Whilst growing up I had a dear friend in a chap called Paddy Funreal. Our times together were most meaningful but fleeting in a way I would not come to understand until much later days. Alas, there was Paddy Funreal, standing on the blighted shores of my North America taking photographs of things he did not understand, things that were not of our liking such as the very idea that someone, somewhere would actually approve of allowing lemurs to reside openly in our township.

Those dark years were sometimes more than we could handle. This was especially true for we who had grown up in the antebellum ways. We were not to understand why seaweed hung from the rafters of the ancient buildings of our forefathers. This was a matter for a later generation to sort through once there was time again for melodrama.

Death is a footbridge made of aching rope, reaching across the chasm of ultimate nothingness of oblivion, taking us safely from one great cliff of remorse towards another that may for an instant gleam with hope. Alas, this will not last as we will certainly, once there, lose our way again. For we are all doomed to ultimate failure and need to consider ways to embrace death earlier than chances may have for later.

"Hey down there, did you get a load of those lemurs?"

The voice was bucolic and indigent with the wayward logic of a brass band. Whilst he called down to me, I slipped the sandwich made of unfortunate ingredients back into my pack and started back up the dunes towards the man who could never remember my name. I called him Hesston. It was not his name.

"I did not," came my most simple reply. I was rarely hesitant to be straightforward with my intentions when drawn into these kinds of conversations.

"They were through here. Most assuredly."

"There are no lemurs," I told him after some dodgy hesitation. To bring the truth of these words to those whose skullfuckery led them to believe in foolish legends was not something to be bashful about.

"Ay, but there are!" he said with something of a glimmer in his eye, but behind those sparkling eyes I could see his dishonest intent.

"Are there any messages come in from town?” I wanted to change the topic of our conversation before it either became dreadful or banal.

"Not that I’ve seen these past two days. I would expect it has something to do with the lemurs."

"I expect you would expect that to be true."

"I have always loved you, most deeply," he told me brashly.

"I know that you always have and one day I shall use this as something to brandish at you when I am most needful."

"Ay, but I know that you will!"

Ours was something of a dark story of misery and love, linked eternally, but it held such secrets that both Hesston and myself were quite often driven into madness by it. At times I would loathe the man for never being able to remember my name and calling me by the names of harlots and throes he had been with whilst on his times spent soldiering. Then there were the times when I would see the burning passion in his eyes and the power in his hands when he held my shoulders in his grasp, and these times would always sway over the better judgment of my heart.

"Down at the guest house, someone happened by to tell our renters there about the discovery of some works by Betty Crocker. They appear to be recipes for good things to eat. Much of it is in regards to muffins and such, but surely there will be some foods that can be prepared that will help reduce our gray skies."

"I trust not these texts. I only trust my heart, and my heart tells me you must stay here with me, but whilst my heart tells me these things another part of me screams out that you must leave here lest you tear me in twain."

"Ay, also some works by one called Twain. Mostly river survival stories and such, but surely you will want to see these treasures brought up from the place of our ancestors?"

I have always wished, in looking up at the night’s sky, that the sky might show us a thing of beauty we could call The Zesty Nebula. It would be so overwhelming in its loveliness that those not strong in their faith would faint most assuredly upon the floor of the room they were in at the time at which their faint arrived. It has often interested me to study into the topic of why these words, faint and faith, are so similar in spelling and appearance, but I have never been able to put aside enough time to begin such a major project.

I left Hesston at the rocks and headed up towards the house, purposefully not inclining myself to invite him to follow, as was usually our custom before we began our passionate lovemaking. I may not have been loath to allow him to follow regardless, but I did wish mostly to take the journey alone.

A fatal condition can be love, and amongst the swaying trees and their haggard seaweed beards, it can be even trickier than I imagine it would be in a place where you could see your shadow in the moonlight.

It was in this soft, manmade meadow before the main house where I once was accosted and convinced into awkward and unfulfilling relations of the most unwanted kind. The man who took me wore glasses, but on that night the glasses appeared to be a disguise consisting of a black leather cowl, comical earplugs and a plastic goatee painted a color that no one’s hair could ever naturally grow.

Copulating with townies has always been a hobby of young women. The problems resulting from this hobby is townies talk openly about copulating with us and we, under normal, static conditions will never speak of the sordid events again and will deny their veracity. This causes a bubble in the North American culture raised by an issue that has never been properly resolved. This bubble issue is most clearly defined in an inordinate number of reported male copulations with females compared to a much smaller number of reported female copulations with males. This matter threatens to destabilize our way of life on a daily basis and we are reminded to duck and cover.

This townie, who had bridled me with unsought and unpleasant copulations, went on to report he had laid pipe to the fortress, a name the townies gave me when I would not eagerly agree to satisfying them with the hand or mouth in the alley beside the building where we often went to drink liquor in the days when there was still hope. And now I had received a copulation that was lacking in fine motor coordination and seemed to have been planned out, step-by-step, with the help of a computer generated flowchart. I was appalled at what had happened to the fortress and vowed to find the secret cobalt mine that appeared to me in dreams whenever I took excessive amounts of the expired and moldy prescription pain medication we had found in an old lady’s untended row boat, which was moored in the dried out spring behind her garden.

I remember the time of day that my father died and from my bedroom I can see the place where he fell. Remembering the time of day of his passing instead of the month or year allows me to mourn for him every day.

It is in the cobalt mines of my dreams where I find him again. It is there he tells me something I can never understand. Each time he appears I get closer to understanding, but this could take me many years and there is scarce little of the expired prescription pain medication to last that long.

My father had found a book in tending his fields, written by our forefathers and detailing what was happening to our people in the years of oppression before the great falling out. Hesston killed him for the book, out there in the field where my father had found it. He had foolishly led secretive Hesston, a man led by the demons of temptation, to see the place where he had discovered the eerie literature. Having the book in his possession and the will and means to bludgeon my father with a three-toed hoe, Hesston took the route that appeared before him and soon after became my lover.

I had never expected to discover the great wealth of passion I had for Hesston, or how each time I would orgasm I would see the image of Hesston bludgeoning my father in my mind. These things brought up matters of great internal conflict and my own dance with the devil.

My father's name, you see, was Paddy Funreal.

The expired prescription pain medication was my salvation, for it induced such feelings of elation and masturbatory elegance that I was beside myself with delight. When Hesston came to me I would take him most hurriedly and lay him to sleep with the most delightful of dreams. Perhaps I stalked him like a pussycat but I took him like a hungry panther.

There was more I could say, but there is still so far to go in creating the legends I want to create with Hesston. My greatest hope is that we will be remembered by generations of our descendants after I die in childbirth.

And we are here in North America.

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