the mysterious pink envelope

I


Lucille stood in front of the long mirror to open the pink envelope. It had arrived two days ago and had been sitting on the battered oak table, untouched but not forgotten. Her name and address were perfectly written on the front in a thick black ink. She had been a little afraid of what it might say inside the mysterious pink envelope. It smelt vaguely like unsmoked tobacco, rather moist, and fresh like a good shower with soap, and her fingers as graceful as crystal swans trembled a little as she ran them across the seal. Lucille jumped as she cut her skin ever-so-slightly on the paper and a tiny trail of pale red blood emerged between previously unnoticed folds of skin. She gently sucked the wound with an optimistic sigh. Sliding her index finger beneath the self-adhesive strip she moved it along horizontally, one end to the other, and the noise in the silent drawing room was like the whoosh of a firework. Blue paper was inside, pale like eyes. It hadn’t been folded because it was so small a piece of paper. The new smell that left the inside of the envelope reminded Lucille of cut grass and running hosepipes, but a lot of things tended to remind Lucille of these things lately.

Lucille’s hair was fair and long to her back, her body curved like a chocolate Venus but with two good arms, her eyes melted like butter on a sun-struck windowsill, her breasts rose high with every breath and she had bare feet when she read that one square of blue paper:


“You are the most beautiful
girl
I have ever been without.”


She clasped it to her chest: oh the smile! Rain hit the window and sounded like a birdsong, and there sneaked a flutter at the top of her thighs, and she looked deep inside the same pink envelope and saw a glorious grassy knoll, and without a word she fell right onto it.


II


But a knoll, and in an envelope? Lucille didn’t think that it was really her place to question such matters, so she lay herself down on the grass and hummed in the sunshine, which shone with the force of reality, despite its existence within the confines of the mysterious pink envelope. A few peaceful moments later she was disturbed by something prodding into her side. How frustrating, she thought on the knoll in the envelope that had made her feel so beautiful. It was a hot dog.

“What’s all this?” asked the hot dog in a surprising voice.

“Just a grassy knoll,” replied Lucille rather curtly. She had just been woken up after all, although she didn’t think she had been asleep.

“Not all this,” said the Staten Island Dog, slapping the grass. “This grassy knoll is always going on here.”

“If not all that then all what?” asked Lucille, who was becoming more interested in what the hot dog had to say.

“All this!” it exclaimed, and slapped Lucille in the face. Shocked and with thick red lips Lucille immediately put the hot dog in her mouth before it even had time to belch its distaste. She dozed back off cheerfully.

A semi-hour later and Lucille woke up, only this time the grassy knoll was grass no longer but sharp jagged rocks, the sky looked like a furnace and Lucille’s arms and legs had somehow become – albeit beautiful and perfectly formed and soft and gentle – hot dogs. Surrounding her, rather eerily she thought, was a pack of singing sailors hats.


“Ho ho ho and a case of good rum” – they sang –
“long might we drink it
now and forever
so as we might forget the embarrassment
of being the all-singing
all-dancing
drunken sailors hats.”


They offered Lucille a dark brown bottle because she looked upset and the dancing and the singing continued, feeling as though everyone should clap their hands. The hats, of course, didn’t have any. Lucille brushed her hot dogs together and moved awkwardly about in the rocks.


III


“The rum keeps flowing
all night long
until we can’t remember
anything at all.”


The sailor’s hats seemed to be getting more reckless and more miserable, and Lucille didn’t like not being able to stand up because her legs were of hot dog. It was an unusual sensation. The rocks that hadn’t always been looking like they were breathing and moved themselves in a revelation. What are you doing? she wanted to ask the hats.

“What are you all doing dancing and drinking like this in the afternoon? And where has that lovely green grass gone to?”

The sailor’s hats ceased all activity at once and not one of them said a word in direct reply. “Listen to her,” said one; “she’ll never understand!” sobbed another; “nothing the matter with her, look, with her perfect hot dogs for limbs!”; “we’re the one’s suffering,”; “grass?”; “grass, she says!”. Lucille managed to manoeuvre herself backwards. The hats threw the rum away, smashing the bottle; it screamed as it broke and Lucille watched the broken fragments of glass transforming into trees as if released from some eternal curse. They piled before the girl with the hot dogs and with one last lament went forth in song:


“Oh oh oh
oh oh oh
oh oh oh
What it is (to be me!)”


