THE DEVIL’S STINKPOT
First published ‘Roisin Dubh’ 1994
I have scraped the useless flashing from the end of my pencil, cleaned this book's fly-leaf from blots, smuts, blemishes and foxing --- and am now ready to write about the girl I loved.
But, first, where was my story laid? A land where I ate dew-bit amid primroses and cuddle-me-to-you's. Where the sun peered above the distant hills, cantilevering its beams from ten to four across my yawning face. And where I showered cool spring water over my bareness.
The ocean breakers dragon-roared from beyond the nearby forest-lands, the dawn breeze fetching tangs of salty fucus: a trove of sea-mystery and smuggler's blessings in each heady whiff.
The pencil has become blunt and I'm finding it hard to continue and this fly-leaf is now over-crammed with my blown-up scrawl...
I've come to the title page now, showing author and publisher's name.
THE DEVIL'S STINKPOT
Nothing for it but to lay my plot across this unsatisfactory surface and gnaw further splinters from my pencil head. Not much time left. I must get straight to the point. My handwriting growing circumscribed by imaginary narrow feint lines. Only reader will be myself if I don't hurry.
BY D.F. LEWIS
Well, my rival in love was darkly tall, wielding a devil's turnip twice as large as mine. He mocked my wholesome gods and he hated the tooth fairies who whispered in my ears at night from under the pillow. He laughed almost out loud at my images of nursery tales and fruit-stones. He mimicked a lord's prayer of one to ten and back again.
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But his gods were elder and swarthier: groaning, towering visions of cock-eyed ogres gobbling dung-wet, half-cooked human beings. They swooped from the sky on huge black bedding wings chanting of Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth , later squeezing out my pillow friends like earwigs.
And He the Dark One stood sentinel against the dying sunset to call them down.
And that's the title page filled out. I'm on to a page proper, one power-dressed in ugly print. Nobody will be able to read my thick pencil against it. My teeth ache as I pit them against the sharpening-end...
The seas are quiet tonight, not such as the night before. She I truly adore will drop me into the stinkpot sooner than love me back. He who calls to Cthulhu is a side-long shadow companion who may or may not still be here. Kids play dibstone down by the runnelled rocks, where winkles and cockles click in rhythm to the stars. The forky channels ebb and flow over the beach ... but I yearn for the forest-land, just my love and I, turnip in her merkin. She worries out my pillow-faces and taunts them with diddle daddle, tells them that at dew-bit they will have nought but the air among the corn-flakes.
Fizgig shoves her oar up against the rock-face --- and the point is broken again. My tongue is splintered. My hand has points of flesh, inturned and gristled. And the Dark One has flown with those he summoned and she pulls the crappit-heads from the lower sand-levels to suck them dry. The dibstone kids have gone for shelter behind the drunkery, wherein their daddies skulk and sup. And she says I've no lead in my pencil.
I'm in flesh-quake. The sea-wrack's 'gainst my hide. My skin's hell for leather. My turnip's creased and winkled. Words mix and flether. The storm-clouds are really rather large webs and wings --- and the waves comb my head. One story within another story upon another story. It's not fitting. I'm in her stinkpot now (thick cellar-turds and forkheads eating my brain for high tea), far beyond the spit of land where once we cuddled and kept our future.
She's creamed out now, gone with the Dark One who once pointed a thick finger at the black spume in the sky, betokening the coming of the Great Old Ones...
And the words printed in the library book which I once used for scribbling my story seemed far more immediate than anything I produced. Far more relevant, if strait-laced. With far more present tension.
My own point had finally gone. Unless the reader had read far more between the lines.