“As in ‘But not today,’ ” says Woof, “ ‘not with some overtanned, tale-telling, near-middle-aged washup,’ right? I understand.”
“Oh, no! No but. I’d love to meet your horses. I was just thinking I could use a cup of coffee first, if that would be alright.”
“ ‘If that would be alright,’ huh?” says Woof, smiling broadly. He half-rises from his bench, turns left, and shouts, “Lupita, my darling! Uno el otro café, por favor!”
Cuddlefarmer Harvest
Security Footage
2004, Elmwood Junior High School, USA
[6 minutes, 57 seconds]
Fixed overhead shot, black-and-white, silent: a water fountain mounted on an otherwise locker-lined wall in a hallway. A tall boy wearing a canvas duster approaches the fountain, bends to drink. Another, shorter boy, dressed for the beach, rushes up from behind and slams into the tall one.
The tall boy heaves, and vomits in the basin.
The short boy kidney-punches the tall boy and pushes his face against the drain, holding it there, as a third boy, shouldering a messenger bag, enters the frame and tears the tall boy’s duster off.
Although the tall boy is now revealed to be wearing a light-colored tank top and what looks like a pair of mid-thigh hotpants, hardly any of the skin below his neck is visible, so thoroughly strapped are his gangly limbs with overlapping, high-capacity CureSleeves—six on each leg, and three each arm.
The third boy kicks the duster aside. He opens his messenger bag against his chest. While the tall boy flails and the short boy intermittently stills him by digging his (i.e. the short boy’s) elbow into and around the tall boy’s clavicle, the third boy removes the tall boy’s CureSleeves, loading them into the bag as he goes.
CUT.
Two minutes later. The third boy is crouching by the tall boy’s right ankle, starting to detach the last remaining CureSleeve, when the short boy says or shouts something to him, then rabbit-punches the tall boy twice and bolts offscreen, the third boy trailing him.
The tall boy, alone again, sits on the floor and leans back against the water fountain, openly weeping. A girl with a ponytail enters the frame, sits down before him, squeezes his shoulder. He tells her something. She raises a buttock, pulls the duster from beneath herself, hands the boy the duster.
He scrubs his hair and face dry with the duster, blows his nose, wipes his eyes, balls the duster and throws it offscreen.
The girl pats his knee and tells him something.
He reaches for the CureSleeve on his ankle, opens it. An infant Curio, five or six days old, crawls out and lies down atop the boy’s calf. Another cure does the same, and then a third and fourth, all of which look to be about the same age. They lie in a row alongside the first.
The girl picks one up, holds it in her fist in front of the boy’s face, tightens the fist, crushing the cure, and throws it over her shoulder, offscreen. She shrugs as if to say, “What? Did something happen? What did I do?”
The boy appears to be fighting a smile.
The girl takes another cure from off the boy’s calf, holds it up before the boy, and tilts it back and forth, as if to the rhythm of a nursery rhyme, then turns the cure so she’s face-to-face with it, pantomimes surprise, and smashes it firmly against her own forehead, tosses it over her shoulder, offscreen.
The boy is laughing. The girl waves away his laughter and shrugs, wipes her forehead clean, waves away the boy’s laughter again, pokes him in the ribs, chucks him on the chin. He cups his hand beside the two remaining Curios. Both crawl in. He sets one of them down atop the CureSleeve, keeps the other on his palm, holds it out to the girl, and tells her something. She pinches one of its legs at the ankle, and he pinches its other leg at the ankle. The cure hangs upside down between them. They nod in sync, one-two-three, and, together, they pull the Curio apart. The girl tosses the leg behind her, offscreen. The boy hands the girl the rest of the Curio. She holds it in a fist. Its mouth opens and shuts and opens and shuts. She holds her other fist just beneath its muzzle, flicks this second fist’s thumb as if shooting marbles. Its head snaps back, and stays snapped back. She tosses it over her shoulder, offscreen.
The boy is hugging himself and laughing. The girl pulls back a shirtsleeve, exposing her CureSleeve. She unzips her CureSleeve and a full-grown cure climbs out and stands. She cups her hand and it lies on her palm. She closes her hand and turns it over, holds her cure above the boy’s infant, which still sits atop his ankle-strapped CureSleeve, looking on placidly. By the way the girl’s cure begins to thrash, struggling to escape from her hand upon seeing the infant, there is no mistaking that it (i.e. the girl’s cure) is a hobunk. The boy nods enthusiastically, makes beckoning gestures. The girl extends a halting finger, turns to her side, so the infant is out of the hobunk’s sight lines, frees her ponytail from one of its rubberbands, fusses for a moment, turns forward again.
The hobunk is three-quarters hog-tied now—both of its ankles to one of its wrists. The girl sets it atop the boy’s calf, near the knee, facing the infant cure. The hobunk bucks wildly, trying to free itself from its bindings, then gives up on bucking and drags itself forward, an inch at a time, grabbing hold of the boy’s sparse leg hair and pulling, using its tail for extra leverage.
CUT.
Thirty-nine seconds later. Slightly pixelated close-up. The hobunk, gasping for breath, having dragged itself down the boy’s calf, to just within reach of the infant’s tail, takes hold of the tail, pulls the infant closer, clutches the infant’s neck and squeezes.
The infant goes rigid, then limp, and the hobunk lets go.
The infant slides down the side of the CureSleeve, onto the floor, prone and unmoving. The girl picks up the hobunk, undoes its bindings, sets it standing atop the boy’s CureSleeve. It leaps from the CureSleeve onto the infant, and jumps up and down on the back of the infant til matter begins to spill out of the infant, first from the exit, then from the mouth.
CUT.
Eleven seconds later. The same fixed overhead shot as at the start. The girl picks up the hobunk and returns it to its sleeve while the boy, no longer laughing, slowly nods, his eyebrows high and lower lip protruding. He says something. The girl shrugs, turns to him, strokes his cheek. She stands up, helps him to his feet, helps him on with his duster, and, arm in arm, they walk offscreen.
[Circa 1992. 4 minutes, 12 seconds.]
Daylight. Heat haze. A couple dozen unwashed, adolescent boys playing soccer on a narrow, gravel lot. Shirts and skins. Oil barrel goalposts. Across the dirt road abutting the lot, a pair of helmeted US soldiers comes over the top of a hill. They descend halfway, sit, light cigarettes.