I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.
He doesn’t know who he is anymore.
Still, he wants so desperately to wander.
But there are anchors tethered to his ankles.
And perhaps the heart has grown roots in Taiga.
Instead of slipping through the murky darkness to plunge himself into the shadows of the forest or resuming his post at the edge of the river so that the roar of it might quiet all the noise in his head, he skirts the perimeter without any real purpose. He looks for nothing, pays no mind to the oddities he comes across along the way. He walks simply to walk. Because the joints ache when he is stagnant too long and there is a darkness that swells and bursts at the center of him, a bitterness that grits his teeth when he remains too still.
It is this aimless wandering that delivers him to that clearing. Gospel has lifted her head and felt a gathering cloud of confusion as she studied the viper approaching them. It has made her heart hard, her inability to decipher exactly why the woman moving toward them like controlled chaos so strongly resembles her mother, her. Her nerves bristle at the tone of woman’s voice but she is crying and Gospel does not know why.
He watches from a distance, warring against the swell of his own confusion. And then it dawns on him. Crashes over him. Drowns him in a dread so thick and heady that he struggles to breathe around it.
Everything in him screams to turn tail and flee. To cast himself into the shadows and never come back. Because he isn’t fit for a family and he almost certainly does not deserve one.
Why hadn’t he made the connection? The scales and the venom. All the things that moved just beneath the surface. Oh, how desperately he wants to be a coward. Alas, instead, he forces himself into their midst. The gravity that pulses around them.
He swallows thickly, says, “Sabbath.” There are tears that cut rivers down the cheeks of both women but he does not know how to provide either of them any comfort.
BETHLEHEM
I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.
