MAD MARY: By Seth D. Clarke
Friday, December 30th, 2011The air smells of lunacy. Smell it? Delicious. Lovely, wafting to the nostrils like Mom’s apple pie. Tasty, she was. The madness has a distinct olfactory punch to it that cannot be mistaken. It’s not like fear. Fear smells thick, like spilled blood. Madness is light, almost frilly, delicate and thinly pungent.
Ah, yes. There she is. What’ssssss her name? Mary? Yes, that’s it. I lean in to the outskirts of her mind, and listen:
The cows come home home home, all day all day…where mind the gallows go, inclines declines…algorithms of alcohol…
I withdraw, leave her to her nonsense chanting. She’s pressed far past the bounds of what can be understood as thought, much less coherence. Perrrrrfect.
She mumbles and stumbles, swigs from a brown-paper bag in the shape of a bottle; I flare my nose and sniff…King Cobra, I think…yes, yes. She’s far gone, too. Many bottles in, this day.
“Periwinkle, twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder who you are…” she weaves around a corner and into an alley, lurches to a stop, inspects her surroundings, sinks and sags to the ground in a pile of newspapers and cardboard arranged into a nest, still whispering to herself in a barely audible sing-song “it’s contagious, here we are now, imitate us…”
Nirvana? Really, Mary? Ah the mad, no taste whatsoever.
I wait, wait, wait, tasting the shadows, watching the stars come to life beyond the cloud cover. Night falls, Mary sleeps. The crowds fade, and no one sees me. They never do. I disguise myself as something living, something real. Something vaguely human, or human-shaped. I love their ignorance, these frail, mad humans.
Finally, the moment comes, and I strike like an adder, swift and silent. She tastes of madness, so sweet like honey-wine, and anger, acrid, like aged scotch. When I finish, she is a flaccid sack of nothing, but I sense her soul wafting upwards like a smoke trail and she is relieved, thankful. She whispers to me, before she vanishes among the waiting multitudes of the In-Between, Thank you thank you, death is like loving–
I smile a toothy grin and slither back into the cool shades of nowhere.
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©2011 Seth D. Clarke
Seth D. Clarke is a full-time student at Oakland University, pursuing secondary education certification and a bachelors in English. He writes as often as he can, which isn’t ever quite enough, as he is a husband and a father of five children. To read more of his stories go to www.refractionsofself.blogspot.com.
