Rarely have I ever seen someone who looks truly rotten. They don’t seem to show up often. Even
the most miserable faces have some redeeming qualities. A tattooed cross on a forehead. A
smirk. The aging scars from a blow inflicted by an addict with an axe, or, hatchet, to be accurate.
These things add flair, a sparkle, though they rarely create networking opportunities. Glimpses
tend to be short and lips tight when that type of people walk through the bus or claim a corner
on a train car. A moose once climbed on a bus and was treated with more dignity. But, I have to
admit, this moose looked better than you.
When you showed up at my door with your red shirt I could see that you looked rotten. Your
head was nearly scraping the roof above you as you stood lanky, snot dripping out your nose. It
seemed like you had spawned out of some slimy pore that had long been forgotten and
untended, hidden in the scalp of some Argentinian psychoanalyst with a bright imagination and
a thick head of hair. You were projection. And trauma. You were a red shirt, eight feet tall and
skin was your face. I haven’t seen, for instance, many faces lacking orifices, that can easily be
considered, by our standards, as rotten.
It was said that once, in a lush grove, you had stuck your head in a hole you had dug six days
ago. The nearby villagers came to see it. A man with a holeless face had stuck his head in a hole
on the ground. Excited children ran in circles around your eight feet tall body that sprung out of
the ground like a palm tree. Flowers were thrown at your groin and slid sadly down on the
ground. When you came back up, your face brown with soot, screams rang out in all directions
as the villagers and their children witnessed a rotten face. This was 800 years ago, on the banks
of a river. I digress.
I saw your eyes covered by a smooth, oily skin, the color of mayonnaise that’s been left out on a
scorching sun, flickered with the debris of a carcass that has fallen from a tall cliff. It made my
skin crawl, and yours did. A weak web of cartilage covered your mouth and I could hear your
attempts to mouth out a call to arms or a hymn. You looked like a worm. But you could move.
Your arms grasped the walls. You loomed over me. You mouthed out your dinosaur salutes and
although I could not understand them, I heard your sounds. They filled the empty space in my
bedroom and bounced off the walls. And you slinked into my door, no more a physical space but
resembling water, you passed through it.