I had finished my night shift and was locking the door to the take-away. Home sweet home, I am on my way! As I turned the key I felt the wind grabbing my clothes and the cold rain beating down at me. Yes, the winter is definitely coming. As much a winter as Ireland can ever have, nothing to moan about really. Just very rainy for 6 months. I wonder would Noah be building a ship if he lived in Ireland?

I noticed him as I was about to take my leave. There he stood, his black coat flapping around him like a flag and a hood covering half of his face. I couldn’t see his eyes but I knew he was fixated on me. The streets were empty, the villagers were asleep. I wondered why had he, the great&controversial Marilyn Manson, sought me out. He hardly had come for a quarterpounder?!

He stepped righ in front of me and I could finally see his face. MM looked as if he had just stepped out of the lifesized poster I have on the  bedroom wall in my childhood home. The make-up, the white zombie contacts in his eyes, the fat ruby-red lips and chromed teeth. Scary sight for some.

“You have to come!” – he told me.

I was dumbfounded “Come where?”

As if my logical and legitimate question was the last drop in his chalice of sufferings, he put his two hands, heavy with skull-rings, on my shoulders and shook me.

“Darn it, you have to come with me!”

Whether with help from magic, or a portal in between dimensions, I found myself standing in a village in Estonia. At the crossroads in between endless rye fields. Dry dusty roads, sun so hot it’s splitting the stones. I looked at Marilyn and knew better this time than to voice another of my legitimate questions. In the travel of time and space, his clothes had changed from black coat into all-leather, his hair wasn’t covered by a hood anymore but was slicked with gel. The only unchanged aspect was his make-up- still the nearwhite powdered face with rubyred lips and piercing contacts covering his real irises.

He pointed to something infront of us, and there, just off the road and before the rye field starts, was a tiny cross pointing towarsd the sky. A little mound of dirt and a headstone. I had never seen anything like it. MM told me the headstone is a lid off an old tin-box in which he used to collect buttons into. The lid had a lovely picture of blue skies and flowers and trees.

“I buried my hedgehog here!”

MM had an hedgehog? What?

“I need you to deliver a eulogy. For my hedgehog”

I wondered if Marilyn had lost his mind? How can I give a eulogy when I didn’t even KNOW the hedgehog?! So I decided to ask him,

“Marilyn, but … I am confused. What should I say?”

He flipped. Into a rage!

“Just bloody say something”, he roared!

The End

Source: Pixabay
Source: Pixabay