Big Frank has been reading Aflame And Afun Of Walking Faces by Kenneth Patchen. These very short stories are wonderfully unique. He creates a fantasy world that beggars description, but after you have read even a smidgen of it, a daze of wonder will envelope you completely. Below is an abridged sample, just to whet your whistles:
Moondogg And The One-Armed Dentist's Sister
Under silver maskery of hours like frozen waves -- when those whom eternity accosts have palely come -- within sound of the chimmey's gray-petalled wound, Moondogg quietly waits, waits for the maiden of gray tears to climb to a place beside him.
Blurred golden eyes peer up from the winding motorway, while furry lids softer than a bat's nipples open and close over harbor and listening vineyards, silhouettes against which the grieving hands of fogbells vainly beat . . . peril and longing bedded down like sad crones in a stuff any child might pick apart as easily as the hangman of romance the cottony breath of a thief falsely accused (perhaps of one's very own family) . . .
Now, in the only moment for that, she climbs like a struggle of scissors to where the sky ends so unimportantly -- in a roof . . . thereupon Moondogg inquired, "Well -- that is, tell me first did you have a fine day?" and he falls to kissing her dangling arms and forehead.
Birds of ice with blunted gray beaks tear at the shrouding waves. O then sobbing into his cruel pale curls, she will answer: "Take me with you. O now take me, take me with you . . . in three weeks less a day I shall be fifty-seven years old." . . .
[Not to worry Moondogg does take her with him; she holds on to his furry belly and they fly off (hey, he's a moondogg ) together, but first they make a quick swoop through her dentist brother's open window.]
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