Rikki Ducornet
The Dickmare
It all boils down to this:
does she present to the Dickmare or not? She fears the lot of them, those perpetually
inflated Dickmares, their uncanny magnetism matched only by their startling
lack of symmetry. Yet she has been summoned. A thing as unprecedented as it
is provoking.
And she
has awakened with a curious rash. It circles her body like a cummerbund. A
rash as florid as those coral gardens so appreciated by lovers of bijouterie.
A rash having surged directly—or so she supposes—from her husband’s
anomalous—or so she hopes—behavior.
Once she
had thought her husband admirable. Admirable his thorny cone, his sweet horny
operculum, his prowess as a swimmer, the beauty of his sudden ejections, the
ease with which he righted himself when overturned. Not one to retreat into
his shell, in those days his high spirits percolated throughout the yellow
mud they optimistically called home.
Adolescents
intellectually annihilated by lust and hopeful mysticisms would engage her
husband for hours on end with thorny topics such as why Noah built the Ark
without once questioning the High Clam’s outburst of temper. And if the
High Clam loves the fishes and the shelled fishes best (after all they did
not suffer during the forty days and nights of rain but, instead, benefited)—why
were they snatched in numbers from their naps and served up Top Side boiled
in beer and dressed with hot butter? And her husband instructed the small fry
with cautionary tales featuring the terrible Kracken who swims on the surface
of the waves like a gigantic swan downing mischievous little mollusks at will—the
fear of the lie quieting both their wanderlust and their exuberance (and some
were so shellacked with fear they slammed shut never to be heard from again).
The old
timers, too, came to her husband for advice, sleepless in expectation of those
fearsome migrations they were impelled to entertain periodically for reasons
beyond everyone’s grasp. It seemed that everybody was in need of advice
all the time, anymore, and that her husband’s ministry never ceased.
At first
she had been proud of his popularity, or rather, had done her best not to hate
the constant tide of traffic and bavardage. She would shut her eyes and cling
to anything, to debris—a rotting hull, a stump of pier, a branch of folifera.
And she would dream unfructuous dreams of the secret arms of rivers that are
said to feed the sea—uncertain waters flowing from an unknowable source
(because Top Side)—a source she wished to find.
* * *
Her husband’s popularity came to a sudden halt right after a doleful
interlude with the Cuckfield quintuplets whom he had surprised in their daily
rotations over by Sandy Bottoms. Now no one, not even the Squamosas who wear
their digestive tubes in their arms—will give either of them the time
of day. Once so admired, her husband has taken his problems to a Dickmare—and
there is a scary rhyme the small fry trill about him:
When the moon is out
and
the bivalves hop—
and
cannot stop,
and
cannot stop,
and
a shadow steals above . . .
tell
me! What is it?
What is it?
My love!
--a Dickmare who orders up nacreous
pills from the oyster shop, pills that resemble toothed hinges and once swallowed,
produce an egg capable of sprouting fins and swimming. These days her husband’s conversation is as rare as
a clam’s liver. He has lost the instinct for cordiality, and his capacity
for mobility is sorely compromised. He has developed two pairs of bocal palpi,
and even if he had wanted to, she would not want him to kiss her. When in motion
he takes no great strides, but instead stretches out his foot so slowly that
she—who stands at the ready with a glass of water (these days his thirst
is prodigious)—fears the tedium will kill her. But then, having set the
right foot down, he withdraws the left so suddenly that, crying out, she drops
the tumbler, wetting her apron. When he is mercifully out the door, another
unexpectedly vigorous push with his left foot sends him headlong into his vehicle.
Is
it a squid or a calamar?
* * *
When her husband returns he wishes to engage her. Occupying the recliner, he
kneels on his knuckles, inching forward with one hand on each end of the
apparatus. This, she fears, may lead to further disability. She can tell
he has taken the other pills, the ones the size of a grain of linseed, which,
like those the size of a split pea, and unlike those the size of a small
haricot bean, are, at the instant of ingestion, spat out upon the floor.
She stands at the ready, her small broom resting at her side.
The fine
salmon pink of her husband’s cheeks has darkened, and his skin exudes
a peculiarly pungent odor reminiscent of dead eels. Provoked by the prescribed
medicaments, within the hour she knows he will turn upon himself like a wheel
in motion.
Her husband
displays his lamellar and vivid portions. He wishes to excite her curiosity
as, he tells her, she has excited the Dickmare’s who, having asked to
see her photograph and at once been satisfied, extends an invitation to his
grotto. The Dickmare suggests that she is distinguished from the schools of
others of her kind, by a brilliancy of eye that, added to her moist plumpness,
renders her the most appealing analysand he could aspire to.
She is a treasure, the single form reflected in a plurality of lesser forms,
or, rather, she is that plurality reflected in a singular form.
Unclear
as to what he has said, still she cannot help but be moved—as creatures
such as she, so fraught with disappointments, swarm within his reach, easy
prey for lesser contenders, those who do not have access as the Dickmares do,
to the tops of rocks, nor have they access to the medicines. And it is true:
she is lovely, vitreous and permeable, her bottom globulous. Aroused, she is
luminous in the dark. So round, so smooth, so readily ablaze in her posterior
part! No one, she muses, has noticed these things for a very long time. And
so, after all these months watching her husband pull himself across the floor
in fractions—a transaction that is always accompanied by frequent vomitings
and the prodigious thirst—she weighs her chances. Risky business!
Or
is it a Dick . . .
After all,
the Dickmares are known to unspool and push their pistons forward with such
alacrity, a subconical cavity will be stunned into service before it has a
chance to ignite. And she fears that rather than excite his compassion, the
curious rash now tumbling to her knees like a Samoan’s grass skirt will
excite his scorn and what’s more his wrath. Yet it is also true that
she has just that morning shed her shell—a thing both temporary and wildly
appealing. If she is at her most vulnerable, she is also at her most charming.
The rash, she hopes, may well be a function of this transformation, her heightened
state. Her beauty—she can see it now—has never been more poignant.
It boils
down to this: might the Dickmare provide a pill less bitter than the one she
has sucked ever since the Cuckfield fry gave voice to their many peculiar complaints?
Might the Dickmare assuage her loneliness and her humiliation? Is she afflicted
enough to dare seek out a questionable success with an Upper Mudder known to
be sensuous, furious and cruel? And she so fragile! So amply furnished with
tender sockets and delicate rosettes rotundular and soft. Yes, above all she
is soft. And so easily impressed!
It is said
at Death—and once the flesh has dissolved into the limitless bodies of
things so small they cannot be perceived by the naked eye—the soul is
swept away by a current called Forgetfulness and carried to an edifice of foam
so impalpable no one has ever seen it. She wants to be the one to see it and
to inform the others as to its nature.
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Last updated: March 9, 2007.