In the garden Ivan and Felix had grown bored waiting for Jake. They had seen him press his nose to the glass and had debated for a while what this unclassified signal might mean. Not long afterwards Felix tripped over a strange mound of freshly turned earth at the back of the garden. A graphic image of Isabella’s decomposing corpse, swarming with microbes and parasites, flashed into his field of vision. He shuddered and jumped back. He looked pointedly at Ivan.
“It was Hugh and he’s buried her here in the bloody garden,” he said.
They discussed this possibility for a while. Then they spotted an open upstairs window and, below, a trellis over which spumed an orgasm of wisteria.
When the back door opened and a blaze of light violated the composed shadow patterns of the garden, Felix was about six feet up the fragile wooden scaffolding while Ivan stood below, smoking. Felix, alarmed by the sudden uproarious glare of publicity, lost his footing and tumbled back down to earth.
“It’s only a game,” Ivan explained in Italian to the two watching carabinieri.
I'm enjoying these snippets of WiP, enough to want the full picture. There's a new (to me) humorous thread to the writing and your usual easy way with cutting images: '... light violated the composed shadow patterns...'
ReplyDeleteAnd of course, I'm a sucker for dead bodies in gardens (wink wink).
I loved ‘spumed an orgasm’ too. Well, I did at first. All that froth and foam. But after a couple of repetitions, it started to sound a bit like a home-made word, kind of double orificial action. What a not-so-sensitive man might do all over his missus after eight pints and a dodgy sausage-in-batter. At that point, the wisteria wilted… But that's just me. :)