you're ripped at every edge, Garbage

[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; He doesn’t know what she does, that the years wind themselves into his very blood, the heat-map of him, red and orange and yellow, colors of alive. He doesn’t see what she does, but he can read the years well enough, and discern their strange and instant camaraderie, forged by the fact that they are alive when so many others are not. He wonders how much she remembers of her long, long life. “I know the feeling,” he says, though the kingdoms he was once prince to were never welcoming to him, he has always been a thing of the meadow, nomadic. He can’t recall the kingdom’s name, though, only the feeling of the earth shifting beneath his feet, unsteady. A dry heat prickling at the back. He had another name, once, but it was a name that didn’t matter. The name that matters is the one his mother spat, vicious even as death crept in - you’re nothing. You’re garbage. That’s the name that stuck, the one meant for him, the grotesque rightness of it felt in a fever-throe across his skin. Garbage, you’re garbage. Ugly, filthy, useless – all synonyms he knew, ones he used, in a life that he no longer quite recalls. Not sin, but the memory of it. The sour aftertaste of bile. She has a sweeter name, a thing that rolls from the tongue and has no connotations – none that he knows, anyway. Her name almost sounds familiar, like he may have heard of her, in another life or century. “Where was home, Ryatah?” He asks this question because he wonders if it will jog his memory. He asks this because he wants to know what place once housed this pale, eyeless woman, as if knowing would explain why she was here, talking to him, engaging with him at all. Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain.