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HUGGER MUGGER by DF Lewis

Bloodshaken, Carl was eventually carnified.  Yet so bumbazed, he was nothing but a wink-a-peep with a particularly severe affliction called web-eye.  And, furthermore, this sight-pod calling itself Carl was not squeezed forth from its mother as normal babes were presented to this droll-booth we call a world: a world in which normal beings were etiolated puppets with chittyfaces and timber-toes.  No, Carl was extruded amid the slimy humbles from the nose-hole.  Beneath the influenza of the moist-star’s lunations, Carl’s mother had a bout of snot-fever whilst in Alf the flesh-hewer’s shop, a condition suckened forth no doubt by the sin-bred carnifications of the bestial kind which were flayed open by Alf’s sharp jiggumbob as he prepared cuts for the commonest patterers of town.  She had twisted her wrist-pin in the sneezing, and the pain prevented her from noticing the snorting up of the wallydraggled eyedrop called Carl.  And Carl’s essence was simply seeing, as the bodiless orb, which was frumpled by a retractable webskin, surveyed the interior of Alf’s shop.  In turn, Alf thought Carl was a residue of a previous slaughtering and he threw the spare eye into a taplash barrel, where he hoped it would help along the fermentation of the hucker-mucker therein.  Meanwhile, with nose disgored, Carl’s own hudder-mother sat at the lyrichord and played Alf a love tune.  But that bonefaced rutterkin was in prigdom: twittle-twattling with another punter and imbibing some hugger-mugger that had already been properly brewed.  Such a snub, far from heart-robbing Carl’s mother, induced the spirited lady to ladle out her own dose of some half-done humdrum from the barrel with the apple of her eye in it: and her puppet-strings loosened as the gulpswollen ne’er-be-lickit oozed towards her timber-toes.  As for Carl, this very optic mollusc she swallowed, well, he sensed the imminence of a more rightful birth this time, yet little knowing that what he was indeed having an eyeful of was not his mother’s uterine underworld but, rather, her hogger-pump’s semi-diluted carnifications.  You see, he didn’t yet have a nose with which to gauge.

Published ‘Psychopoetica’ 1996