The Dark Muse:
Another Simple Series of Words
I: Purgatory
I had watched Mr. Prior for the past few years, going through the throes, wandering about his house. When he wasn’t at work, the summer heat kept him outside. His porch swing sang in the heat. It needed some PB Blaster, but so did the rest of his house. Mr. Prior would push the swing to make it squeak, and gaze ponderously up. The top right hook physically ached under his weight. If only he had the time, he’d change the blasted thing out. He’d been meaning to for a few years now, but the shop took so much out of him, he just wanted to sit. Nothing special, just sit and relax. Oh, there were those occasions of energy, like when he had clean up the old fishing gear out of the basement. No reason to keep it around, he hadn’t been fishing since Jim died. I would say he reflected, but he heedless swung against the clairvoyance of his thoughts. You have to understand, Mr. Prior had a lot on his palette, the colors of his eyes turning to gray.
He spent the winters working in his shop, cutting odds and ends for the neighbors, putting a few broken boards back together at the his brother’s Farm, painting where he could and cleaning where there was no painting. Now that snow had past, he’d been less than motivated to move. He was a winter person, full of push when his competition had none. Now, though, things were slower. The summer heat had put a burden on him, and he smoked cigarettes long into the dark.
Mr. Prior was my neighbor, a distant relative on my mother’s side, and a retired miner. He had the arms for it, they said. Now, he swung until the cigarette in his hand would burn him. He’d light another; it’d burn him too. It would go on into the dark hours, when the infomercials kept the insomniacs catatonic. My mother warned us when I was younger that the city was crazy at night, that people walked like ghouls and the moon did strange things to their minds. In reality, she meant that the night time should be a time of idleness, not to be spent in wandering of any kind. I knew Mr. Prior well. We were one in the same during the night, both robbed of the grieving faculties of the soul. Forever denied, we fell in unconscious rotation with our former souls.
It had started when I turned 13 and my father fell. The summer heat had made the ladder slick, and the delirium of the height found an ally in my father’s fatigue. My father’s plummet took away any hope of sleep. Instead, I fell into my own form of depressed catatonia. What small I hope I had for the exterior world died in the the summer. Our stories were linked by the season, and together we turned our lives into elogies.
At first noticed Mr. Prior’s fallen shoulders during the same summer. Like some scene out of To Kill a Mockingbird, the majority of the town would sit in the natural air conditioning of the North-East ghettos. Everyone except for me. My window, though, was constructed to allow perfect view if Mr. Prior’s swing. That summer, while tinkering with a desk set, I noticed the gray eyes gazing above the small fire. Mr. Prior’s ritualistic burnings were a nightly pyre for us both. Together, we slept wide-eyed in the heat, conflagration our mutual passion. Not like we possessed many other options.
At 13, my world became an awareness, a conscious output of internal observations. In fact, more like pain did the words come behind my eyes. I couldn’t control it, but there are things which first must be discussed before my sickness can be related. It is to my neighbor I turn, and put to voice the monologue more embroidered than embodied by Mr. Prior. Late into these summer months, I turn my pen to his need, for his swing has grown idle.
A simple man of wood, Mr. Prior was a sublte
note in my childhood. I was young when he moved in
next door, and my first memories of him came after his wife’s death. My mother, just weeks before my dad’s accident, informed the
table that Mrs. Prior had “passed.” The paper detailed the death with a simple,
“Mrs. Evelyn Anna Prior, 34, past quietly away in
The time between the funerals left Mr. Prior and I both alienated. I would not say I was close to my father, but his displacement from my life left me distraught and lost. I fell into the trap of immature depression, and vowed to live the remainder of my life guilt-stricken. It lasted a few months, and eventually I returned to my rather lethargic, but complacent self. In the passing years, my mother also grew away from her shock and suffering, enough so she fond solace in some grocer’s arms—though, they thankfully met in his house. Begrudgingly, I past my waken hours in the house rather idly, going through the throes of daily life; during the night, I watched Mr. Prior.
He was the ultimate in monolithic personality, for he shed not a single tear during the funeral or afterwards. Sitting on the porch, the man lived life every second of the day, and if he slept I never saw it. Whatever had died with his life was the passion in his soul and Mr. Prior turned outward only the somnombulance of paralysis, or some paradigm of a ill-suited father’s physicality when left to deal with his grieving daughter.
