Le Joueur Secret by Kathleen Rooney
It might not be a secret and it might not be a game, the pleasurable loss of self in interpretive contemplation. All the same, Loulou the Pomeranian has this sensation often on walks with the master, on walks with Georgette. Night-time is the right time for stage-lit scenes viewed between parted curtains. Loulou creates narration for the inhabitants, beginning in realism, then surpassing it. In Loulou’s canine mind this canvas inspires that kind feeling. The bilboquets flower pinkly: a bouquet of bilboquets. And the men play cricket? The men play baseball? And something happened to the turtle’s head? The aim of the men is not upon that black oceanic dirigible. The aim of the master is hardly a message. If smashed, what would fall from that angelic piñata, swimming through the sky? The woman in the mask – the gag? – asks, Loulou imagines, that you not talk to her of sport. Opening a window, but covering her mouth. Speak to her of objects removed from their usual context. Of the sheer smashing panache of utter what-the-fuck.
...
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and a founding member of Poems While You Wait. She’s the co-editor of The Selected Writings of René Magritte, forthcoming from Alma Books and University of Minnesota Press, and her second novel, What Makes You Seek Your Fortune Here, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2017.
Photo credit: "Mira II" by Herncar - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mira_II.jpg#/media/File:Mira_II.jpg
