Joshua Cohen - Witz

And like a visiting relative, an unwelcome guest, that Xmas just refused to leave: it never packedup its bags, bulging with snow to melt in the flee of the sun, never put on its cap and went out unafraid to greet the cold that was its own, its true home; it was endless, unbearable…what? It just sat around the house, turned to a puddle to profane the floor, having forgotten its own toothbrush and towel, it had to borrow, it clawed up the couch, stuck its snout into everything, became fattened on what was fed it, which was all we had then the furniture and lastly ourselves, and soon began to warm, to reek with putrefaction.

It was Xmastime forever, for seasons at a time, at first deep into a month once known as January, a duplicitous, twofaced month named after that ancient Roman deity Janus, King of Latium, the God of beginnings, the God of endings, of gates like those to Developments and of doors like those set with knockers and bells, buzzers and intercoms and etched glass to a house since fallen, the patron of the bridge between the primitive and the civilized, between youth and maturity, too — a God whom no one thinks to worship anymore, a forsaken, spurned God, omnipotent and yet abandoned, omniscient and yet ignored; allpowerful, all alone: without Him no one knows which way to face, whether to the past or the future, or else just to stand forever upon the threshold searching this way and that, to waste an only life waiting for their very own end, however it would arrive and never too soon. It was anxious, depressing, it was Xmas into some say the next year, God, has it been that long, as the sun became split into suns, the freeze giving way to the humid and heat, the ice given notice, evicted, absorbed, poisoned with soot, snow melted to smog, though others hold it was Xmas deep into the year after that — who would swear to it, we all know how reliable the authorities can be, how much they’re to be trusted, how honest they are — the days’ debts to the world ingathering fatal interest, with no hope of paying memory off, and so the banks all went bankrupt then the market crashed and burned, valueadding no appreciable warmth to the scorch of the day; the looted metropolises leveled by bulldozers whose shovels had been emblazoned with the faces of fathers set sharp with the flaming teeth of their fathers before them…the world entire that was Siburbia razed to its very foundations of basement whether finished or maybe or not, which were cinderblock and brick and their cinders themselves leveled with palms become clammy with greed, demolished, reduced to vacancies of the earth, emptied lots marked for nothing, inhabited only by that that was no longer human: as no one worked anymore, as work had become life, had become mere survival. Kestenbaums roasting on an open fire …dairy products expiring, turned, were sold way past useby; cars became metal; teevees screened only snow in the unseasonable heat; shoes went thin then holed and then earth; clothes turned to rags then air and so everyone went naked at night, sweltering under the glare of an oleo moon. If you wanted to tell the difference between men and women and why would you; after all, they’re all goyim: the men were the ones with the nails of sharpened flint, who’d kill the other men with their nails of flint less sharpened against the curbs and the rust of the cars and the smash of the glass and the knife of the heat; they’d relieve themselves at the edges of ruined properties poorer of fence (impaled on the posts, their victims laidout across hedges grown wild); they’d attempt to sate themselves slovenly on what substances nosed out, snouted, raw or salted, and then, never full, never being able to differentiate appetites they’d smash in the strength that’s occasioned by rage the faces of others flat with the scuff of their hooves that they’d grown only to slip and slide to four legs on upon the asphalt and the glass and the metal; flatfaced women with the cancer cankering the puffs of their navels would whore themselves out for anything not so raw and not so salted, and when they were raped, and they were raped hard and raped often, and so had nothing at all to eat or drink whether it be raw or salted or anything else, they would sustain themselves by licking the stains of smoke from stray scraps of trash, glittery, littery wrappingpaper — that is, when they weren’t attempting survival through the suckling of shvitz from the hairs of their distended lips, though women raped into becoming mothers would occasionally maintain themselves, too, on their own offspring, pickled sweet in twindeckered sandwiches stacked high atop wonder white with the crusts cut, spread thick with lard, lashes of butter, fat dollops of mayonnaise without brand, snacking on their kin drooling saliva to shine their mammæ, which were headlights, twelvenippled, barebulbed. Their brilliantly pleasureless clitorides were shaped like the Popes…

Offspring who’d escaped their mothers through matricide, which was the only way to escape them with the exception of killing themselves then each other stayed out, orphaned and unable to sleep just roaming the festive streets until late, occupying themselves by stringing up ornaments of testicles and skulls that they would glowingly impregnate with tapers rendered from the fat of abortions with lengths of hair for wicks and strands of hair and esophagi and intestine to hang glorious gore over the joyous proceedings, the sidewalks decked in pisspuddle, ornamented with the vomit and turd of perpetual holiday, the frayed and loosed ends of these umbilical strands tiedoff to garlands of desiccated dingleberries from the most diseased boughs and moldering branches of dying dingleberry trees topped with angelic roaches and other mutatudinously gigantic insects stripped of their wings and pointless stars, then wound around lampposts that’d wilted from the passion of their exertions, flaccid attempts on the sky, their jealousy of even the sun — decorations if they could be called such in appearance less like enormous rosaries than they seemed oversized adult products intended expressly for the stimulation of the anus. On allfours these offspring would promenade under these garlands proclaiming the worship of beauty, cheer and its happy cult, on spines of tar smashed open and meltingly gooey at base they’d often mistake potholes for wounds of potable sewer, slurping petroleum goop, they’d slip ’n’ fall to make easy prey for their relations and strangers alike, denizens of the streets and their lowering gutters strewn, too, with these tanned torsos these millions of them left amputated to gangrenous stumps ever grasping, heads still attached, nothing else: an eerie species of GrecoRomance, this dying admonition to pluck out your eyes if eyes they had anymore and not just slits, or holes, or rough ethers, at this sight of once full and whole people who’d had their limbs hacked from them or gnawed, their arms leaking at the shoulders, legs dripping at the kneel of their knees — they were sodomized in any available orifice with their own severed limbs, flinty sharpened hooves first then smacked about the face with the limply sopping appendage, sliced with metal, slit with glass, left to rock and rot, to occupy as entertaining spectacle their attackers whom they couldn’t even curse because despite the left heads, their mouths and tongues they weren’t able to even talk anymore, needless to say, that none of them were, that they were left languageless, rendered without speech, that they at the most generous only gestured and grunted at random, voiceless and languorously lolling like mute tongues themselves amid the humidity and heat and the damp stick of morning, the hour they’d traditionally air their sleek, ribworn flanks, deep into the long afternoons of dry scorch.

It was that the next evolution of those who were unmarked rendered them unto animals, partiformed creatures, mutagen beasts, who were once inarguably Men & Women mutated then mutilated by their fellow mutants and by the mutilation, too, that is the passage of unsanctified time, therianthropes to the Gods who had forsaken them as the Gods had once been forsaken themselves; how they were burdened beasts without conscience, asses without soul and that this — with the covenant sundered and the death of the chosen and their rainbow choked by the pollutant clouds and the stars of the sky burnt out and the sands of the sea winded up and away to dust the furthest reaches of the primeval void — this was, it’s been said, only the possible, a small allowance or potentiality, just one way of the many infinite ways in which the world might’ve evolved, essentially hidden, Apocryphal; in the end, which was only yesterday, little more than a misnomer misnamed.