Kelly, his only daughter, eventually became self sufficient, learning to drive on her father’s car. Illegally, she’d pull the muscle car hesitantly in the retarded progression of a new driver. She studied the manual on the porch in the afternoons. Burning the clutch while shifting, she’d eventually mastered as much as she could. Still, the tires squealed as the large engine spun the tires. One night Jim, her neighbor, came out and hollered about the late hour. Jim, obviously distract, saw who was behind the wheel and awkwardly approached the vehicle. That day forward, Jim insistently taught her the various parts of the car, including the almost seductive nature of fine-shifting a big block engine. It was a secret knowledge they shared around the purring engine. When they finally finished, she could switch gears with the lubed ease of a professional.
As far as I could tell, Jim was Mr. Prior’s only friend. They went fishing once a month in Jim’s large boat, Titan Twins—his older brother had the same boat, Titan, but Jim swore it was for his twin redheaded children. At least, that’s what Mrs. Stuart told my mother. Jim would sit on the porch swing and talk well into the night, while Mr. Prior smoked his unfiltered Luckys, or his romantic Marlboros. It went on weekly, with the conversation normally revolving around Jim’s loud observations about the women about town.
When I turned 16, Jim offered off the swing to teach me how to drive Mr. Prior’s car. It was the only interaction I had ever had with either of them, and, till this day, I still do not know how they knew it was my birthday. My mother refused off her porch, and said that manual transmissions weren’t “fuel efficient enough for my boy”. Even Mr. Prior managed a laugh, as the two burst forth with giggling. Emasculated, I walked to school with the burned echo of ridicule on my ears. It was a scarring experience, and I swore that my first car would be a standard.
Mr. Prior sold his car two months after. He bought a large pick up truck with a odd, aluminum tool box in the back. I’d watch him putting the digging bars, levels, squares, hammers, and other odds an ends into the aluminum box. Kelly watched too as Mr. Prior carried thinks dolefully from the shed. He would not have thought it doleful, though. Mr. Prior demeanor was not one of sullen longing, but just a permanently sorrowful aura. Much like how the wilted flower is always appeared `sad, Mr. Prior hunched shoulders acted on every viewer. He seemed to all the neighbors like a ghost from a past happiness, forever stuck in a world drawn too thin. He wandered back into his house with out any ceremony, only turning once to examine the newly purchased, aged red truck. He would return with a pack of smokes, spending his night on the swing in his nightly habit.
The unhappy specter had his secrets, though it wasn’t until I was 18 that I found out he beat her. I wasn’t alone. None of the neighbors had suspected. When it was discussed, everyone agreed that it was a horrible thing, but no one would explain how the knowledge eventually came to them. My mother, when I asked her how she found out, only told me that “everyone has dirty laundry.” Mr. Smithton, the old man on the corner, told me when I took a mis-delivered letter to him, that I should be careful out at night. He said, “men like that like turn aggression on anything they can! He belongs in jail, that sonnabitch.” When I told her what I had learned, my mother had warned me thereafter to stay away from their house.
I knew why he hit her. It wasn’t hard to tell. It wasn’t abuse of power, as the gendered argument went, and he didn’t hate her. Mr. Prior loved the poor girl far too much. It was the failure on his part that pushed him into violence against her. At night, I could see it in the slow burning of the cigarette. Mr. Prior was a specter of the past, but he was more than that. He was the living of a lost sensation, his body the husk of lost feelings. It is hard to articulate my knowledge, for it is in his very person the sensation lies. He had become the monument of his dead wife, for he could only see his days as being dark without its missing light. Somehow, I knew that he beat Kelly because she was not the same fire as his wife. It was vile, inhuman, and unrealistic, but I knew it the truth. He told me in those night candle hours that the moon was his wife, and that the day was simply some gyration of unseen gears, invisible celestials at work in the realistic skies. Simplistically put, he was forever in the past.
