Chez Jane

The white chocolate jar full of petals swills odds and ends around in a dizzying eye of four o’clocks now and to come. The tiger, marvellously striped and irritable, leaps on the table and without disturbing a hair of the flowers’ breathless attention, pisses into the pot, right down its delicate spout. A whisper of steam goes up from that porcelain urethra. “Saint-Saëns!” it seems to be whispering, curling unerringly around the furry nuts of the terrible puss, who is mentally flexing. Ah be with me always, spirit of noisy contemplation in the studio, the Garden of Zoos, the eternally fixed afternoons! There, while music scratches its scrofulous stomach, the brute beast emerges and stands, clear and careful, knowing always the exact peril at this moment caressing his fangs with a tongue given wholly to luxurious usages; which only a moment before dropped aspirin in this sunset of roses, and now throws a chair in the air to aggravate the truly menacing.