"WATCH"

[L.E. Leone's latest for your enjoyment.  No post tomorrow, but please check back around on Thursday for Writers Talk with Jessica Fox-Wilson!]


Watch
 
The watched pot boils. Steam streams and billows. The whistle whistles—which is experienced by the watcher of the watched pot as a whistle. Condensation beads around the lidded rim, rivering down to sizzle against the burner. The air between the watched pot and the watcher of the pot turns to weather: cloudy and humid. Now the watched pot shakes, wracked with boiling, and the noise, this whistle, screaming. Incredible, it’s like nothing the watcher of the watched pot has ever heard, or ever will. One’s brain is actually transformed. One’s brain can for once be tactily experienced inside one’s kitchen sink, like a sponge.

The screaming stops finally, too late for the cat, which has leapt to its death from a third-floor bedroom window. But the watcher of the still-watched pot is stronger than this. Silence, meanwhile, will need to be adjusted to, changing the brain again—even as the watched pot itself shifts slightly in shade, color, gradually glowing. It begins to tick. Which reminds one, after a time, of a watched clock, or watch. How time itself, like a crumpled newspaper, loses its linear tick-tock nature now, as now in no particular order now it crackles and burns.

L.E. Leone
© 2010