As romantic as it sounded, the harsh racket of abuse became so loud that my mother was forced rise and turn up the volume. Oh, we ignored it. No one spoke of it or called the police. They would not interfere with it. Sometimes the fights took hours, sometimes it was a matter of tragic seconds. Most of the time, with my window so near their house, I listened earnestly with little glee. I couldn’t interfere either. I was part of the abuse, or so I thought. As if my knowledge of his situation made me responsible. We shared our own cathartic tactics: He beat her, I wrote about it. Night after night, I turned vampiric and drained the very life from his beatings. Every hemorrhage, every broken blood vessel, every crushing blow I seeped into my angst-ridden poetry and writings. Call it what you want, but I could not pen anything without the muffled cries and horrid strokes. The dark muse fluttered, and I could do nothing else but listen to its song.
I wandered inside my mind lulled and wondering what provoked the fights. I worried if the same violence existed inside my mind. Would I too, if pushed to far, raise a hand? I knew it was possible, but improbable. No one talked to me, for I was too agoraphobic and misanthropic for friends. I felt wretched for it, as if it was a mental illness…as if I should tell someone about the problems inside my mind. Do insane people know themselves insane? How then did I know myself…not sick, not me. How did I know myself different? What sort of creature lurked outside abuse? All these questions were unconsciously absolved. Patience. There is time enough for my story, though the night already grows thin, I maintain voice until the digression.
Time progressed, and Kelly stayed home less and less. After graduation, Mr. Prior offered her a job in his carpentry business. Surprisingly, he excelled and his business was picking up enough for him to hire more help. After a few jobs laying carpet and building roofs for some new business in town—a local boom both controversial and profitable—Mr. Prior spent less daylight at home. Together, they went to work. He’d return home alone while she ventured, as I learned through the hollering, to some local café downtown. Regardless, she was punctual and went to work on the hour everyday.
Despite what many people thought of her, Kelly didn’t seem to enjoy any drugs other than the coffee she drank. My mother was fond of warning me to stay away from her, “She’s trouble. Her mother was a pot head in high school, and she’s got it in her blood.” Old fashion sayings about drunks made new, I thought. No, the only vice she had was the odd loyalty to her father.
It first came to mind when I was installing a new motherboard during the winter months of my eighteenth birthday. Mr. Prior had been gone for some days, as he normally was in the summer, but recently returned home. Snow had packed high along the roof, and it was a miserable night out. Such were the conditions when news reached us that Jim was dead. The laughing neighbor on the swing, and Kelly’s tutor for driving, got himself in an accident while drunk driving down in south. They say he said a new speed record on one of their highways. New speed record aside, the tree did a number on his car. He in turn found himself propelled straight into the afterlife, in less than a blink of the eye. I had been installing the motherboard carefully, the heat of my mother’s roaring furnace my only companion, when she burst through the door and said, “Jimmy Rogers is dead!” Startled, I remember only being confused. “Jimmy Rogers! Timmy Prior’s neighbor. Poor man crashed his car. They say he was drunk behind the wheel. Oh, Cheri’s a wreck. I’m headed over there for awhile. Stay here, I don’t want you driving in the snow!”
Frustrated with both my mother’s protection racket, and the computer I had to constantly repair, I pondered the frosting window. There, I saw Kelly carefully sneaking from the side window. She crept along the roof, carefully sliding in the ice to the low point, and dropped stealthily down. Amused, I watched her creep in the shadow of the house, pausing only to watch the front door and slouch away into the night. I couldn’t help but think her beautiful in her stealth, like a stalking black cat along a forbidden fence. Immature, I thought her wonderful and pleasant.
Then, rapidly the maturity of knowledge rushed on me. No innocence guided her creeping, but she slunk from the whip marks on her back, those hidden blues and purples of past violence riding high on her shoulders. A broken mule with head down or a whipped dog with tale low, she crept for fear of provocation. No animal deserved the abuse, not even privately could I stand the thought. Something intrinsic felt its first pity. Some poor distraught girl sneaking off to escape my bliss. My body felt shaky, forcing me to Slouch unconscious in the chair. I took to penning verse in vain. It was no use, and I managed a few lines of social dynamics:
We live in a new prison,
A world of sand trapped in glass,
Searching for a new prism.”
