Far From The Madding Crowd

There was a man standing in the corner of the dayroom shouting, declaring to a young frightened girl she was a complete, not partial, pair of buttocks. The distinction of partial and complete were equally nonsensical.

“You’re an asshole…a total, complete and utter asshole” he said. Not ‘you have an asshole’, or ‘you are sitting on your asshole’, which would have have at least been accurate, though an unusual thing to say, no she was an asshole. Fully formed, with no blemishes or interesting element that made her stand out from other assholes.

She was a perfect asshole.

This I considered said more about him that it ever did if her.

I stared at him wondering why he had used this word in such a way.

Why not woman, ‘you are a woman’, ‘of youthful appearance?’. Or something similar. She was pretty too. I liked her. I told her my name yesterday in the garden.

“Oh”, she said, “I’ve never met on of those”. Then she wandered away. Looking up at the sky, watching something in the clouds.

Clearly she was not an asshole. An asshole was something excreting waste products, a creator of noxious gas, an asshole was very small in comparison to a young woman. It probably wasn’t even conscious it was an asshole.

And yet he repeated it, and this time with such vigour he stumbled forward and, regaining his balance, wiped spittle from his mouth hole with a sleeve.

The young woman did her best to ignore him. But she was not quite so successful as all others in the airy spacious, somewhat ghostly room. The mention of assholes made her eyes flutter, ever so slightly, enough that i saw it. I scanned everyone else, no they hadn’t noticed this. I could see that. A man prone to anger continued his daylight mumblings about science and art, about mysteries, the things seen and unseen.

A nurse sat gazing out the window.

Those of us present weren’t talkers.

“Stupid little bitch”, the man continued, “You don’t deserve to be here…you really think being here is going to stop me?”

So now she was a dog, a female dog. In the mind of this man. A stupid dog. Unquantifiable surely. Another irrational statement. And how is it that she could really deserve to be here? Perhaps this was a compliment? A statement of fact, in a rash of madness.

Baseless riddles and his poor use of the English language continued. She was a prostitute, something admittedly I could not fact check without breaking decorum. And a pejorative term for the female genitalia. Something that seemed even more incredible that her being an asshole.

I decided he was mad.

As we were supposedly in a madhouse.

Someone really should make him stop though I thought.

Why does the nurse just sit there gazing out the window?