Texts
SCRIPT FOR "THE CHILDREN'S HOLIDAY"
A film by Stephen Eric Berry
Written by Stephen Eric Berry and John Elkerr
Artwork by John Elkerr,
Featuring the Floral Photography of Diane Aronoff
Epigraph 1: "People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable
if they are not cats."
--Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet (1974)
Epigraph 2: "Kinderurlaub – what you call The Children's Holiday – is the grandest day of the year, when all the lovers of Fuckingham are my doomed children."
--Angusina Bitter, Confesions of a Psychopomp (2023)
NARRATOR:
Deep in the Kobernausser Forest where bumblebees barrel through blue mist and the yellowjackets are so blissfully huge they loft away moles and shrews and human babies light as feathers, it was the 83rd of May, that special day the yokels across Mühl District call Kinderurlaub.
In the unforgettable house she called Scurvy's Own Shangri-la, Angusina Bitter – child of a long line of shape-shifters – found herself batted awake by the paw of one of her cats. Of all her felines Chester had the biggest crush on her.
She raised her sleep-thrashed head and looked around the room. The walls were even more scored and streaked than yesterday. What a marvelous room! Every day it grew lovelier: her very own living collage of ravaged opulence. She made her way toward the bathroom, through a shifting archepelago of brown islands floating up the powder-blue sea of the wall.
In the bathroom she studied her shingled reflection in the moldering paint. There were no words. She treated herself to a hawking snort of dexedrine cut with psilocybin dust.
What had happened to her? Once upon a time, she'd been so prim and proper. But she soon blossomed into being the toast of the salons – pampered and pretty and pugnacious. Sculptors fashioned her likeness in bronze. Painters fell all over themselves to book her for sittings.
Now look at her.
She put a record on the turntable, an LP from the old days, back when crowds howled Bravissimo! for her in the finest jazz clubs of Paris and Berlin and Prague and Budapest, to name only a few. The music and dexedrine shroom dust started to loosen the tangled kelp of her thoughts.
How should she dress for this special day? Maybe a veil? A little warpaint? A head-dress? A hairy goiter turned into a vine? Or maybe she should toss her fingers through her hair and come what may!
She worked her way down the stairs, listening intently to the snide remarks, each one a brittle twist of envy.
Outside among the chirping naive birds and bees, she strolled out into her garden to take in the flowers. She loved to soak her darlings in the fountain pools. Irises, petunias, phlox, delphiniums, delosperma – all made murderously lovely as they drowned.
With a finger, she tap...tap-tapped the hairy vine growing out of her neck. The vine that wound straight up to the Moon. The Moon that, just then, returned from a dream.
"Mooooon," she called, “tell me about all the lurchings and churnings of the night.”
"Oh, My Toadworted Maestra, my Cataracted Canary, my Arthritic Angel...it would be my honor. I scribed each and every one of your orders on the mica pages of my book and I've accomplished every jot and tittle. All night I trained my pale blue light across your fiendish apiaries and sprited the bees to gather and sting together a most satisfying crop.
"I'll be the judge of that, you airless dustball," Angusina snorted. "And stop your drooling!"
The Moon went pale. "Oh, Your Highness, I must humbly beg your –"Go on!"
Startled, the Moon gathered herself. "Very well. All through the windy night, up and down hill and dale, I pawed like a cat through the dark forest. Then I was a mad cyclist under the gaze of wild horse winds. I clothed myself in cogs and gears and sprinkled my fentanyl-blue milk over the switchback paths where the children love to scream and duck and hide. From the back of my llama, I spied out many hand-holding sweethearts who I found lollygagging in the deep spruce, hoping as they all do: to find some cushy little hideaway where they can do and do."
"I summoned a battalion of yellowjackets, and they attacked the wannabe nightingales, all busy and bare-bummed and making sloppy heave-ho gondolas with their bodies in the tall grass. Next, I ordered the bees to seal the lovers in cocoons of wax and creeping ivies, just as you ask-ed.”
"Purrrr-fect,” Angusina swooned. “Now get lost!"
The Moon curled into a wisp and said no more.
Now Angusina strolled deeper into the garden and took notice of the Sun hovering over the Delphinium Pool.
She looked up. "What are you so busy smirking about?"
