The Baby Mind

The Baby Mind
by Shane Jesse Christmass

In 1974, when indoor smoking wasn’t pillory then, in the train corridor, the tufts smelt of Nanna Magee’s stale smokes, like a hive-mind of melting dysentery, drinking charcoal that the nurses would eventually give to Edmond Magee. Edmond didn’t know if it was the last time he would see Nanna Magee, but he remembered bawling his eyes on the platform, at the train station, as she got on her carriage. Edmond Magee was nappy-aged, soon to be bed-wetter, and as he sat there in his soiled ka-ka, poop, nibbling on a wholegrain rusk, toddling abound in a Fisher Price hell, before God he made an effort to stop nothingness. In his mid-twenties Edmond remembered that in primary school he’d read about how Zophar came, consoled Job during his illness. That’s a true friend. Just like Job, Edmond Magee had sinful impulses of beauty. Zophar and Job laid themselves beneath the earth and when Job realised this, he woke up, and like a sometimes general, he obeyed God.
Edmond Magee was no saint in secret. Edmond was nothing like Zophar, for no greatness had eventuated into this world, not even divine punishment. Edmond Magee was one who ruled himself out, even though his pride reached to the sea. Sometimes he got tipsy, while the silk spools of star rolled into silk spools of star. He watched his girlfriend rake her hand through the abyss, through her hair, her category of the fingertips. Edmond reckoned his bad attitude was a coarse driblet with falsity at the core of himself. Edmond’s bad attitude was a dribble to make him feel apparent, or off-cuts of any producing, dead white on the fingertips. Edmond Magee was shit. In his bed he saw the hypostasis of the archons. That which lies beneath the Lords. They hovered over the bed sheet. Examples from pleasing they please asked Edmond. To their apprehension or own sake, ideas, emotions, apparitions, these spirits rose and enjoyed their time! Was Nanna Magee ever entitled to ideas over the
soft bed? Edmond Magee was the idea that eddied, even if he relinquished that duty union – Gods, every kind of wickedness. Edmond’s laws of making the moment were more epithet than achieving the sweats. This was the reality of the rulers! Someone believed in it, but first like another ghost, Edmond contrasted his own or good error. There was trouble from the unknown. “Adorn the now.” They bellyached, wisecracked. Edmond Magee heard whispers: Archons, Monarchs, Hierarchs, and Anarchy. It’s not 1974, it’s 35 years later and Edmond Magee in the suburb watching a horrible old VHS tape, it was Scott Baio in Zapped, but in Scott Baio’s character in Zapped, Edmond Magee saw Pol Pot, he saw Saloth Sar swimming with his shadow in the darkness. Saloth Sar forced the Khmer of Edmond Magee’s bones to build, defend, pushing a whole populace into assisted manslaughter, what knuckle-dusters in minutes! Unlike Zapped, Edmond Magee wasn’t in “one hilarious situation af
ter another.” Edmond Magee felt sorry for the Saloth Sar that became Pol Pot, the Saloth Sar that became Pol Pot, who took the banknotes to the market, got strapped with hand knives and dirt morals. Edmond Magee is has, now was and how he got it. How the drunken rich beat the lower class in knife-holding culture, boredom like a hive of weevils, this employment can be invented, organised, like gangster-unleashed storming attacks on the poor. Robber with manipulation. The suburbs. The train conductor was on the P.A. system. “Everyone who’s not travelling to alight the train”. Edmond Magee was two years old. The tiny overhead bed lights on the first-class carriage, the baggage cart, the luggage rack made no in leaving Edmond alone. They didn’t leave Edmond alone. Fading dusk-light returned as the bed was turned down.

Many of Edmond’s peers, say the 7 year olds, were wrappaged and received in beast dreams. Edmond Magee was two years old; in his baby-ether he got shaking with the world into transcendental things. His Father waved Edmond’s birth around and divulged this, squeezed into Edmond, indefinite, pummelled into an opaque scrying illusion, terminal boredom. Edmond got humour with life, which was alien-like, but sometimes he thought he was on the baby-change floor. Still. Development. With development of humankind’s timelines. And more corporeal boredom.