03-31-2016, 11:31 AM
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane; There are things that haunted him in his life – a whole host of them, a parade of names he said when he walked into that roiling sea, and other names besides, names history has stolen from him. There are a dozen of these things, these names. He has wronged many, sinned in a dozen ways. (A boy. A young boy. Standing there and saying do not call yourself such ugly things as if Garbage wasn’t something ugly to begin with. A boy, shivering, saying I’m cold, I’m so cold. And him, old and wretched, hellfire eyes on the boy – on his body – and weak. Garbage, there with a boy, and instead of running he steps closer and says I could keep you warm. He did.) There are things that haunted him in life that followed him to now. This is the cold truth of it: death was not an escape. It’s not an escape because he still knows their names, they burn hot on his tongue like cinders. He still knows their names and knows the things he did. How he kept them warm. He sees eyes, first. It shouldn’t be so, but the world is strange here, in this ghost-realm. Eyes like fire, like jack-o-lanterns. They are harbingers, such eyes – harbingers of death and destruction. (Do you love me, do you love me now he’d shouted – cried – at his mother, blind and bleeding, dying, his own eyes rolling on the sand before her. He should have died there. No magician should have fixed him.) Those goddamn eyes. He scrabbles backward, as if there was an escape, as if this wasn’t as dreadfully inevitable as everything he’s ever done. He moans under his breath, a low keen that’s kissing distance from a sob. This is the cold truth of it: she looks like that boy. (Vader, he thinks wildly, his name was Vader.) “No,” he says, but whether it’s in response to her or to the situation at hand, I can’t say. Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain. |