Shaun Pieter Clamp: A ROCKET'S TALE • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by Shaun Pieter Clamp
A ROCKET’S TALE

The scaffolding falls. I’m a shiny rocket nose downslope into crater. Imperfect bliss kindles in the mouth of the stone. I make my way down there on wheels. The bright moment will singe my nipples into golden bullets. I’m a fire hydrant but in the Americana blues, dolphins flip in the oil puddles. A catastrophe, all this glitter, no one to spoon.

At the crater’s bottom, I find a little man who speaks ‘out the side of his neck’. He says he is my father.

“Take a seat on this here hot plate.”

Onto the boiling disk that warms my fuel in my convoluted combustion chambers resembling intestines or a brain. My exhaust pipe putters little farts.

“Where am I going?” I ask.

“Through the big smoke, son.”

“Through it? To where?”

“I don’t know, son. I’ve never seen a star.”

Once I’m fully erect he plays these bellows I have a distinct memory of. Made of pig’s bladder, hung above the old fireplace. Out of its nozzle, a creamy green foam which titillates the magma, and I hear a low fraternal rumbling, like an all-boy school war cry, the bundled sound swarming from subterranean chambers with the kinetic energy of fire-born bees, melting the paint and galvanized hull, the scrotum of my booster, the sphincter itself bellying outwards like a blazing carrion flower—I could feel that sound carbonizing my colonic mucous, switching my heart’s current to AC, blood and engine oil sirening through zebra crossings of the libidinal universe.

All longing transformed, I was simply ready to eat my tale.

When the sky is a jungle, ay, there I go. Piratical explorer of the Ganges or some such spindrift constellated spoke of our luminous bellwether. Ay I was flying, ay dios mios, ay Vallejo get your fishhooks outta me! There I ride, my summerlong tailwind pipemouth explosion throttling me up until a twinkle in that strange man’s eye. On reflection, I never knew the guy, and I’ve traveled so fast he’s already dead; his livestock life spent in my timeline’s pen. My tip splits color into heat before my sensors can construct or dream a sequenced impression. But there is a smell, that’s more of a knowledge. If one were to knit the galaxy’s discrete processes into a fibrous stem, at the part where it branches, there I was, so it was more of a sound, a single byte eternally playing and so static and so silent. In the crotch of time’s interstellar tree sat a boy whistling the song of his rocket, emerging from the leaves like the ugly hoverfly, hunting his brood from amongst the zodiac.

I was free in the way dead things are, orbiting nothing. I was bored that I had yet a body to bear. I won’t moan, but it got dark. It was easy to imagine that I was shivering. My thrusters set to Neptune blue. I reminisced of a city I had never seen, arranging it among my ribcage struts: simple towers, transit snaking like coral eggs, tiny torches on the helmets of construction workers who were to be evacuated as soon as the empire was complete. A diamond raised like the Seattle Needle illuminated the governmental district in Eu du Toilette, from whose faceted windows peered regal spermatozoa, neotenic overlords, my future seed.

They were arguing, flagellums quaking with fury. Apparently the brawny infants of section G had performed a coordinated attack on the oft-maligned Zygotists, taking a number of shrieking cell clusters hostage, dragging them back through fallopian tubes built in secret agreement with the scuttlebug construction workers, stowing them under pyramids resembling general hospitals in the middle of a desert—dark sand blue-blowing through the skirts of the Sphinx—and the Zygotists had responded by reinstating a long-antiquated late-term abortive regime, a scorched birth policy, as it were, on such disproportionate scale that the powers that be, who had squeamishly propped up their spiritual antecedents, were calling ineffectually for a ‘pause’, and no one heard them, and fireworks exploded through my little mind, a march of skeletons along picturesque canals. Oh it was all so involved I began to pray for the spectacular radiation that might reveal our hardwire souls to one another, that our clenched fists remain in the mouths of our lovers, and that our tears be but the tenderest obsolescence of a gag reflex we were already beyond.

To rot, to rot. To rove, to rove. Who popped the pustule on the fat arse of Jove? This is why I don’t involve myself in politics. I haven’t the mind, the heart, or the stomach. I expurgated my colony via a near empty fuel cell. It rolled away like a domino, luckless and alone, as did I, free in the way neutered things are. I knew now the dangers of haplessly exploring one’s cavities. Maturity meant ascribing virtue to one’s waning hormones; the more fuel depleted, the more space I could inhabit. I wasn’t jealous of a misspent youth. I fingered a drunk girl on a dancefloor once, the night checkered with strobe lights and the absence of ethnic minorities. It was the silver age of our constitutional democracy. We smashed our empty glasses in the corner of the club. The girls cut their delicate feet on the shards and danced the red spoor of wounded prey. Another life, another unfinished mandala.

I was on the lookout for black holes, the only one I’d seen before was in the iris of the only man I’d loved. Yes, this rocket has a history. Imagine a pink rose folding its petals clenched to suck on a cigarette—those were his lips—to exhale an entire summer’s day. My heart thudded like a pool cleaner after his crumbs of affection, wanted to carve a lamprey hole in his alabaster side, to spin him around like a completed Rubik’s cube, for what else could I do? My longing expressed itself as a series of thorns along my green stem, of which there remain four, my tail feathers stabilizing my ejaculation and egress.

