Wizards and Lizards

III. Of Barbs and Scaled Things

As if nature herself sends forth an army of barbs to dispatch him, Bozo struggles against the cloying thicket. Rows of sentinels conceal the horizon, their mazelike phalanxes steal direction. Canopy obscures navigable stars. His sense of time lost, he wanders about their stout boughs. Here on the timber empire's fringes, the forest holds no sway, leafmold greets bog forming treacherous terrain.

Other branching paths seduce with assured rigidity, but they lead back. He steals a last glance, then decides the only reversal worth it is fortune

Undrained despite extensive reclamation, the marsh air is pregnant with toxins. Strange bulbs and barbed roots jut from the bankside, where water drops from "oh how refreshing" to lungfuls of pondscum in a single step.

Elbows pointed forward like a galley's ram to shove the unappealing scum aside, Bozo wades through the filth, viscous and clinging. A deranged smile spreads like an infection across his face. Keen to prove awareness of madness is ample prevention, he walks with the measured step of a believer in evil.

He snares on a hidden root and loses his only shoe, sees it sucked beyond sight, a victim of commute. Mud slicks against the balls of his bare feet. A miasma hangs.

A whisper disturbs serenity, faint as memory. Bozo jolts, sending ripples. Branches stir. A lone crow caws. It crosses successively lower perches to eye level, its movement belying foreign agency. Hypnotized by the corvid, Bozo misses the horned lizard sliding from its muddy hole along the banks. Robed in fog, it propels along the surface quick as toxin, pulling short of striking distance.

Ancient Egyptians believed a crocodilian judged mortals upon passing, weighted their deeds and consumed the foul.

Bozo jolts at the corvid's stirring, but not as Shriee expected. He leaps into action, reaching underwater for his lost shoe reckoning its size sufficient to lock the monster's jaw. His fingertips clasp the heel. Freed in a chaos of splashing, he forces the shoe between its terrible jaws.

Shiree strips fabric from Bozo's arm, but finds no purchase to drag further. Unable to bite, it reveals fierce claws moist with bog venom. Reacting with an animal quickness of his own, Bozo grabs a knot of flaxen roots and hoists himself onto its back.

From this advantageous position, Bozo observes the delicate places below almost bemusedly, simply as if deciding which item looked most appetising on a taster plate. He finds the vulnerable, naked apertures easily. Ears, eyes, armpits - all the vowels. First he pushes his thumbs deep into the eye jelly. A horrible shriek escapes the plated creature's mouth, a sawing lament that turns all good to sin, but as the crowing continues its pitch shifts a tone closer to a man's tortured gasps.

Shiree, no longer in control, phases between mortal and crocodilian form. Fountains of blood erupt from fresh fissures. The remnants of crushed eyes fall into the fading fog chalice, returning from whence it came.

Bozo tears at plates along the lizard's spine. One hard wrench loosens a lump of indiscernible flesh, which quivers in his hand. Stalks of meat dangle like the red roots of a bloodplant. Blood spumes intermittently from a distended capillary. He drops the trophy into the water.

Shiree's chest collapses. Snapped ribs, sharp as sabres, deflate his lungs with a hiss. Fragments of bone shrapnel scrape his organs until they resemble tabletops from a ruffian classroom. His open torso reveals a mass of roughly handled meat, the sickening specialé de jour at the impossible banquet of masques. He gurgles. Blood bubbles to the last ragged strips of his neck, open from lobe to larynx.

The sedentary flow runs red. Bozo pushes his hands inside, past the guts to the resin walls of the inner skin, which he scrapes clean like a hide with broken nails.

His nickname proves ill-chosen. No perfume sprays when Shiree's bowels perforate. Acid and half-digested morsels shaken from his slashed stomach fizz on the tarp. Still the wizard lives, somehow.

Bozo grasps the top jaw and wrenches with all his might, a rowing motion that splits its head in two.

Slits form at the corner of Shiree's mouth, small red papercuts opening like vile sores, splitting upward towards the ear. His jaw hangs by fine threads, otherwise detached.

Flies mass on Shiree's exposed entrails. Buzzards circle overhead. Betrayal by his avian brothers, a final indignity. Soon they will descend. Small mercy his eyes are already taken, the birds leave none for seconds.

Bozo pulls a novelty tissue from his sleeve to wipe his face, a routine typically involving an audience participant.

Bozo passes his former encampment, emerging shortly at the collapsed canvas. In the light of a burning puddle of fireeater's oil, the wizard lies desiccated, dismembered limbs flop pathetically either side of a destroyed torso.

Thank fuck. Mother Fire spared the magic vestment, but devoured the surrounding flesh, testament to the article's power. Bozo doubts its legitimacy but takes it. Fucked if he's going to be the guy who leaves the golden fleece at the dock. The waistcoat slips off easily, the silk offers no resistance. Bozo pulls it over his playsuit. 

He stays a while and listens. Unless he's sure the wizard is dead, every animal will send him diving for cover. Bozo visualizes in his mind's eye what he desires most, and that's to kill Shiree again. Plunging his hands into a crocodile didn't satiate his thirst for revenge.

For a time he stands and imagines Shiree rising, the clefts in his head remolded, eyes blinking anew, but when he opens his eyes, the wizard remains on the wrong side of Styx. No blouse could resurrect anyone from such a state. Parts of the corpse were already missing, carried underground by ants. Bozo taps the breast twice. He whistles, back east toward Duffy's.