Carsten ten Brink | 2 Works

The Irregular Platypus

‘Platypus?’ he asked and I knew he’d have to die.

We’d only been isolated for a week and today, seated in what he called our exedra, he’d started with ‘I know, let’s play irregular plurals.’

He was like that, always needing a stimulus, and I’d found him increasingly irritating, nothing like the young beau he’d been. Only briefly bearable now, he was, and I’d learned to channel him, to sort the administrative corpora in our bureaux, but he’d done all that, sheaves of it, filing, shredding, responding and now he had nothing left to do. He was terrible at anything physical, had the energy of a fungus, and the grace of a cactus. The only esprit he had was in his cerebrum.

I played along with ‘datum’ and ‘medium’ – they were OK, slightly interesting even, given how we use the plurals more than the singular. As was ‘bacterium’ given the virus. A virus is not really irregular, as it behaves like its grammatical genus, but the one we were living through definitely was as irregular as could be.

While he now wittered of minutiae and phenomena, I wondered whether he was a man or a mouse, a goose or a louse, and whether Steinbeck would have been successful if he’d called his opus ‘Of Mouse and Man.’

And then, just as I rose to find something more to drink, he, well, he announces as the apex of his curriculum the plurals of the octopus.

I’m not sure how I’ll do it, which modus operandi I’ll choose among the modi available, but I have two favourites: to stab him with an antenna or strangle him with a scarf. Scarves I have aplenty.

Love Storm

So, my neighbour Sandy drags me into this tent with the fortune teller. We take turns. I’m second, coz I’m still eating cotton candy and my fingers are sticky and pink and the fortune teller wants to hold onto my hands while she scries my fortune.

Sandy comes out smiling. ‘Your turn,’ she says. ‘She’s very gifted.’

I’m going to fall in love, the fortune teller promises me, get blown away by emotion. In the next 24 hours!
I don’t meet anyone at the fair, nor on the way home but as night falls I am hopeful of what the morning will bring. Love!

At six a.m. the storm comes. Not rain, not snow, not hail. NO. Frogs, hundreds, falling into my back yard.

I run outside still in my pjs, grab every frog that I can, kiss him, then grab the next. One has the muscular lips of a saxophone player, others remind me of my golfing grandmother’s leathery skin, some I swear are trying to use their tongues, but I carry on until the last frog has hopped over the fence and my yard is empty.

NOT one turns into a prince. Maybe they weren’t even he-frogs, what do I know, but they didn’t turn into princesses either.

An hour later, my lips itch, then break out into blisters. Had my visitors been toads? I don’t know but I’m no longer thinking of love. I’m thinking of medical attention.

The dermatologist is oh so cute, and his hands so gentle on my lips. The fortune teller was indeed gifted.

The first thing we did together, my new lover and I, was to build a pond, and add lily pads.