I am a brass cube. Neil Ulysses Darwin Cumberbatch melted into hot rubbish the scraps of a guest's tuba and his mother's oil lamp—and, good heavens, the avant-garde, handsome-twist-of-a-foul-mustache Sir Darwin Cumberbatch must have thought my gold colour fit the mold of a cube! Therefore, I flirt with the black hammer and the gear with the missing tooth beside the forge, safe. I can drink in sparks from the vat, and they ionize my subtle contours.
That would be my ending, noble and quaint, in this forgery or later the wine cellar Sir Darwin Cumberbatch hosts his other masterpiece alloys. But then I dream many nights in a row for time in the Portarlingtown grand cobble plaza with the fine statue of the Renaissance man in his most handsome gaze into his copper kettle lass. I, at once, know I must go. I am a work of art: a man, living or limestone, could gawk me for my accomplishments of Modernism, Futurism, Fauvism, and perhaps Cubism.
The matter is that Sir Darwin Cumberbatch should help me. On one particular merry evening, when he invites the curiosity of a woman with a jade necklace and a distracting eyelash, I glow brighter than I have before—I even polished the night prior with Brasso™. With the stroke of exceptionally divine intervention, she asks him about my beauty and my name. He smiles, soon with a glass of purple drink from a local vineyard, and he offers her me—a gift. It is splendid, and I itch in my mineral composite for a museum of onlookers (and statues of naked men).
They have rich sex. I learn her name is Maria. The woman stows me in her Coach purse—I would prefer a Prada, fret not. She discharges me from my certainties—the tempered tools and my creator. Maria, home, displays me behind the king's throne—the John Louie the Thirteenth.
I sit for years. My good humor drifts to ironic—pampered with dust and redness. My hubris! I miss Sir Darwin Cumberbatch, the hammer and the gear, and—more than all the material goods there ever is—my hope for attention. It was my purpose, I still believe, for those to gawk at my beauty. Mold from the humidity of the lavatory, however, clefts me from my artistic calling forever now—and forever.
Then, at once, a boy visits Maria. He has a pathetic, gaudy blonde hair that only wishes to sheath his excruciating blackhead. He plucks me from my tomb to ask the woman about me, but he—distracted by the prismatic texture under my sheath of grime—forgets to. He steals me! I want him only to grind me into golden garnish on a bowl of salad. However, to my glee, he cleans me with his saliva and thumb. I glow, a lightbulb, as he and his fat brother just joining us pass the front entrance of the Skyland Manor museum of Yansville fame, and—through my perfect causality—he asks his brother if they should sneak into the museum to see why I shine passing the entrance.
END