if the heavens ever did speak
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
There was a boy.
A boy born ill-fated from queer magic, product of a love story between a magician and a monster that was already failing; but ultimately he was a plain boy who was not very important and did not do much at all. The boy was raised to be devout by a father who did not entirely know the meaning of the word, but still – this boy knelt in prayer until his knees were worn bare. And sometimes while he prayed his father (the one who stayed), would sometimes lay his cheek across the boy’s back and the boy would think this is love, this is love.
This boy was not particularly smart – he was not particularly anything, really.
He watched his father go away, in time, not sure why he had to watch him retreat, not sure what he’d done (nothing, he’d done nothing, it was his father’s nature to find the most disastrous of love stories, but our boy did not know that). He was alone. So he did all he knew to do – he prayed, half-garbled things taught to him by his father, to gods who did not listen, if indeed they existed at all.
Eventually the boy came to Beqanna, where he met few and impacted none, lived loveless and childless.
Just a boy. A boring, stupid boy.
There was a summons.
Magic wrapped like shackles around his ankles, a body twisted from flesh to plastic, black to a dark purple, and the boy was changed.
Then: a clown with a Glasgow smile and a handful of bright balloons, laughing – always laughing – and saying we all float here. A wolf with a head thrown back in a howl, a tiger with no face, an escape.
Then: another name (Velvet), a feeling like drowning, an eye scratched off. A name carved in his stomach - her name - and every letter was a vivisection.
There was a girl.
A girl with pale skin and wet blue eyes whom he watched destroy legions, who carved her name – Nerissa - in his stomach. Who scratched and threw and screamed.
(Who slept, restless, while the clown crept out and sat at her bedside, whispering.)
It hurt, at first. The play. He drowned and ached and bruised.
Then: there was a mantra.
She loves us.
(This is how the world works – the toys become hers, she is their god, and nothing hurts. She loves us. She loves us. She loves us.)
This is where we lose him. This is where Sleaze dies, and Velvet becomes.
Then: his head rolls, twisted off by the girl.
(And had it been her idea, or someone else’s? Someone with a grinning smile, and fangs under its red-painted mouth.)
Then: he is garbage, discarded.
(She loves us.)
But for the devout, there are always new gods.
A woman remakes him, head refastened, clouds painted over the scars of his old god. Tangled mane combed smooth again. A creature made whole by tender, artful hands.
There was a girl (again).
But this girl is not like the other girl; she is not wicked, she is kind. He is quick to love her. Quick to worship her.
This is where we lose him. This is where Velvet dies, and Cloud becomes.
She loves us.
But nothing lasts forever and the two girls meet – Nerissa a looming shadow over a pasture of moss Lena had built, words - mine - hissed through gritted teeth.
(She hadn’t been sleeping. No matter how deep in the toybox she buried the clown, he was always back, watching. Waiting.)
And so he was taken back, gripped in her arms. There was a bath of bleach, her chapped hands scrubbing and trying to remove the clouds that had been so lovingly painted on him.
A chemical baptism, and Cloud was gone, reborn – reborn to nothing.
There was a fire.
That was the last thing he recalls. Flames, and someone screaming, someone – something - laughing.
There was a prayer.
(yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil)
It was his last.
There was a boy.
A boy who woke up in the meadow with flesh on his bones and a distant ache in his belly, like something had once been carved there. A boy with a new ability – a mind that no longer stayed caged in his skull, a mind that jumped into objects, rocks and trees and others. This frantic mind lets him taste every spectrum of emotion but he doesn’t mean to, he doesn’t want it.
This boy does not pray. This boy’s mind is clouded purple, because he thinks things – things like there was a girl and my name is velvet and my name is cloud and she loves us - and they are things that don’t make sense, that can’t make sense because if they made sense it would mean one of two things: either they actually happened, or he is really and truly mad.
(He doesn’t know which is worse.)
This boy – whose name is Sleaze, again, but the name’s never felt wholly right since the purple – is wandering in the meadow. He avoids most horses because his mind will slip into them unwittingly and their fear will be on his tongue, rancid and bitter.
He feels a weight on his ankles, like shackles.
He has time to think not again, oh god, not again, please no --
(funny, how fear will make you a praying man again)
-- and then he is pulled down, down, and then there is blackness.
He wakes. He’s still flesh, even if it’s dark purple (so dark the light has to hit him right for you to realize it’s not black). He breathes a sigh that still comes out as a half-choked sob.
Not again. He can’t.
Not again.
(yea, though I walk through the valley)
He thinks he hears voices – or maybe screams – but he can’t make out any actual words. There is a scream and it sounds close enough that he cringes, steps back from the wall.
(of the shadow of death)
He hears laughter, too, familiar laughter - the kind of laughter bred in the dark corridors of insanity, the kind that leaks from the corners of the mouth like drool.
He is no longer entirely sure what noises are real, and what noises he is imagining.
“Please,” he says – begs – to no one.
As if in response, a door creaks open and he feels every muscle in his body freezes – even his eyes are frozen open, although the wept tears continue to falls from his face. A shadow appears in the doorframe.
(I shall fear no evil.)
sleaze
cancer x garbage
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