28 September 07 - 17:23
Green Twist
Published 'Return of the Mutant Starfishman' 1999
Arfi spent most of his waking hours doing jigsaw puzzles. It never crossed his mind that he might be wasting his life, for he found the whole activity relaxing, absorbing, generally civilised and, yes, cathartic.
He became so expert, he speedily progressed from the large chunky pieces designed for the short-witted, towards those that numbered their pieces in thousands. Then there were the ones with bits bearing malformed joints or pseudo-stellar appendages. He even had puzzles which eventually formed pictures in scales of life to life and larger...
As the carriage clock on the mantelpiece kept the silence in rigorous shape and, with the heavy-duty curtains half-pulled across the net-choked window, Arfi propped the huge purpose-built board upon his middle, emptied the contents of a wickedly difficult jigsaw into the seaweedy-smelling chamberpot beside him and proceeded to fit the whole affair together... without recourse to the picture on the box-lid and working from the middle outwards.
Arfi purchased new boxes—amazingly—from the pet shop nearby with the big aquarium in the window. There were always stacks of jigsaws on the shelves—in fact, the place seemed to sell little else. The walrus-moustached shopkeeper knew Arfi's little foibles very well and chose the next puzzle for him, so that Arfi need not look at the box-lid. The shopkeeper was indeed one of those rare breeds who believed the customer was always right ... even when he was wrong. He knew that the time was approaching when Arfi would be entirely dissatisfied with straightforward jigsaws. One had to be cruel to be kind, even if it meant tempting Arfi beyond the edge.
Back in his lair, Arfi excitedly stripped off the cellophane with blunt fingernails, whilst keeping his eyes tightly averted, and poured the contents with a sensuous jiggling noise into the freshened chamberpot.
One day, Arfi was particularly pleased, because the shopkeeper had told him that the new puzzle had a picture that was really awe-inspiring. Something about Ishmael and MobyDick. Always pleased with literary themes, Arfi was bound to be satisfied with the end result. And the box contained more pieces than any other that the shopkeeper had ever seen in his experience. No two pieces the same shape. More than life size, Arfi wouldn't mind betting.
As the rusty innards of the clock gave out an uncharacteristic whirring, jarring noise, Arfi began to pick out the damp bits one by one from the chamberpot. His ultimate knack was to be lucky with the first few samples. Then he built up the picture, detail by minute detail, gradually obtaining an overview of the subject-matter, colours blending, form from form, shapes born, points evolving, extruding...
Today was a dark day. The sky lugubrious. The street lamps lit earlier than usual. At first, he couldn't believe the outline which was emerging upon the lap board. Scales. Mottled hide. Winding coils of microscopically diamond-quartered skin. Hooked herring-bone teeth, whiter than he could ever credit a jigsaw reproducing. As he headed out towards the straight bits, he felt sickness constricting his throat. He couldn't account for his feelings. But, then, horror-struck, he realised there were no straight bits for the jigsaw to use as its right-angled edges...
Arfi desperately searched for the box-lid in the gloom, finally discovering it in the coal scuttle. The sooty mulch therein had made it like papier mâché, but he could barely discern a rather picturesque view of St Paul's Cathedral, a majestic landlocked leviathan set against the bluest sky that could only be seen in picture-books.
The contents had obviously been stashed in the wrong box.
Arfi rushed over to the chamberpot to be violently sea-sick.
There was merely a pause for tension.
As he began to sense the pulsing spirals of slime slide up his bare leg, he remembered he had forgotten to switch on the light in his puzzle-solving haste. However, he could see that his skin was a mosaic of green scales, wet to the eye, but dry to the star-forked flicker of his own tongue.
He fled to the mirror ... but this by now could only reflect its own dank darkness. He thought he must have become a monster that had only managed to escape because there were no straight bits forming the jigsaw's rectangular margins to keep it in. He spun back across the shimmering parlour on one of his star-points and instinctively—as if it were a fang—planted another star-point into his own middle, grateful that he was sufficiently double-jointed to recycle the venom.
Evolution—albeit piecemeal—is parthenogenetic to the end.
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