High overhead, the Sun scratched his beard and spoke in golden tones: "Oh, my Liver-spotted Darling, my Blue Powdered Princess, my Tremulous Trinidad of All Things Sketchy and Vile...I cranked up my scorch and my torch and I made my legs into wings to sprite the air as I prepared the two lovely specimens you see before you."
Angusina grimaced and looked around. "What – what specimens?" "Ah – yes – now you see," the Sun gave off an electric crackle. "I found the big one atop her flitting little boyfriend. One moment straddling paradise and the next she's lost her head. Tis, tis...now he's nothing but a wingless fly slurping and sucking on a piece of decomposing fruit dangling from a trumpet vine. Look at them! As she tries to save her dear heart from falling to his death off that wooden plank."
Angusina's eyes rolled back in her head. "Deee-LI-cious."
"And what's that underneath her?"
"Why that's Pontefact, the Wolf, with his thirteen slathering tongues. And so busy."
"You've outdone yourself!” Angusina gushed. “We'll use those long legs of hers to make a homunculus powered by the Malicious Envy of my bees. That Hobgoblin will spread sweet azimuth tremors through the forest! The louder the commotion, the more and more curious children will wander into the deep spruce! We might even get a few adults tromping in to "save the day." And then, with nothing but relish, he'll feed the little twits into the Extruder – and not a one of them – not one boy, not one girl! – will get their snotty little hands on my blooms. I can almost hear him cranking up the machine now. And once this poor girl's boyfriend has mindlessly sated himself on all that sticky juice, bring him to me for breakfast. I'll have him with smoked partridge and a fig-stuffed woodcock.
Angusina sat down at the piano and began to play an old favorite. Like tendrils of hexavalent chromium smoke riding a cheerful breeze on a spring morning, the twisted mazurka wove itself through the darkest reaches of the Kober-naw-sa forest. The trees creaked and swayed to the music. And Angusina creaked and swayed with them, joined by a howling wolf and the Moon and the Sun and clouds of madcap bees hung with long, shiny stingers. And even Chester lounging in the bedroom window high above looked quite taken by the spectacle.
"This," she told herself, "will be the best Children's Holiday ever, ever...ever!"
A film by Stephen Eric Berry
Written by Stephen Eric Berry and John Elkerr
Artwork by John Elkerr,
Featuring the Floral Photography of Diane Aronoff
Epigraph 1: "People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable
if they are not cats."
--Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet (1974)
Epigraph 2: "Kinderurlaub – what you call The Children's Holiday – is the grandest day of the year, when all the lovers of Fuckingham are my doomed children."
--Angusina Bitter, Confesions of a Psychopomp (2023)
NARRATOR:
Deep in the Kobernausser Forest where bumblebees barrel through blue mist and the yellowjackets are so blissfully huge they loft away moles and shrews and human babies light as feathers, it was the 83rd of May, that special day the yokels across Mühl District call Kinderurlaub.
In the unforgettable house she called Scurvy's Own Shangri-la, Angusina Bitter – child of a long line of shape-shifters – found herself batted awake by the paw of one of her cats. Of all her felines Chester had the biggest crush on her.
She raised her sleep-thrashed head and looked around the room. The walls were even more scored and streaked than yesterday. What a marvelous room! Every day it grew lovelier: her very own living collage of ravaged opulence. She made her way toward the bathroom, through a shifting archepelago of brown islands floating up the powder-blue sea of the wall.
In the bathroom she studied her shingled reflection in the moldering paint. There were no words. She treated herself to a hawking snort of dexedrine cut with psilocybin dust.
What had happened to her? Once upon a time, she'd been so prim and proper. But she soon blossomed into being the toast of the salons – pampered and pretty and pugnacious. Sculptors fashioned her likeness in bronze. Painters fell all over themselves to book her for sittings.
Now look at her.
She put a record on the turntable, an LP from the old days, back when crowds howled Bravissimo! for her in the finest jazz clubs of Paris and Berlin and Prague and Budapest, to name only a few. The music and dexedrine shroom dust started to loosen the tangled kelp of her thoughts.
How should she dress for this special day? Maybe a veil? A little warpaint? A head-dress? A hairy goiter turned into a vine? Or maybe she should toss her fingers through her hair and come what may!
