DEI ALTARE AD INTROIBO

The shamble leg man slept with a gypsy who had flies in the seams of her eyes and breathe like spoiled onions. She spoke Romanian and wore goatskin shoes with birds’ talon claps. She claimed to be tutored in tap dancing, a claim he cared not to challenge, and knew how to cut hair with lit matches. Her hair was a covey of twigs and balled string that she twisted into a loose knot at the back of her head. She had a scissor cut just below her right eye and a cyst on the knob of her chin. When she spoke she spoke in gibberish and Esperanto, a consonant wail that deafened his ears. Her eyes were black shale, the sclera pitted with green, the lashes curved inward like apple peals. She had loose skin under her arms; skin boiled until it separated from the bone, a marrow whiteness in the rook of her elbow.

She hooked her legs round his neck and wailed into the trove of his ear. The gypsy woman smelled of orange roughie, creel and roe. The heels of her feet were bricked with calluses, a plagiary of hard skin that caused her to keel to one side like an abandoned ship. He tried to push her from his chest but she heeled upside his kidneys, so he shook his head from side to side hoping she’d declutch and leave him be. When this didn’t work he boxed her ears and whispered, ‘you gypsies are a miserable bunch, all this wailing and plagiary.’ When this worked to no avail, as her ears were crated, he shimmied to the left, then to the right, and threw her to the ground, an odor like spent matches and sulfur creping his nostrils.

The man in the hat awoke and ate a peameal sandwich with raw onion and Macquarie’s mustard. ‘INTROIBO AD ALTARE DEI’ he said to no one in particular, ‘DEI ALTARE AD INTROIBO' and good riddance to you all’. He felt the rickets in his legs again this morning. He much preferred mock chicken, sometimes Porker’s bologna or a mild capriole, but the Hasidic butcher where he bought his meats refused to sell anything cloven or un-bled. The man in the hat’s father ate pork sausage and tripe, wingtips of blood clowning his face. He once ate a cow’s head, the ears curled like prepuces, a dead fly balled in the seam of its eye. His father told him that gypsies ate calf’s testicles, boiling the scrota in the same pot as the potatoes and cabbage, a placental hash that encouraged vitality and good hair growth. ‘GOD BE WITH YOU ’he hollered, ‘DIEUS EX PLURIBUS IN HASIDIA’. He shook the worms from his legs, a mischievous grin on his otherwise dower face, and climbed the stoop leading up from his lean-to.