by Darren Horton

Created on: April 13, 2011   Last Updated: May 25, 2012

The Lunatic Fringe

The last time I saw my father he was wearing a strait-jacket, and nothing else.  He had a big smile on his face, but it wasn’t happiness.

My father, the poet, was reduced to repetition, muttering meaningless tirades against the world.  I hated seeing him like that; an intelligent man, reiterating the same ridiculous sentences, over-and-over again, in heart-breaking, parrot-fashion lunacy. 

He kept saying, “You’re a creative-lunatic… just like me…destined for ‘The Hunt’…to be hunted…to hunt,” whatever that meant.

Who ‘they’ were, was never fully explained, but his words never left my mind, even after his death, and were engraved in my memory as a constant reminder, that my father died a pale imitation of his former self. 

In an attempt to keep my own sanity intact, I forcibly removed myself from the literary world (from a calling that my soul truly hankered for) to embrace a more serene occupation – that of an artist.  I should have taken up dentistry, because my art, although not as attractive to ‘The Hunt’ as say, poetry, was still regarded lunacy enough to warrant a pursuit.

It was winter, the worst since records began, and I was buying tubes of acrylic for my two latest masterpieces - ‘Two men in a hat’ and ‘Schindler’s Twix.’

They approached from a darkened alley; three men, wearing Hawaiian-shirts and mirrored shades.  It wasn’t so much an approach, more an abduction.  They wrestled me down to the tarmac then dragged me by the feet through a snowdrift to an unmarked Transit-van, where they proceeded to thrash the living sense out of me with bouquets of flowers.

When I came around, I was bound with liquorice; strapped to a chair with multitudinous strands of red candy laces, in a situation every bit as surreal as Gulliver’s. The three men in Hawaiian-shirts were now wearing paper party hats and had bread-sticks sticking out from their ears and nostrils.  There was music playing in the background - Abba, I think - which only added to the sinister atmosphere in the room. 

“Who are you?” I asked.

One of the men held up a shirt, garishly Hawaiian, and said, simply…

“Come.  Join us in The Hunt.”

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