From a new project – 24 faces of the Earth in 24 hours.

All stopped screaming suddenly. Kunene, who had pulled his machete a moment earlier, let go off Hhohho’s hair and sat down, his mouth open. I saw many people close their eyes and unfold their arms. They looked like black angels. I felt the snow flakes on my arm and as I eyed them closely, I saw they weren’t white at all but colorless and made me feel frail in my skin.

(Excerpt of an in vitro novel “Bloody Management” for NaNoWriMo. Unfettered, unedited, but not dispirited. From chapter 19, “Prayer”.)

It was getting bright and the people awoke in the village, while seven black women from Nigeria kissed six stubbly men and one woman good-night. The woman had more hair between her legs than any of the men had on their faces. Of the six men, four returned to their wives, who were happy to feel them next to themselves, though they did not know this consciously, only their sleeping bodies made the appropriate signs of mild, friendly grunting and lurched tossing. When the men slipped into bed, they breathed quietly not to wake their wives and, closing their eyes, saw the shapes of the black women they had been with, faceless shapes, gyrating around a dark cauldron in which the women brewed the secret solution that made white men obsess about them. This was a hallucination of course, but a powerful one. In truth, the seven women were chatting their way through last night’s events, drinking strong herbal tea and massaging each others’ necks. Being a whore was an acrobatic emotional feat, though once you had got used to it, it became routine work, as long as you had proper boundaries. None of the women had such boundaries. They had not been brought up with them, so they left themselves completely open to their customers and fell in love, every one of them, each night. The customers returned from them believing that they had been with a hooker, a secret secretion of their sorrows as men, while their bodies were bewitched forever by sirens, who themselves were only semi-conscious of their true powers. If they’d been fully conscious of them, they’d have rented an appartement in Whitehall and taken over the country by commanding its male, love-starved politicians. But they were proud Africans and they had no interest in a small island  with lousy weather and an altogether provincial mindset as far as most things, apart from music and banking were concerned.

.. may still go to #hollywood.

the other day, i took a plane from hollywood down to cape town to visit @franki_ a girl who followed me via twitter, the latest and greatest in international memetic travel. we had to settle an underscore, so obstinately positioned after her name, so i took my french foil, which a fencing master had once given me upon sparing his sporting life. at that time, i was still famous.

twittergirl lived in a slummy neighbourhood compared to my los angelesian den: in the californian hills, i could have any number of half-baked stars for dinner and more. here, i smelled the stench of the grey bourgoisie, which brought me back to my boyhood and those school years in hammersmith. i felt nostalgic and sheathed my foil. this was going to be a fun trip, a summer vacation in the middle of our winter.

we met on table mountain for dinner: servants in white brought us quail and frog soup spiced with onions grown by namibian gangstas. i read the body electric out loud and cats responded. i drew my straw hat, which i had bought for the momentous occasion, and she spit in it. what had so auspiciously begun between characters and tweets turned into a party when her friends rode up the mountain in hoppers and vespas and motocross flitzers. the joy!

photographs were taken too and fed into a giant database of super models. these pictures would be taken on a mission by pioneer VIX who would probe the intergalactic space not carrying mathematical formulae or bach fugues, but images of the finest and most graceful of our race as well as our world’s most successful brands: a shoe from nike, a cellophane-wrapped hamburger from mcdonalds, and a new slimming coca-cola with not zero but negative sugar content. there would also be space on board, i was told, for an image of his majesty the frymaster. unfortunate for me, i was told that a giant iguana who also lives on the mountain, had jumped in front of the lens in the very moment the picture was taken so they could not accommodate my aspirations to transworldly stardom. since i had been famous before, i didnt even cry.

i yet had to have a single moment alone with twittergirl. alas, she was called away to a photoshoot involving a pair of large, enormously large gorilla toes. to prove a point which i have forgotten, but my dear friend professor pangloss assured me in our therapy session that i do not need to know everything, and i don’t have to go everywhere or talk to every single soul on the planet. this twitter thing, though, it does make you feel dizzy with possibilities!

i took off from cape town with a twist in my step and my stiffness all turned into tatter, leaving the promise with @franki_ to visit me in the hollywood hills. as my plane pulled away from the horn, i saw twittergirl stand on the platform, iPhone in one hand, tweeting me already.

© 2009 finnegan flawnt