Of course, one can’t see a black hole, and good luck sorting through the spaces between stars. When God gathered his pearls from the suffering pool to admire the excuses his matter had made (on his behalf), there trickled through his webless fingers a liquid sifted of all that grew or groaned, loam of oblivion to pelt the pool hsa hsa could their soundwaves escape the impulsive mouths the droplets made. Thus they call, with a heaviness from which words cannot rise, and grip our tracheas with what we would but say. Stretched across the event horizon, fields of force of infinite keening, where ends and needs, heads and tails, lose their correlates and their meanings.

I slow danced with him once, my hand atop his. It was the end of a party, we were a bit coked up. I felt ecstatically like a houseplant, yellow tracing my last egoic structure, shadow out-bottoming in humiliating love. We deserved to be there, so rich and generous. I’ll never forget his expression. We were on the roof. He turned to me. His teeth were gritted in a square, his eyes snowed over. I stood face to face with a streetlamp of a man, a curtain of metal. I stood before a light that arrives and goes as the Earth revolves, as clouds do, and mourned the city blocks that reflected him, as I flew away to find a mirror.

I could feel it, the whatsitcalled surfeits and deficits of matter bending my arc, but I encountered no resistance. I wasn’t going any other way. Nor was I accelerating, or not perceptibly, not in relation to the ghost of myself radared in the imagination, bedfellow X-rayed with prickles of space dust, grey man perpetually sitting himself up in grandad’s underclothes, by the mind’s blinded window. He seems without will, though I’m too afraid to ask, afraid of the magnet that might arrange his filings, polestar of the ghostship I’d be forever hostage. With each mental blip I see him sitting up, his elbow pushing off the bare mattress—no further, no—no further.

This started with a bang, but now I’m here, reaching my late twenties (in lightyears), an orphan planet approaching apogee. The stars are fewer. Desolation threatens to pull me apart, cleave an ice pick into my epiphenomenal heart, haul me back to that yeti crevasse where they weaned me with their primordial milk (blent with silica, frozen in cubes). They ate off my reflective surfaces, rubbed themselves on my stifled warmth. They believed every star was a cataract housing creatures just like them, every heart a hostile comet to be sublimated by the fires of pain. Meagre fires in their intranet’s cave flashed their daggers through the new chimneys (they tied me upside down, told me to make ‘em quick). They couldn’t breed, even their testicles and eggs turned frosty. Didn’t they know, my heart kindling with a different heat, that those pitiful flames told only of their suffering, that the noble comet burned for their sake, honoring the forlorn planet soon to be extinguished in its wake?

Inexorably I melted my way out of there and floated like Moses to a distant shore: lands of Thoth, Anaximander, Plato. A land of similitude and swordfish, breathwork and pederasty. My hot body was greased by worshipping hoards. They slid me through the dunes to Giza, my blown-glass trail fissuring apocryphal languages, scattering interpreters to the four corners of my blazing tetragram, sovereign mark on that pageless page. There I made the acquaintance of the Pyramids and the Sphinx (a familiarity I may have alluded to), demanding at once their glittery nipple caps be removed. I have an earthly taste, despite my construction, and truthfully prefer the curves of the dunes, though their malleability and fickleness become tiresome in a lover. I longed to become more than a hieroglyph, however, to find a god that might outshine my farce (Ra was nice, but distant). I was alone in my fame, unreal, unborn, knowing history’s banners were raised to be lowered.

I studied the sky while they used me as a compass. I studied the earth until I saw only their map. Then they had to hide me, bone of the scroll I was, unfurling me over the lip of the crater to sign and seal my existential myth. There I skidded into my numeral origin and bang! I flew on the wings of scrotums, sunning ever upwards into this well whose darkest distance is my closest haunch. Wildebeest gloaming through the river, marry me, though I would not know you. I’m a broken virgin, I was born so. I’ll be the chimp riding your back on this carousel of carnivores. Counter-cocking the revolver once, I’m rosy eyed for the ticket—bang bang—I’m a clerk, my spirit drifts on the terraced city, it’s the outline of my building. I’m shocked, I’m outraged. I’m carnival sleeping through all this black. Streetlamps rear like scrofulous snakes. Berty? No, I’m walking with my coat hunched to meet the policeman. Pock-pock footsteps, his eyes are gleary. Since when was the mist of one’s breath a crime? But officer I was only watching the foxes fuck. Who paid for this screensaver, the one you’re seeing? I don’t like you. I think I’m going to rape you. I think you’re going to like it more than you won’t and that’ll send you into a tailspin, and after, that yellowgray roadkill colorscheme splitting creation is your only way forward, tangled as a Roman this road ain’t. Ate your peas love? Jesus you’re gorgeous. I love my Action Man. Suddenly you’re sun.

Hello Mr Creation. May I hold your hand?

Shaun Pieter Clamp is a writer and editor living in the UK. He graduated from Rhodes University with a BA in English, Philosophy, and Law and a BA (Hons) in Philosophy, for which he received the DCS Oosthuizen Prize. His writing is published in Hobart, Agbowó, La Piccioletta Barca, Maudlin House, and elsewhere.