Denby Wire and Iron Company

Friday, March 7, 2014

Hippopotamus Eye

Don't look at me with your hip
Not at me with your hip
Don't look at me with your hippopotamus eye

A rap lyric that popped out of nowhere. My brain must have been working on it in its spare time. It started the other night as I was going to bed. I reached over to switch off the light and there he was with that eye of his, a disembodied eye that doesn't belong to a face. Sees right through you. But it's not scary. Leo's still my friend after all these years. Just don't look at me with your hippopotamus eye. And then we go to sleep.

No one can know what it means. Nobody knows the story, except me and Val. Maybe Mad, if she remembers. I told her once. You can't guess what it means. It isn't something you can guess.

A boy testing the limits. Going where he's never been before, violent, out of control. Leo flung down hard onto the blacktop from the roof of the playhouse. Didn't make a sound when he landed. Just pop. When Val picked him up we saw it was bad. That cracked glass orb. The horror. We saw what happens when you go where it's not safe. People get killed. They break and you can't fix them.

We sacrificed a hippopotamus nobody liked. Touched the eye up with orange watercolor and glued it in with Elmer's glue. That dead, leering eye. It was sixty years ago. No one could have guessed what rap music would turn out to be one day, or anything else, for that matter. He sits on the nightstand now and wishes me good night every night as I turn out the light. Still my friend after all these years. Just don't look at me with your hippopotamus eye. And then we go to sleep.

Sunday, November 3, 2013

Beanietopper

The victims had been ground into hamburger and sold into savory. Frailfinger was able to outwit the authorities by gluing an umbrella handle to his coccyx with pine gum. Barfwrinkle, on the other hand, was fond of baking handguns into fruit pies. Messerschmidt, always the prankster, insouciantly shot moose DNA at gawky co-eds through a soda straw. It would have been alarming had it not been so frightfully infructuous.

Stop. Do not modify your behavior in any way as a result of what you see in this box. What a job lobbing Bob's slobbering gob to the clobbering mob. Derek was so embarassed at having accidentally shot his wife that he pretended he'd done it on purpose. No longer able to control the brightness of his halogen lamp, Johnathon concluded he was experiencing dimmage damage. Gumball dynasty! Heart string plucker blues! Scaling back. Number of things that now make a difference: zero. Wen yengot notten, yengot notten aluz!

Thursday, October 31, 2013

New Business Model

Having gotten completely fed up with referrer spam making tracking of statistics on this blog impossible, and with the acceptance that the statistics are anyway virtually non-existant, and realizing furthermore that the posts here can be just as easily followed on my Twitter timeline, I have decided to change this blog's "Business Model" and start just putting up more "blog-like" posts including observations about various things. Or at least that is the plan for now. In fact I suspect it will make very little difference what I finally end up writing here.

Of course, if after this post, I end up receiving hordes of complaints from people saying that I've destroyed one of their favorite pastimes, I will try to see what I can do to make it up to them.