01-12-2018, 12:24 PM
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane; It’s a strange thing in life, to walk as a man reborn. He doesn’t know this, not precisely. He knows there are other memories, things that sit beneath the surface, like the river of Hades (a hundred dying souls, a hundred heartbreaks crying out his name). He doesn’t know what these are, precisely, they are feelings more than specific events. (For example, he knows there is something wrong and terrible about the way his eyes glow orange, like jack-o-lanterns. He doesn’t know he once tore them out for a mother who hated him.) He doesn’t know the exact nature of how he came to be (again), only that he woke on the same shores he might have died on, coughing up seawater. His voice is still hoarse from it a year later, like he spent decades drinking it. Maybe he did. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to know. He senses there is a lot he doesn’t want to know. The meadow has a hint of familiarity, and he thinks he might have once lived here. He doesn’t look old, the sleek black stallion who crosses the land. In his rebirth, a new body was made. Gone are the gray hairs, the swayed back, and the neck that so many traced in fleeting affairs. He is a clock run backward, the same basic architecture (the bones didn’t change – well, they ache less, now) but a different story. Maybe. He hopes. He doesn’t know what he looks for, as he wanders. His heart (it is the same heart, the way the bones are the same. It, too, aches less) keeps him here. Looking for something, or maybe just for company, another fleeting touch. Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain. |