Alligator - Lisa Moore [2]
Someone put a finger in the peanut butter.
There’s a gouge the width of a finger. The honey has crystallized. It’s gone whitish and hard and it’s a squeeze bottle. It makes farting noises. I love Madeleine because she has honey and multigrain bread, and the smell of her cashmere sweaters and her big silver jewellery. She’s always rushing and she has grocery bags or video equipment or luggage because she’s just off some red-eye from Paris or Madagascar. Once, I saw a black shawl get away from her and go flying over the pavement, tripping all over itself, until it caught on a hedge.
There’s an article in Cosmo about winding a scrunchy around your lover’s balls to maximize his orgasm. Guaranteed to double his pleasure, it says.
There’s a diagram. You just wind that sucker around the scrotum, and this wows him so much he never leaves you because he’s not going anywhere because you’ve done this incredible thing with the scrunchy and he’s immensely grateful. I’m just sitting on the couch, leafing through.
Then there’s the actual nuclear power plant and it’s all chrome and steam. It’s all shiny surfaces and echoes and ominous footfalls, which people forget the importance of the sound effects in a safety video.
The guy’s voice is still going about safety. Safety this and safety that.
There are pistons dropping into cylinders, pipes sighing, gusts of steam lit by cherry-coloured Exit signs or orange lights and beeps and dings and shrill whistles like kettles that sound not very state-of-the-art.
Make sure the scrunchy isn’t too tight, then just tickle his balls a little and see what happens. I know soon they will have a shot of a mushroom cloud because any excuse for a mushroom cloud, wait for it, wait.
There’s a Dr. Newman who says about the flow of blood and engorgement and tumescence and the scrunchy will tighten during the normal course of and if you put your mouth.
And there it is, billowing, smoky, and lurid gold underneath, against an aqua blue sky, spreading over the desert. What we don’t want to happen. What they have the capability of in China now. What they have the capability of in who knows where else. A dime a dozen, these mushroom-cloud shots.
There can be no strangeness while watching the footage because it’s random. Everything is strange. Strange boils over into strange. But then something strange happens. We are out of the nuclear power plant, suddenly, and there is the man and the alligator. But there’s also narration.
The man gets down on his knees before the alligator.
He has a handkerchief and he’s sweating. The scientist is narrating about how you must always follow the exact same procedure in any sort of dangerous work in order to achieve safety, whether we’re talking nuclear power plants or circus work.
He says, This man always wipes the sweat from his face before he puts his head in the alligator’s jaws, because if anything, even a drop of sweat, touches the alligator’s tongue it will cause an instinctive trigger and the jaws will snap shut.
But, as you will see, on this day of extreme temperatures in Louisiana, this performer forgot to wipe one side of his face.
Watch closely.
The man does wipe one side of his face, but he forgets the other side.
And, unfortunately, a drop of sweat falls onto the alligator’s tongue and triggers an instinctive response.
The crowd rushes backwards, stumbling, falling, getting up, spreading out. People trip over the abandoned lawn chair and the walking canes.
The man’s body is flicked back and forth. His fists are on the alligator’s snout for a moment. He’s flopped over and flopped back. His legs are kicking. Then, on his bare back, stripes of blood because of the claws, or being dragged in the dirt. The alligator shakes his head as if he’s having a disagreement. He really disagrees. He disagrees vehemently. The alligator is trying hard