[private] a place made for all of us. together.

[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; “Maze,” he repeats with a smile, “I like it.” He thinks of mazes, then, twists and turns. Things complicated, but solvable. As they move, he thinks of puzzles. It’s a puzzle, why she has returned, for all her knowledge of his sins. She has told him he is worthy of forgiveness, but she doesn’t know the other things. All these chains he drags behind him. But he tries to shoo these thoughts from his mind, because now is not the time for him to play confessor. Now, he is simply a father, walking with his daughter and his…whatever she is. Walking with Agetta. The next piece she brings up cautiously, and he almost laughs, though the laugh would be a strange, choked things. He thinks again of the children he has not known, the ones he was not given the chance to know, and the ones he willingly left. He was only close to one, the child borne from his not-womb, and he’d left that boy too, hadn’t he? Left him in their meadow with no explanation, because Garbage could not find the words for an explanation, could not shape them in a way that he was willing to admit to himself. “Of course I do,” he says, “I’m just glad you don’t regret it.” He spoke wrong, he realizes, and fumbles to correct it. “That I’m the father, I mean. Not her. Of course you can’t regret Maze.” He barely knows her, but he sees she is bright, and quick, and he hopes to god she will fare better than he. “I don’t have a good track record, as a father,” he says, “I didn’t meet, or barely knew, most of my children.” (Or left them on the shore, as he walked off to die. God, the selfishness of it!) “I raised one myself. A boy. He turned out well.” Or, he had when Garbage last saw him. Years and years ago. He wonders if he’s digging a grave, confessing this. Yes, I want to be involved, but I am a mess. Wouldn’t be the first time. “Does she have other family around?” he asks then, trying, perhaps desperately, to claw his way out of the hole he’s dug. Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain.

@[Agetta]