Sedley Proctor

The Junk Book Sedley Proctor

Inside the drowned man, Hobbes found the whale. Inside the whale, Hobbes found nothing but junk.




***

Among the cardboard boxes and bin-liners, outside a restaurant called perplexingly Le Chat Noir, someone had dumped a manikin, which appeared to have been super-glued with angel wings.




A large black dog or possibly werewolf springs and snaps off its head. In the ghoulish celebration of the dismemberment of the manikin there is in fact no blood, just the crunching of prosthetic limbs.




Here in the junkyard it is often like this - moments of violence and high strangeness, followed by hours of what seems futile wandering.




***

Was it the junk that made him creep? Or something itching at his soul? No matter, there was no solution other than to trigger the gun. - On the brink of fame and fortune, Jimmy Quentin, poet maudit of the Q-tips, leaves it all behind and takes to the streets where his life continues to spiral out of control.