Indifferent to it all.
Wooden peers just from its belly. It drums its fingers on them. It raps them with its knuckles. It runs its fingers over them, like a man playing a washboard.
Ontonagon begins to whistle. It whistles high, it whistles low. It waits and raps its knuckles, it whistles high and whistles low. It ignores events happening nearby—the violence, the screaming, the fires and the settling ash. Ontonagon recalls a day last year instead.
§
Ontonagon removed a long, narrow slab of the concrete of its shoulder. The narrow slab shuddered, surprisingly un-solid, indeed.
Ontonagon pulled a mirror from its generous pockets and used it to look into the newly revealed interior of its shoulder. Within, Ontonagon spied a family of bats. The bats were gnawing on root vegetables and worms.
Ontonagon explored its self-inflicted wound with a stubby finger. The bats, alarmed, grabbed hold of the finger with their pin-like teeth. Ontonagon pulled the finger out and held it up in front of his face. Coated in bats, it undulated with the flap of their wings.
§
Ontonagon rubbed the weird memory from its eyes, and decided to go to sleep.
Read parts ONE and TWO and THREE.
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Lakeside - BLK JKS
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The painter Rachel Howard.
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