They even managed to sing the parenthesis but it was too late for punctuation, and the hats plummeted from the tall rocky edge and Lucille screamed “no you don’t have to!”. But they had fallen straight down onto the heads of 1950s dockworkers, tattooed and laid and moving on with a cargo of elegance and decanters, and they kept their mouths shut.

Lucille closed her eyes but heard a voice shout “Jork!” at one side of the stage, and a telephone ringing at the other, and it was raining, and she seemed to be on a football pitch. Green grass! The silver tipped mind balloon! But what’s this? An office complex? Legs are legs once more. Good. Those dogs were making me hungry. Although my arms are now… forks?

Ah, it’s Jork. The cutlery amalgam.


IV


“Behold me missy I have the head of a fork”, spoke Jork. What hot rain there seems to be on this young field, I can feel it melting right through my clothes, thought Lucille. And office block with windows like this could only be in the commercial sector. No football match but all the white lines seemingly in place, and then this darned tower like a big thingy in its midst.

“Behold me I said,” said Jork disgruntledly. “Your head cogs are turning in the perpetuity of a solipsistic introspective philosophic philologic rudeness.”

“Pardon me?”

“Pardon maybe but ever really be able to forgive I don’t bloody balls.”

“…”

“Just ignoring me – Jork – to think about the confusing nature of your own temporary reality and this a football pitch.”

“But the pitch…”

“The pitch makes the earth spin make the earth spin makes the earth spin and that tower” – he pointed with an outstretched piece of cutlery – “that’s the after-paradise stock machine. Share buying and spares. Currency analysis and whosoever cares. Must toodle.”

Jork kissed Lucille on the lips and had a fork for a head. It would be wrong to say that she took no pleasure from the kiss, but it was a pleasure she couldn’t quantify, occurring in a place she blushed to think about. He was a cutlery amalgam, she was a lady. Don’t know where he disappeared to though. The telephone kept on ringing. Lucille thought it must have been coming from the office tower. It wasn’t, because a man with a cellular phone and a dark red suit was walking towards her and shouting jumbled words and sentences into it. He wore sunglasses.

“…watchplants scrummy scrummy tell the wife the boy has done the doo-wop a clock handle I say give me a three quarter square percentage of niner over the proverbial detriment at nine point two two the pound my shelf needs a rebuild my stocking wants for darning buffoon is surely a ten…”

He stopped in front of Lucille, walking but not talking, that is, the latter of which continued, slightly louder if anything. He seemed to be normal and normal. However on the top of his head and the back of his head were the same duplicate faces that he wore on the front. Three faces? How very haunting, scoffed Lucille.

“Paradise share!” he blurted suddenly.

And we cut to the back of a taxicab.


V


Lucille sunk into the leather seats of the taxicab. She looked down at her body, which looked and felt normal, and thought about an explosion. It was big and tore a house down, although whose house it was she didn’t know, and she relaxed a little.

“Hey lady,” drawled the driver, “stop that.” She looked up. In the rear view mirror his face looked like the moon. “Stop that thinking about explosion in my cab will you?”

“And who might you be?”

“I’m the moon,” the driver replied, patronising in his tone, “and you better watch yourself.” Figures, she probably thought. The moon was still looking at her in the mirror, “Hey lady,” he said, after a few moments of silence. “You’re going to have a baby. You know that?” Lucille found even the suggestion ludicrous. She had never had a physical relation with a man, and whilst the human biological system was not her speciality, she knew enough of the basics to know what children grew out of.

“That’s impossible,” she said.

“No it’s not,” the moon explained. “You spoke to me, just then, and now you are going to birth my baby moon.” He saw Lucille’s incredulous look. “Obviously the moon doesn’t have babies in the regular way. It’s all in the words.” Lucille was concerned. Was she prepared for a baby moon? He was a charismatic driver, but sure had been underhanded in his reproductive aplomb.

