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.
Leave a Reply