Bethany

When she was born they held their hands together and watched behind windows with a fever day and night. Two months premature. A little pink, wrinkled thing in a glass and mechanized bassinet, injected with tubes and taped down like an experiment in a lab beaker. Long days and long nights uncertain. When they held her in their arms they wouldn't let go, not for years. The miracle child, they would call her. Special, most beloved. They give thanks to the savior and pour their adoration onto her. Their thoughts and their possessions all to this gift. She grows in that atmosphere with no brother or sister to partition it. No brother, no sister. She comes to understand the value of her life and its position among others. To guard against the wolves and the parasites who'd leech from her birthright and the earned merit to take pride in it. Pride in the body, in the privilege within it. They watch their princess flourish over the years, becoming the warrant and the bond between them and they knew that whenever she left so too would their love. It must be protected, they say. It must be protected and honored. And out of her mouth so came barbed wire and poison and with her words clothing was made of fear and hate and vanity. A weapon forged and sharpened dispatching any perceived slanderer and bending those who would be manipulated. They look away and pardon the child Their silent dinner tables and magnetic screens. She hides prenatal scarring with lipstick and bronze fiction and decorations perfectly arranged about her form. Beneath them rests the isolation, the love of self so full it renders all others inadequate and separate. The mirror bears no other reflection than hers. The glass and the window. She has only herself to satisfy and it alone is enough. It alone.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Isolationist

Among the stalks and fronds there is the face of a man. His visage haggard and gaunt, he rises and parts the bushes. He has on him a dirty army green parka and leather leggings zipped over his pants and under his hiking boots. A large, stuffed rucksack is on his back and a bolt-action rifle is slung over one of his shoulders. He walks the terrain, thick and untouched by the brands of civilization. He is far away from it, as far as he can take himself. No home; no trappings of the multitude to surround him. He is alone in the wild except for a burly, long-haired dog and his thoughts. Thoughts detached and reminiscent, swaying from destitute to tranquil. It is autumn now and the nights are growing colder. He searches for a suitable alcove to set up camp, combing the land with his sunken eyes. A cave perhaps or the base of a protective tree; he doesn't know. The land is a mystery to him. Even now he is still lost. He settles for a bald and flat clearing, surrounded by bushes high en...
Read more

Beasts

A dozen or so tents were sprawled down in a valley. A single cook fire lay among them with men assorted around it eating bowl-fulls of stew and giving some to their horses. There was a horse for every man and they looked underfed and drawn under saddles adorned with diverse cutlery. The bronze tassels in their manes were frayed and loosened, jutting from them uneven quills of hair. And all of them, man and animal, wore some manner of red cloth on them, be it a scarf around their neck or a sash tied around their waist or foreleg. There were no women or children. "Can they hear us?" The boy asked. "Not if we're quiet." Cale said. They spied on their stomachs on a high hillside overlooking the camp. Far enough for them to feel a modicum of calm even in appropriate wariness and suspicion. "Who are they?" "I'm not too sure. Nomads probably."  "Maybe they could help us." "No. Not them." "How can you...
Read more

Geneva

You were thirty-five when you died, thirty-five when my mother was born. 1955, sixty-one years ago. Another age when a woman taken by a man twenty years her senior was not so unusual. A man of the drink and the carcinogenic speech. The baby he didn't want. Called a miraculous birth, the healthy girl from the dying mother. Four months later and you were gone. It was diagnosed as tuberculosis, an antiquated mislabel for hidden and insidious aberrations carried on like a curse in the blood, the genes. The kind that betrays your own body with attacks on the lungs and the liver. Weapons striking sudden and swift. A few months and the trigger is pulled. Such fragile forms set with unjustified disease to make you sure of His sadism as you are of life itself. Pulmatory fibrosis and emergency transplants and cancer. My uncle, your nephew, sits withered and pale. He sucks on an oxygen tank as we watch, sullen. "Wanna hit?" he says. I smile with him. You lived in secondhand storie...
Read more