Fruits of Empire

A fat, sickly man with dying blonde hair mopped in a half-assed combover atop his corpulent head waddled  from the teebox to the beercart. His legs, solid stalks of jiggling flesh indiscernible as either fat or muscle, tilted so his feet pointed in opposing directions at almost 180 degree angle. He pours the amber piss down his throat, gulping and excreting at the shock of cold and bubbling.

His wife waddles up to her child in the clubhouse. Too much noise, slapped down. He can’t behave like that if he wants his sugar. The child calms down, the child runs across the dirt track, making noise into the wilderness, coke in hand.

I watch them from the corner. I watch them silently, from the back of the shadows. I lean against white plaster where ornate fixtures alighted with dust hang incandescent. The owner is on his way, visiting one of his dozens of developments. I found his hiding spot the other week, journeying into the woods off the ninth, where he had pitched himself beside a river, a cloth camping chair unfolded in the deep gouge made by a backhoe tearing the bank apart for an as of now unknown further development.

I’m drunk. I feel half dead. A sickly woman, bones with a supposedly healthy BMI of loose skin and fat undulating in stocky globs off her body, limps from her brand new car. A man from another side of things has his arm around a teenage boy. He’s telling a story. He’s dealing weed and beer.

It’s hot. Incredibly hot. The air is thick with disease, a sweet sick smell of food decaying in the light, insects in the life pregnant, the whole atmosphere feeling like a root cellar below a burning building. This is what it’s all for. So much wood went into building it. The maggots and termites are popping in the heat of the wood they eat.

All I smell is clouds of disinfectant that do nothing. They rest on fecundity like snow blanketing the forest. For all the desolation celebrated and sickly ritualized, nothing dies here. Long past their time, corpses continue to shamble on, soused and wet, like unburnable firewood soaked by rain. 

Opium comes off like swollen fruit, overripe and ready to taste an insect’s ovipositor, happiness dying out as a burning incandescent light until it’s all shredded, strung out jerky-dry in wide nailed boards underneath the sun on the long flat plains of the driving range, looking up to heaven, where the sun is too bright and the air too thick and our bodies immobile with weakness, desiccating at the end of a long process of driving ourselves out and to the end.

Bodies plump and bloated walk the path. Squishy lumps of fat absorb anything hit against. A hearty chuckle. A meaty hand. An unwanted penetration. Sweat, alcohol, sugar. Burned slabs of meat. The sun draws down and the fat is all that remains, an oily shadow and blue velvet shafts of light you never want to be seen by.