The following is an excerpt from VHS, a literary novel by Pablo D’Stair being released in various e-formats, absolutely free-of-charge (and in limited edition print-editions-by-part through giveaways). Information on the project, including links to what is currently available, can be found here and here.

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"Sculpture"

About when I crossed the street by the empty lot where there used to be a building where I’d taken piano lessons as a child, some woman accosted me, having mistaken me for some sculptor they’d heard giving a lecture sometime almost a month previous. I did my best to assure her I was not only not the sculptor she was thinking of, but not any sculptor and that I had, in fact, “no interest in sculpture whatsoever in any style or medium” but this just got her to soften her mood and she wanted to sell me on the merits of sculpture. To begin, she related a story of how when she was young, an adolescent, she’d been in a rather bad way due to traumas at home she only vaguely went into the details of, and that she had used to roam the streets, even getting involved in some illegal and some illicit things, but then one evening she had come upon a very small “museum of sculpture”, an independently run, non-affiliated place, the works on display those of some half dozen lesser known local sculptures, and she’d struck up quite a rapport with the older fellow who supervised the place—such a rapport, in fact, that she was allowed free admission and even began (without wage) working for the place, cleaning the sculptures and chatting it up with the few people who might happen in on any given day. So, she got a real appreciation for “what sculpture was”—something she had never considered and felt a lot more people (meaning me) still didn’t, that people (especially me, I could tell by the dryness of the tone she addressed me with) thought of sculpture as “nothing really” and so didn’t give it any thought.

“That about sums it up for me,” I said, kind of with some purposeful aggression, but the woman was so into her evangelizing she thought this dismissive remark was meant as affectionate and told me she could lend me a good book of photographs of sculpture—before I could mock that, she admitted it was hardly a substitute for seeing actual sculpture.

To throw her off, I said “Wait, what word are you saying? Sculpture?”

“Yes.”

“Sculpture?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, then I haven’t really been following you. I thought you said Scripture—like holy texts and all of it. I thought that’s what you were talking about, but I’m afraid now I’ve really lost all interest and actually I think you purposefully muddled the pronunciation to confuse me, having marked me as the sort of person with a real religious bent. You’re a bitch for that, out and out, and now I don’t even understand the story you spent all that time telling.”

Not much of a reaction after all of that, her eyes darted through a bit of thought and then she started all over with “No, no. Sculpture. Sculpture. When I was young I had a lot of trouble at home and so used to get into trouble until I found a small Sculpture—Sclup Ture—museum, that was the gist of my story.”

“Hey, maybe if you give me some cigarettes I’ll keep listening to you, what about it?”

She only had two cigarettes left, so I made a face like “wouldn’t it be better to give me both, because otherwise I wouldn’t get to hear much of her story” and she silently accepted this, let me have the pack and started talking. I interrupted her as often as I could by snapping my fingers and with great pretended fascination repeating this word and that word and I even told her on a few occasion to “repeat that, what a wonderful way of putting something, Jesus, you know how to talk” even though she only used rudimentary phrase work and very run of the mill metaphors on the few occasion metaphors came into it. By the time I left, she hadn’t even finished vaguely explaining her home life and I was going to turn around and yell something at her to drive home the fact I’d been belittling her outrageously the whole time but figured I didn’t need to go that far, just walked until I got into the lobby of a building between a Driving Academy and a medical supply store to warm up.