Oh, the blindness I felt. I dropped the pen and
thought of the rain of blood profiting my production of work. Was I mercenary? No far worse, I was the
psychotic, backward product of some illicit and gratuitous violence. Then, my dark muse smiled down upon me: “like Doctor Frankenstein,
I sought to turn on the creature of my wicked mentality, the dark muse ruining
all those self-truths and beauties I held high. I had
romanticized the abuse and used it to my own accord. Should I
call the police and allow impotence and idiocy to release the feral monster,
Mr. Prior? When did the artifice yoke me, for I had penned my own damnation. No, for I must rise against the creature before
it ruins another
The strain of though continued straight into melodrama. Even now, I look back and see only the pained verse written in bare characters. I quickly had turned my muse into a monster, reduced its wings from angelic to demonic with a stroke of the pen. Though now vapid, I had been moved into a state of unconscious angst, my writing instrument the soul’s chisel. Pages and pages, I plotted to turn on Mr. Prior and reduce him down to the state of torment he had inflicted on Kelly. I imagined myself brave, adrenaline rushing as I stood against him. At the time, I feared no repercussion and vowed I would kill the man. The violence rushed under my brow, sweat the bi-product of my heated passions. I would have stopped at nothing to stab Mr. Prior to death, to hear his lungs collapse and the undoing of all my crimes against humanity. I imagined myself something more than I could possible ever have been.
Though it was highly doubtful I would have risen against Mr. Prior, I never found out. As I contemplate his unrealistic murders, the sound of his truck firing in the cold winter shocked me into reality. I glanced at the clock, It was unusual for him to leave so late into the night. Regardless, it saved me much physical strife, and again I returned to my world of computers, though ever mindful of the my new perceptions.
II: Vision
Mr. Prior’s business took off. Within the final six months, news reached the neighborhood his ‘company’ had won a major contract with some new corporation moving into the area. I cannot comment further on the subject, fore it was around the same time that I began my tactics against Mr. Prior. Nightly, he swung and I observed him through the uttermost window of our house. With all the lights out, we swung together late into the night. It came to me during once such nightly progression. The ultimate vengeance against Mr. Prior’s abuse should not come from my hand, fore the story would be propagated and spun unjustly by the media: “In local news, Timothy Prior, 43, was shot to death late last night. His neighbor, a 19 year old recluse whose name has yet to be released, is the chief suspect. The police have yet to give a motivation for the crime…”. No, the hand which slays Mr. Prior must be of his own blood and who better than the visage of his former wife?
I wrote fervently night after night in attempts to pen some type of bloody propaganda. How to coerce the innocent and unfamiliar hand into our vengeance? Vengeance, indeed, for I had been completely corrupted by Mr. Prior’s insensible physicality. His violence sung the thoughts inside my blighted mind, and my lungs exasperated almost to orgasm with their very notes. Some heroic mentally seized my every thought, but I could not manage to write the very words I needed. The pen seized. I had wasted weeks writing useless rhymes under the dark creatures hold. Why, if my very body ached to escape its talons, did every cardio compression leave me feeling impotent and wretched? How many hours did I waste penning oblivion, only to be forever trapped there over-writing the very simplicity of existence? Would it be as simple as to write:
“Dear Kelly,
I watch your father at night. He beats you too much.
Kill him and revenge us both.
Your
neighbor.”
You laugh, I know. I starred dumbfounded at the very writing. I even laughed as the composition myself. She would have found the note, haphazardly dropped before her feet, and looked into my window: “Why is that freak watching my dad?” What other dark thoughts would she ponder? Would she hate me for knowing? I would have, for who was I to meddle in her affairs? She would not understand that I live an oppressed life also. My own world was a room and window. School was torture enough, but to venture further thanthe porch left me feeling unprotected and misplaced, a lone key dropped in the dirt. No words can explain the restriction and very senstion of my paranoia. Would she understand even if she knew? Doubtful. I didn’t even understand our connection, but something intrinsic begged for my defense of Kelly, and I would heed these better angels before I ever saw pandemonium’s walls again.
Months passed with my goal still unfulfilled. Countless cigarette butts marked the days unaccomplished, and I feared every fight for Kelly’s life. Again, the summer sun rose fat and full into the sky, appeased by its torturous rays. It was our summer of final conflict.
