Spring 2024 - Recrudescence

Catherine Hoffman

With that, I became, not as might have been wished, an atheist, that’d be just nuts as well, but an alien, no longer at home, adrift in myself.

An age of untimed time passed.

God was to blame.

Or worse.

A horrible endless blank.

*

May 27.

Morning. Okay. So, something’s different. It is the 5th day. Might I be getting it back, that ‘mustard seed’? At least a pip of it? Because yesterday there was an encounter. It was about a worm. I took my bicycle to Joska’s. He works in the backyard of Sopron under a plane tree the size of a green, aerially floating football field. He’s a Joe-the-Fixer, a mechanic. Joe’s a man battered by booze and duress to look twice my age, though he is half of it, and from whom I rent the bike. With the usual boy team, Joska was hammering away under the tree as I wheeled in on the bike. His mates told me Joe had been flushing oil from a car, and had found an earthworm, a giliszta, slaked in oil. It was dying. So, Joska, the mates’ yarn went, had placed the inert worm on his palm. He had walked over to that barrel of rainwater, washed it, dried it, patting it dry gently with grass. Then positioned it carefully in a box among soft mulch and leaves. Turning back to his heckling mates, he had sworn a ‘Fuck yourselves!’ at them and said, ‘The one who touches the giliszta, is dead!’ The mates said that Joska had often checked on the worm, to see. And now by this morn? The worm was well.

‘Such is the man to lead the nation!’ On hearing the story, I

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