Monday, September the 6th, 2004
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Be it known that the said Curpin has confessed to the following bad, bad deeds: abnormal behaviour in the botanical gardens; bamboozlement of the grossest kind; clutching a bag of spangles in his sweaty fist; dental irregularities; employment of those given to gurgling; forging railway timetables; glowing in the dark; hooting at inelegant farmyard animals; implacable dribbling; jumping off wooden crates; knitting a balaclava; leaning against a zoo; malfeasance in a charnel-house; not paying his bus fare; oddly-laced boots; pouring forth incandescent light; quietude on a bandstand in a park; rooting about in the muck; skulking in doorways; taradiddle and ergot; uprooting foliage with his teeth; virulent infection spraying; wiggling unnecessarily; x-raying entire continents without permission; yodelling aboard a tractor; a zest for crumpled and bristly things.
In mitigation, it should be said that Curpin has suffered tortures best left to the imagination, drawn his breath in shaking sobs, turned the animals loose, and has a power that men know not. He held the boards for seven terrible weeks. He burned fish. Approaching the startled cellists, he was seen grinding the pressure ridges, smashing great blocks of ice. He did not have time to rest. At the corral, under some sheaves of oats, and very snugly wrapped, he dropped his biscuit. Soon, he was dreaming of all sorts of extraordinary things. I saw him lift a man by the seat of government, rub down his horse, and feed him apples. He even went so far as to hire a top-rig buggy to take a little spin along the banks of foreign streams, procuring big booty and professing to be a detective! It was, indeed, a wild sabbath night. Curpin was furious with rage—one foot upon the iron rail, an enormous net of steel, and his pack-pony became visible. The time of winter dog travel was now approaching. The earth, gritty and metallic, could have bidden a gondola. Living rooms flanked the peristyle, and webs of incandescent tubular lamps shone ahead of the damp, grey relics. Curpin tracked down reports of locust swarms. He honked twice, slipped beneath the sea, went to work on a huge pile of food, and tore up lettuce, his pouch unfolding. His rattling became a sizzling. Even the nearby gravel-crushers were keenly aware of Curpin's bone finger ring, embedded in mud. Gently, in order not to raise great clouds of ooze, he blocked its incredible roped sledge and ox-hoof. Caught in a fish-hook curve, or pumped into the expensive crates, he touched up the ginger façade, decked his troublesome horse, and tampered no more with the tin roof. In fear and chaos, under a bridge or a water-tower, he became dusty blue with age. Like a sheet. Like rugs. Like concrete piles driven, and steel strung. Drying hazelnuts, this evil man on a screened porch with a syrup bottle provided by his hostess punched, drilled, and reached a fine convenient perch. He clapped a boatswain's whistle to his lips, straddling the opposite slope, but his heart was seized by poisonous timber. In a modest salt-box structure of leaded casements, he brewed a big kettle of quahog berry candles, safely past rocks made incongruous by a regatta in a dying wind, their examples of restoration one wooden thumb, with left foot thrust forward, and in summer often charmless. To converse with distant sheep, Curpin thundered past burning heather. He liked it better than mealy primrose. Blown by an icy blizzard, he had been trying out hemp and its by-products, twine, matting and sacks. On the lawn, the seeming anachronism of Curpin's indigenous cable plate softened the blue invalid jetty. He placed the wire cone with its point aimed at strewn torrents and a rack-and-pinion railway, harder, rarefied, tremendous. On the Seminole, formidable enough. For Curpin, it was the end.