From the Flash Stash V: Art’s Parties (The Devil’s Interior Design Episode)

by Wayne Cresser

(Originally published in the Ocean State Review Volume 8: No. 1, 2018)

If you hang around Art’s parties long enough, you’re bound to run into the guy who resembles Crispin Glover, in anything, a gawky watch-capped scarecrow whose clothes add up to thrift store poetry and ragamuffin rhymes.

He’s the guy who begs cigarettes but doesn’t light them right away. He’s the guy who shoves the skinny sticks behind his ear, a sheath of greasy hair falling over them like an awning made of Vaseline and chicken feathers. From time to time, he pats the arrangement, making sure everything is in its place.

He will smoke, he says, when his friend arrives, and then you better hold onto something, brother, because we’ll all know it when he gets here. 

Sure enough, in stumbles a guy with flies buzzing around his head and sparks flying from his fingertips. He’s bumping into tables, jostling chairs, jiggling lamps and shooting sparks every which-a-way while Crispin the scarecrow chases him, lighting cigarette after cigarette and re-assembling the room like he’s the devil’s own interior designer.

And that’s when you remember the scene in the foolish movie when the overstuffed voodoo maid says, “Honey. That’s the first thing them demons do when they take over ___rearrange the furniture.”