sealed his apartment in an effort to retain the various emanations of his things and himself.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤWhere his things were concerned, they ran the spectrum: tattered furniture, unused candles, ancient shoes (these in particular looking sad & wounded), ceramic bowls as well as glass jars and small wood boxes full of rivets, rubber bands, sea shells, matches, peanut shells, a thousand different kinds of elaborately shaped and colored buttons. One ancient beer stein held nothing more than discarded perfume bottles. As I discovered, the refrigerator wasn’t empty but there wasn’t any food in it either. Zampanô had crammed it full of strange, pale books.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤOf course all of that’s gone now. Long gone. The smell too. I’m left with only a few scattered mental snapshots: a battered Zippo lighter with Patent Pending printed on the bottom; the twining metal ridge, looking a little like some tiny spiral staircase, winding down into the bulbiess interior of a light socket; and for some odd reason—what I remember most of all—a very old tube of chapstick with an amber like resin, hard & cracked. Which still isn’t entirely accurate; though don’t be misled into thinking I’m not trying to be accurate. There were, I admit, other things I recall about his place, they just don’t seem relevant now. To my eye, it was all just junk, time having performed no economic alchemy there, which hardly mattered, as Lude hadn’t called me over to root around in these particular and—to use one of those big words I would eventually learn in the ensuing months—deracinated details of Zampanô’s life.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤSure enough, just as my friend had described, on the floor, in fact practically dead center, were the four marks, all of them longer than a hand, jagged bits of wood clawed up by something neither one of us cared to imagine. But that’s not what Lude wanted me to see either. He was pointing at something else which hardly impressed me when I first glanced at its implacable shape.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤTruth be told, I was still having a hard time taking my eyes off the scarred floor. I even reached out to touch the protruding splinters.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤWhat did I know then? What do I know now? At least some of the horror I took away at four in the morning you now have before you, waiting for you a little like it waited for me that night, only without these few covering pages.
<<ㅤ<ㅤ>ㅤ>>