Jimbo

This is a short piece I wrote for a class a few months ago. I’ve tuned it up a bit, enjoy!

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The forest is textured map material sliced by lines of lattertude and longevitude, dotted with blots of tree color ink. Fall fall fall, high fast and hard, into a slice of the plane. Jimbo is here. Jimbo runs right along through the spindling trees. His head swivels, wild and alert, taking in the panoply of flora assaulting his senses. Fawning over a bush dotted with bright yellow berries, something begins to beat at the interior of his head, something not quite right. His eyeballs bounce forward from his sockets and back in, something heavy were pounding at the interior of his skull. Yellow berries on the bush begin to dance, so sensuous, so so sensuous. The bark of the soldierly trees arrayed around him begins to course and swirl.

The pounding intensifies, and then a shudder pulsates through him, a magnet drawn over the glass of a cathode ray tube computer screen, distorting the image.

With a grunt, his brain kicks off the top of his head, clambers out of the interior of his skull, bounces onto the ground then into the air like an over-inflated basketball. It bounces along, leaving Jimbo behind, bouncing through a now solidified world with a boingy-boingy sound until it rounds itself into a spherical ball of flesh dough.

Ball arrives at an edge of a cliff. The cliff is one of those sharpened ones, marble-like in its one-hundred-percent grade. Ball, cautious, rolls to the edge and looks down—there is only cliff stretching away into a pinprick of a vanishing point.

So Ball rolls off—into the vast chasm, falling falling falling until it reaches the point beyond the edge of perception, the fall becoming rounder somehow, more concave, parabolic. It spins, faster faster faster until first it is a blur then it is an invisible moving airplane propeller that throws itself apart with the force of the movement. It splatters the porcelain walls of the cliff face that is no longer that, slipping sliding down the edges until it pools at the basin which it now rests inside.

With a sucking, gargling sound, the liquid starts to spiral into a newly formed bunghole until it chokes everything down with a burp of satisfaction. A hand rises from the drainhole, waggling its fingers, transdimensional, transcorporeal, transical. It grips the lip of the drain and pulls itself out, pulls itself to its once-again feet, slipping a little bit on the thin remnant film of liquid and the slippery interior of the bowl. Jimbo hops out of the bowl, no longer an infinity, now just a bowl for cereal or liquidated brain materials. The remnant film of the pool glistens, evaporating from the Wedgwood blue of the cliff floor.

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If you enjoyed this, you can check out another piece that was published a few months ago in Hippocampus Magazine, or you can head over to the Work page to see some more stuff.