“Pregnant with conversation. That’s typical moon.” And Lucille felt a twitching in her stomach, fuzzes like the labour was starting. It wasn’t a pain, as such, more like swallowing a large mouthful of chocolate that wasn’t particularly good. She lifted up her top to the bottom of her breasts and she hadn’t worn a bra that day. The driver, the moon, did his best to try not to see or hear what was going on. The unspoken confidentiality of the taxi driver: what happens in this back seat stays in this back seat. Lucille realised that the cab wasn’t going anywhere but everything was changing, including the moon and the cab, and the world was the lobby of an expensive looking hotel and the brain trees were of full size now and towering to the electric light fittings. There were hammocks hung from the branches, and inside numbers tried to solve themselves, and a little boy cried and two girls naked from the waist down were the leaves, and looking at her navel stretching out like a hand through cling-film a disc was pushing through Lucille’s stomach. Finally finally yes the brouhaha over and perfectly safe a rotating two dimensional moon hovers the fading back seat and says: “Daddy!”.

“Son!”

Jump.


VI


Ah, the tennis racquet mountain. Whatever a place to find oneself.


VII


Far above the clouds and far below the people at the very top of the mountain of tennis racquets was a castle that looked like a person. Lucille didn’t know if she was going, coming or just standing still. Sometimes the wind would make her chuckle, but that seemed like a lifetime ago. The castle had no doors or windows and no brick structuring, but it did have two sad blue eyes and a long nose that was secretly full of rotten hair. Just like a person.

But everybody know that people never live on mountains made of tennis racquets, even people with weeping eyes. The only thing that would ever possibly – by any stretch of any human’s imagination – live on top of all of those sporting tools was a castle. Lucille remembered her mother once saying something like that:


“Dearest Lucille – every cloud is silver throughout,
and beautiful too.”


Lucille began to wonder whether she would ever get to talk to somebody, and walked to the door that wasn’t there in the castle that looked like a face. It was dark and there were noises that made you feel a little sick, and pieces of furniture were being sealed inside specialised water bubbles.

On an imposing throne on a fifteen foot flowing carpet that was waiting for attention there sat a very dignified dog. It had a human body and smoked five cigarettes at once, very quickly.

“Hum hum hum then, dear-o bleak,” he said. He was certainly charming, thought Lucille. Before she could really open her mouth to speak the dog had raised a hand – with a cigarette between each finger – to stop her. A gong was struck at brutal volume.

“Flan to Hades!” he parped out. “A monologue!”


VIII


The monologue from the dog (gy)


Children can be cruel. “You’re a dog,” they spat at me. “Look at your long ears and wet nose, dog.” The girls would stroke me, the boys would beat me.

Well who’s laughing now? Huh?

It’s me isn’t it, you motherfuckers.

Why? I’m in the fucking suit.

Ever seen a dog in a fucking suit?

No.


Curses and oatmeal, thought Lucille, a bizarre leader, a throne based mammalian, and such jowls, flip flap. Bland décor though.

Out the window!


IX


And straight onto a pile of teetering wardrobes, pine construction, at the feet of a man who carefully uttered one proclamation:

“I have brain grass.”

He smiled in the way that provokes discomfort, and there was dribble on his lips and he peeled back his own scalp like the skin of an orange. Thick foliage, was one reaction. Gosh another.

Out the window!


X


What a commotion, into the arms of a handsome man dressed head-to-toe in silken finery and smelling of flower, such a solid and reassuring jaw line, like a jewellery box, and no doubt strong enough to save everyone, especially a little girl like Lucille.

She fell into his arms and they kissed spinning around on the grassy knoll, and he swept her off her feet like a love broom. And a prince, no less.

“An unrecognisable happiness,” Lucille bleated.

“An unrecognisable joy,” he bleated.

And the two lambs skipped and trundled into the setting sun that set upwards into the electric sky, and the grassy knoll knew it was going to change into something a little more… comfortable.

*

The mysterious pink envelope closed itself on the battered oak table.