81

blue snake dream

(a short film written by David Lynch: shot by Sergio Leone)

 

emerging from the most distant dot on the horizon   slowly

traversing a landscape of bleach and dust   a father

and his daughter

the 12 year old girl is wearing a dress that hangs like wet leather

after slow minutes of walking they are within hailing distance

the camera turns

so that we can see what they see   a huge dog   a grey lurcher

with blood across its shoulders that are heaving as if to erupt

bone through skin

round its neck a long   rough rope that loops over the branch

of a sorry looking tree   this tensed rope runs hypotenuse

to an idling motorbike

where it has been fixed to the frame by a young boy

who the father addresses asking what is he doing   he is sick

says the boy

and shrugs   he moves to start the bike   meanwhile the daughter

lays down on a bank of thin grass the large platter of cold cuts

and cheese slices

she has carried all the way from the horizon   the lurcher

is now a scruffy ratter   and the bike a shuffling donkey

the man starts

towards the boy   walking past a thin shed with peeling whitewash

eczema walls and a roof of patched and cracked red tiles

the girl’s eye

is caught by something blue   a large sheet of ribbed plastic

piled in the corner of the shed   as the father approaches the boy

this blue becomes restless

until finally she sees it unfurl and rise   blue stripe across

the white eye unblinks   a patch of summer-day-sky plastic

detaches and drifts

towards the unaware father   while the girl is being smothered

lets out a scream   her father turns in time to see the completion

of the blue envelopment

of his daughter   the plastic collapses back into its corner

with insufficient bulk to have consumed the girl   but she is nowhere

the small patch

of blue dispatches the father without a sound from either   the dog

looks at the boy who mounts the donkey and they move off

to another horizon.