They careered through the forest at breakleg speed, a whole horde of ragamuffins, fagurchins and black-eyed wallops: a boyhood gang in name, but more an army of cut-throats fashioned to the teeth with all the accoutrements of hand to hand and head to head fighting.

Their leader went by the name Imwitch. He stemmed, some said from an ancient stock that specialised in causing the most pain in the most people. This was, he said, simply for the sake of balancing out all the good which God was concurrently creating. He thought God would be thankful for his honest endeavours, since good would not show up well without bad.

The other wise guys followed Imwitch, churning through the underchoke, steamers with no cause but impulse. Their escapades usually ended in a rumble, with a guest victim or two, and a token law-maker, but above all a simple carefree ruck, where limbs were torn off as soon as looked at. But, one day, Imwitch had a headache stemming, he claimed, from a foolishly acquired emotional attachment - and, so, for the day, lodged his authority in one of the other bruisers ... who proceeded to make Imwitch's headache worse ... or better ... with the red slimy head of a sledgehammer.

There was no love lost in such slizzards, and the forest rung with their hoots of laughter that afternoon. At the heart of the ensuing scrumble in twilight's ghostly glow, the gossip passed from prop to hooker: "Imwitch was sick with love for a girl ... now he's had his come-uppance."

The hooker argued with the prop: "No, even if Imwitch is dead, he is still spurring us on to gang bang." And their two skulls came together with a blinding splunch of egg-shells. The two grey yolks spouted up and, for a split second, it was almost lovely to muse about their union in the treetops.

###

"Whatever you do, don't give your heart to the Balloon-Mender."

The speaker was Imwitch. Tasha felt him lightly touch her hand with his. If nobody understood her, she was sure he wasn't one of them.

She shook her head to clear it of unclear thoughts. She knew. He knew. She was blind. She had been blind since birth. Unlike her, he never used colours in his speech. She searched back in her memory to find the time she first met him.

*

"I know what a colour is." She had been aggrieved.

The place was the home. He had visited, at the request of her ex-boy friend. Even enemies had soft thoughts about her.

"I didn't say you didn't."

He stood up for himself, but she knew he'd studiously avoided the word red when talking about blood. And what was blood, if it wasn't red? Inside her head, she saw a light that was neither black nor white, for it was red. Painful. The edge of a surgeon's knife. And full of power ... and rage.

"What is your name."

"Imwitch."

"That's a strange name."

"How am I to blame for what people call me?"

She couldn't continue a conversation that was getting nowhere, toppling over each other like somersaulters in a circus. She sighed ... and came back to the present.

*

"Who's the Balloon-Mender?"

She had grown to love Imwitch. He brought her happiness during his visits. Wheeled her around the grounds. Whispered in her ear of strangenesses beyond his name. Of beautiful, if weird, visions that her blindness concealed. Given half the chance, he'd fondle her, his breath playing around her lips like soft fire. He'd place her hand upon himself, too, so that she could feel a heart pulsing in his hard stem. The nurses must have turned a blind eye.

"A Balloon-Mender? Well, it's someone who clears up after children's parties."

"Why must I not give my heart to the Balloon-Mender?"

"Because he'll put it inside crinkly brown paper tied with a pretty bow ... and then at the next party pass it round the circle of wide-eyed childerfaces ... and on the music stopping, one of them will tear it eagerly open and find it pulsing ... like a live rat that's lost its fur and its head and its tiny limbs and..."

"Stop!" She could not bear its beating, even in her mind.

Imwitch lay a light finger on her temple to calm her, as if it were not he who had caused her to be upset in the first place. Then, Christ-like, he touched Tasha's flickering eyelids for the first time...

###

The ragamuffins, fagurchins and black-eyed wallops steamed on through the forest, mugging every birdnest to hand. The fragile, finely-mottled eggs smashed to the ground for the Egg-Mender later to sift through.

But where was the good in it?

The souls of the resultant birds that never were to know full-fledged existence flittered from the clearing at the thickest part of the forest, rising into the encroaching night's sky, where they met angels' souls (Tasha's among them) dying the other way.



Published 'Nox' 1994