Fantastic Metropolis

My message?

Buried at sea eight forty became sad and silent.

Morte d’Art is beheaded on tv spotty the corrosive centipede runs downstairs in the Peasley home for fidgetty girls and boys as genievre myrmidon sets her wheeled chair on fire. They would miss her. She galloped west into a picturesque sunset. Here this is me as I should be.

21

Finished? said knickers steaming up the globe I haven’t got time to tell you everything. Turning to camera she smiled.

It’s nine o’clock and sixty to seventy hieroglyphics are leaving the temple of punctuality why? Because trotters like me here tried living outside life. Remember this chicken when you start up. Spotty unpaved the street round the obelisk to run over children creeping along on hundreds of acid feet mopping his brow with a blue handkerchief whistling Arabian Nights. What do you say spotty?

Ocnus I’ll show you the promise of veiled women substituting accidents for hope. Unravelling lives. Ocnus I fear they will not cry.

I’m not in the least particular like you. I am a sort of universal being. You must have known that sooner or later I’d walk home alone. So what.

Elizabethan bicycles were piled against the bank and no one else in the village belonged. Promptly at half past nine the next morning we grow tired of TV.

Funny something about this time of year reminds me of October said Grannie this is a good show.

22

A very hungry snub nosed tom cat followed Zari down Muski to El Dorado every Saturday. Zari always pretended not to notice him. Week after week the cat peeped in the window of her life with a sigh.

Then in the summer of 1999 our reality was overrun by gingerbread men. The invading cookies surrounded the tuck shop where Zari weighted tables. Boppy soon rallied all the magic heroes in this book to the secret passages below bargain town. He wanted to rescue Zari with a surprise attack emerging from beneath the Hawkins avenue bridge and rushing to the shop before the enemy could strike back. Now it had been fifty pounds since Boppy decided to leave the Peasley home and he drove his underground cab fast from left to right shouting instructions at the passengers—

Keep your barrel on! Fire torpedo two you idiot! Save your blubbering for the trenches! Give me a change of costume!

—daylight at last they exited and sped up Hawkins heading straight to the shop. Giant shamrocks paved the way for gingerbread houses buttered toast trees and cookie people the cab ground through hundreds of thousands of them. They stopped at nothing.