here is the repeated image of a lover destroyed; any

[garbage]

Alive? he might be dead for aught I know, With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane; In a memory that he can no longer recall, he is a boy dying on the sand. In this memory – this fleeting thing – he is weeping before his mother, weak and stupid, and she is turning her back because his eyes (those goddamned eyes) are a reminder that he is the son of her enemy, of the king who killed her lover. And he tears his eyes out for her. Paws them out with hooves that are not meant for such surgical precision, so with his eyes come pieces of bone, rivers of blood. Do you love me now, he cries, but she’s dead, because this boy – this stupid boy – he killed her, too. Those goddamned eyes. (He was healed, after this, by a magician who said he loved him when really what he loved was the fact Garbage looked like another. It’s a terrible story.) He doesn’t recall this, not in the way he once did. He knows there is something awful about his eyes, which burn like jack-o-lanterns in their sockets, but he doesn’t know what. In this life, he doesn’t know the name Covet. He doesn’t know his own father, or his mother. There’s a noise, and he turns his head to look. A mare, speckled gray, with a voice like stone and Garbage wonders what she could possibly want from him. “Hello,” he says, and his voice is little more than a croak, throat wrecked by seawater. His voice conveys none of the power hers had. She is stone, and he is sand, crumbling and forgiving. Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain.