Here, everything is still floating

Within the foursquare edges of our world we hang, like flies in a web: now trembling, now resigned; then shuddering again, sudden as a broken leg.  One might consider us without purpose, but do not misunderstand; our inertia has made us immortal.  We save ourselves like vials of lovely poison, all claret colours and rarity, gorgeous as ruby when held against the light.
    And so we look, from horizon to empty-brained horizon for instructions, for some neat key to make us decipher this life.  Anything would do, like the picture on the jigsaw lid that unjumbles the jumble of the pieces.  We are cats curled up in a basket of knitting, we might say, or there again, Look, we are the waves of the sea and a ship is sinking among us to its new drowned bed.  We would know, for certain; we would know and would adjust ourselves accordingly.
    So we sit out eternity with our cooking-stoves and our ill-lit parlours, rocking to and fro in the skinless light, tapping with our fingers the piano-key exercises that we half-learnt long ago.  We read the newspaper every day; by now the writing is smudged to abstraction, grey ghostish letters on ghostish grey paper.  It is no painful task to read it, not anymore; for the news is not legible, however catastrophic.  We do not care to sully our heads with the idiot monsters of childhood.  Indeed, our smiles and our lightbulbs are so interchangeable that there is no darkness left in the world, just shadows; only shadows.  We gaze at one another like Buddhas, and we nod.
    We float like fishes in the sky, you and I, like some ancient party balloon, sepia breeding in our brains.  We are useful for nothing, figurines on a mantelpiece, lifeless and deathless both.  Our entrails are slowing, ready for repainting, for the anatomist to count our bones, to lay them apart with his tender knife.  Our eyes, already lidless, are drying in the airless air.
    Listen to the clock’s elderly ticktick; hear your moments sheared off one by one.  They clutter the narrow landing; they make the carpet musty and they thicken reality like gelatine does.  Eke out your death with us, my dear, among the tea things and the plates.

* Padrika Tarrant is a scissor-fixated sculpture graduate with a beautiful daughter and a stuffed bat in a frame.  Her debut book was a collection of short stories called Broken things; her second, a novel, will emerge in the spring.

Here, everything is still floating is the title of a 1920 collage by Max Ernst.