buggy eyes ; everything seemed fake, artificial, and distant from those authentic realities he had known as a child, like waiting for Christmas presents the next morning. The preconceived veil lifted, and birthed were new trimmings, polished and varnished right before him. He no longer wore the marijuana-coated glasses, but that did not stop his reasoning from using its meat hooks. The problem was that Minus harbored a tired, outdated reasoning.

 

Minus could not reposition, or adjust himself in the midst of company especially when his uncle’s company bounced commentary about him as if he were not in the room.  

 

Without even acknowledging Minus with a nod, Willard announced, “The ole chap doesn’t drink anymore!” Then Ted solicited a nod and motioned with a drink in his hand, his way of saying congratulations.

 

“If Minus had some of my thick blood he would have seen the bottle all the way through, and joined the apex of what fellow artists endure.” 

 

“Your no artist, mate.” His ill-defined friend cackled.  Humorously, nothing could ever explain why his uncle boiled in his own antics, his friends jovially buying his jokes.

 

Minus had been shelled, carved out of his Uncle’s sowing circle; Minus’s stitching seriously contrasted with the rest of this Christmas’s evening needlework.

 

Picture Minus’s cranium enmeshed with the landscape before him, the roots of the earth tie to every electrode of the brain and the grass continues to grow, his body, a dark filled galaxy, continuing to weigh falling objects of rock, earth and matter to the tiny space ether in a tiny black hole that is the ever-seeing eye. He is Sumonosthestra, waiting patiently in the Forgotten Palace.

                                     

But all Minus can see is faint, unintelligible letters marked in chromium, cascading along a gallery of painting and pictures that bear his name, only he can not see it. Instead he goes trotting along to the friends of long ago. Yet something stronger than nostalgia brings him here. All these memories purport a sense of purpose and an obligation to be filled. The ever-seeing Eye pulls Minus down roads, over interstates, exit signs say “to Metairie, La.” Minus is at a keg party. He has the faint notion that he had quit drinking, but he swigs a beer anyway instantaneously. He is offered a joint, but he can’t picture the face that hands it to him. Oh, it is Valentino. Valentino says, “Hey buddy. What is your name?” Minus cannot answer. 

 

Minus, frantic, bewildered with insurmountable cravings, drank a whopping amount of red bull, enough to send him into an existential frantic habit of painting. Impinged with the stinging feeling that his life was false, he ordained the canvas with flying colors, a splash of red and yellow, an articulate calculation of brown and maroon. He folded the draft in half and let it dry. Then he unfolded it and sketched around with his pencil until an etched cutout was visible. The artistic endeavor was purely instinctual, part of his father’s DNA perhaps. The etched leftover appeared to be a disfigured man, eyes wide open with fraught and eagerness, solitude needled into the pupils of his eyes. Minus began to draw those in. The disfigured man retaliated and succumbed to the colors surrounding him as if it were the dream the man had created, his own fossilized identity sketched in running colors galore. Funny thing is Minus could never draw until now, never could sketch such animate things as if they were crossing into his world. A break through perhaps of poetic capabilities yet realized.

 

The first drawing ballooned into creation. It seemed to pronounce urgency with its curved features like the druid symbols of Kal. Its face was elusive, yet the progression of the drawing fluid, promising and towering with authority. Minus articulated the words “Sumonesthestra.”

 

The sharp features of the second drawing looked like a hieroglyphic with a pointy nose like the trickster, fiery hair, seemed to infiltrate through the paper. Somehow, his own creation rang a bell. How messy memory is… it dwindles somewhere in the nether regions of dream and reality. “Ullkrest” Minus uttered with surprise. The articulation, this time, rigid and unnatural.