She worked her way down the stairs, listening intently to the snide remarks, each one a brittle twist of envy.
Outside among the chirping naive birds and bees, she strolled out into her garden to take in the flowers. She loved to soak her darlings in the fountain pools. Irises, petunias, phlox, delphiniums, delosperma – all made murderously lovely as they drowned.
With a finger, she tap...tap-tapped the hairy vine growing out of her neck. The vine that wound straight up to the Moon. The Moon that, just then, returned from a dream.
"Mooooon," she called, “tell me about all the lurchings and churnings of the night.”
"Oh, My Toadworted Maestra, my Cataracted Canary, my Arthritic Angel...it would be my honor. I scribed each and every one of your orders on the mica pages of my book and I've accomplished every jot and tittle. All night I trained my pale blue light across your fiendish apiaries and sprited the bees to gather and sting together a most satisfying crop.
"I'll be the judge of that, you airless dustball," Angusina snorted. "And stop your drooling!"
The Moon went pale. "Oh, Your Highness, I must humbly beg your –"Go on!"
Startled, the Moon gathered herself. "Very well. All through the windy night, up and down hill and dale, I pawed like a cat through the dark forest. Then I was a mad cyclist under the gaze of wild horse winds. I clothed myself in cogs and gears and sprinkled my fentanyl-blue milk over the switchback paths where the children love to scream and duck and hide. From the back of my llama, I spied out many hand-holding sweethearts who I found lollygagging in the deep spruce, hoping as they all do: to find some cushy little hideaway where they can do and do."
"I summoned a battalion of yellowjackets, and they attacked the wannabe nightingales, all busy and bare-bummed and making sloppy heave-ho gondolas with their bodies in the tall grass. Next, I ordered the bees to seal the lovers in cocoons of wax and creeping ivies, just as you ask-ed.”
"Purrrr-fect,” Angusina swooned. “Now get lost!"
The Moon curled into a wisp and said no more.
Now Angusina strolled deeper into the garden and took notice of the Sun hovering over the Delphinium Pool.
She looked up. "What are you so busy smirking about?"
High overhead, the Sun scratched his beard and spoke in golden tones: "Oh, my Liver-spotted Darling, my Blue Powdered Princess, my Tremulous Trinidad of All Things Sketchy and Vile...I cranked up my scorch and my torch and I made my legs into wings to sprite the air as I prepared the two lovely specimens you see before you."
Angusina grimaced and looked around. "What – what specimens?" "Ah – yes – now you see," the Sun gave off an electric crackle. "I found the big one atop her flitting little boyfriend. One moment straddling paradise and the next she's lost her head. Tis, tis...now he's nothing but a wingless fly slurping and sucking on a piece of decomposing fruit dangling from a trumpet vine. Look at them! As she tries to save her dear heart from falling to his death off that wooden plank."
Angusina's eyes rolled back in her head. "Deee-LI-cious."
"And what's that underneath her?"
"Why that's Pontefact, the Wolf, with his thirteen slathering tongues. And so busy."
"You've outdone yourself!” Angusina gushed. “We'll use those long legs of hers to make a homunculus powered by the Malicious Envy of my bees. That Hobgoblin will spread sweet azimuth tremors through the forest! The louder the commotion, the more and more curious children will wander into the deep spruce! We might even get a few adults tromping in to "save the day." And then, with nothing but relish, he'll feed the little twits into the Extruder – and not a one of them – not one boy, not one girl! – will get their snotty little hands on my blooms. I can almost hear him cranking up the machine now. And once this poor girl's boyfriend has mindlessly sated himself on all that sticky juice, bring him to me for breakfast. I'll have him with smoked partridge and a fig-stuffed woodcock.
Angusina sat down at the piano and began to play an old favorite. Like tendrils of hexavalent chromium smoke riding a cheerful breeze on a spring morning, the twisted mazurka wove itself through the darkest reaches of the Kober-naw-sa forest. The trees creaked and swayed to the music. And Angusina creaked and swayed with them, joined by a howling wolf and the Moon and the Sun and clouds of madcap bees hung with long, shiny stingers. And even Chester lounging in the bedroom window high above looked quite taken by the spectacle.
"This," she told herself, "will be the best Children's Holiday ever, ever...ever!"