Ghost of a Flea

short piece inspired by Blake’s intriguing painting

Hunkering down in darkness, a darkness dungeon-deep and damp. Slimy, thick-skinned, with stone-like nodules under the skin. Its back arched and rigid, rigid with rage, enraged, enraged by confinement, without yet knowing anything else, staking back and forth, such intensity, such locked intensity, craving release.

It, he, clutches the bowl from which it drinks, a specially made sacrificial bowl, a mosaic of various volcanic rock, not a cup grabbed from a draining board, no, a bowl for cupping blood, blood that for so long (or long it seemed to the ghost) had dripped from the smooth and rust-dappled roof of the cave, and at such painful intervals: the first drop almost forgotten, at which point, always just at that tipping point, just about to slip beyond reach of recall, suddenly, like pure violence: a PLOP. The fat second drop, in the centre of the burnished bowl, no sooner touching the smooth varnished surface than splayed to the shape of a flower or hand or fibrous root, shiny, thick, and hot. He seizes it and licks, the lusty muscular tongue, and looks about him, as if shame sticks to his face, even though no one is watching.

But now, the bowl is empty. Almost. Just a few dry specs, tiny red crusts. He’s pained by the absence of blood. Him, who loves to sit and sip it, and who, with each sip or gulp, ingests too, cold and glossy as an oyster sliding down the throat, a part of the donor’s soul. For of course, corpuscles have bubbles of soul inside. And so, as each vial or lick of blood enters his stomach, he feels, suddenly, no sooner tasted than gone, the flavour of someone’s life, a jolt, a shudder, an uprush of warmth, and echo of some long-lost pleasure or terror; and these pleasures, terrors, cramps of remorse, lunging angers, griefs like grenades, burst and pulse inside him, making him thrum and quiver and gulp.

He waits; he waits to live. “What body will I be given?” he thinks, “what corporeal form commensurate with my sovereign powers, my violence, gulping lust, appetite?” Looking at the thin lick of light under the door, the light of day, the light of existence. Waiting for the door to open. “What will be my living form?”

And God, hearing this bestial ghost, it’s uncontainable arrogance, its coiled and limitless rage, gives him the form of a flea.