Demons

Twist and curl, fist and whirl, blissed and hurl, christ. He sits cross-legged on the bare stone slabs weaving the strands into shapes, not shapes, dolls not dolls, demons (he loops his lips around the word). Demons. Demons for the local market.

Sits there in the scratchy light he pitches forward and back, pulling out handfuls of straw from the bale listening to the hale on the hot tin roof, stuffing their arms shaping their bellies gutting out their mouths with a swift gouge of his only knife.

Lays each incomplete demon out flat, tall and lean to the rear, short and rumpy to the front there in the bare room where he lives without furniture without props without comfort just the rusted out chassis of a Ford he’d pulled from the burn one November night the fish scattering the phosphorus dimpling purple green dragging it back leaving a chassis shaped gash through his field of post-wheat blue.

Gives some of them eyes, the males at least, red map pins, the child demons get green, none of them a nose or ears or cheeks although some, perhaps one in ten, the lucky ones, they clutch a three-pronged pitchfork fashioned from number eight fencing wire he cuts from rusting coils on a farm on the other side of the village.

Perches those fully spawned fiends on the chassis, hither and thither, turning them into couples each facing the other down those with eyes lording it over those without, the candle spluttering their shadows into some demented stage.

Sleeps when he’s finished his work for the night on a narrow mattress of incomplete baby ghouls the half worked shapes yet to have their mouths plowed his body flattening them into a semblance of wary hunger and furious refinement.

Does he, a sleeping man of some inordinate age in a loin cloth and a rag that may once have been a t-shirt of rainbows and unicorns, does he imbibe these infant fiends with life actual life? If he was asked and why would he be nobody else knows of the ghoulish mattress but him, he’d shake his head slowly his lips parting then pausing then pursing and closing.

Erects his cardboard sign ‘pay what you prefer’ on his grass pitch at the market with his fifty demons grinning wheat ear to wheat ear and sometimes perhaps once a month the old woman selling dried herbs in the stall beside him brings him a nice cup of chamomile tea.