Early June, the strawberries became pickable on the local farms. My mother and my sister rented an apartment near one of the local farms to pick first in the dew. In fact, most of the neighborhood ventured out, only to return late into the evening sated with their crimson glee. It was the night of the fifteenth when I ventured to pen my final attempt. I could no longer tolerate the swinging, and Mr. Prior’s burden wore heavy on us both. The motivation for his swinging grew less and less, and it seemed almost like the Sisyphean winds ached to move him. He had begun to droop his sleepless eyes towards my window at night. I would watch as his docile eyes wave in the warm night winds, wandering when they would completely fall from his skull. There was, after all, no inner dialogue keeping it afloat. If only the bust in which he had perch has fallen, and drug the ceiling down upon him, I might have been able also feel sated as well, my hands cleaned of any crimson glee.
That night I had finally composed what I felt was my best attempt:
“There are factors in life
which urge for action, some agency to force the celestial hand of vengeance. It
is benevolent and innocent. You must seize your own will to power, rise against
your oppressor and strike with clear mind. If it is
ethereal repercussion you fear, know that even the old god of judgment would
find you innocent in the stoic resistance you have shown. Not even the Lady of Camus could boost of your vigilance!
With mercy, Kelly, you must strike him dead. He is no longer your father, but
rather is some type of zeitkobold draining your life to keep his dark
presence alive. Send him to find her, send him to where time no longer can be
his enemy.!
There
is a certain morality in which obligates you into
action. It is not for some dead god, or some burdening society you will move,
but for the greater morality of your personal liberty, a faction both
overabundant and underprivileged in today’s society. I
understand I am being paradoxical. The disenfranchised are
seen as vehicles for violence, the tyrannical media a chariot of this
sludge. Know within your breast that the world is much simpler than it seems,
and your innocence cannot be tainted by them. You have
every right within your physical being as well as your greater, intellectual
person, to destroy your oppressor. He is not your father, but rather a creature
of burden long past its prime.
Your necessity lies in action, not compassion, for that faculty has long ago left your father.”
I did not sign the note. It was uncouth for me to urge, except as through some unknown party, the hand. Besides, the legal society in which we live no longer looked kindaly on such noble actions as slaying Grendel. My prison was torture enough, that I need not be confused with a vigilante.
Despite the assured voice of my note, I could not bring myself to simply drop it on the ground. What if Kelly didn’t find it? Oh, how my mature nightly voice died in the daylight. Outside the familiar sensation of my dwelling, I was lost and prey for the various humanoid beasts lurking. A recluse, I was better fit for some conch shell than the confines of forced education. What did my liberal allotment grant me, a general passing knowledge of social restrictions enforced by overpaid idealist! How could it be possible that I, a self-proclaimed recluse, could be such more worldly than the teachers themselves? Preaching from their desks, they were wiser ‘friends’ and poor mentors that would most resist her expression of violence. How had I seen her escape with so little knowledge except for within my own breast? Oh, they would pity her, the young daughter of an abusive bastards, but they would never teach her again. I was sentencing her to a world of torture; yet, one hell could be better than another. Oh, but I have digressed again. To tell the further tale of Mr. Prior, I must remind myself to be focused on his daughter, for she alone sings his song today.
After my composition, my nightly knowledge evaporated. When I saw the wretched swinging, I thought only of the bottled noises I heard nightly wafting on the heavy pheromones in stale breeze. Where were the wet grasses and subtle birds of natural summer, fore I only smelled the franchised world, only heard the bloody capital blaring from the television; It was these smells and sounds which summoned our final evening together.
The note I reproduced above lay carefully displayed on my desk. If the crime dramas on TV were accurate, each printer dotted their page with a unique signature in black ink. Giddily, I printed my note in yellow ink on black paper, careful to print an unseen phrase—“Old man! ‘tis not so difficult to die.”—in black in near the bottom of the page. Whatever dark letter identifying my crime would be lost to the abyssal page. Confident at my own ingenuity, I wiped the sheet blissfully clean, and slid the piece into a plain envelope my mother had purchased. This was a submission which would find its reader awful. You ask about finger prints, I’m sure. I used latex bathroom gloves and a careful misting of various cleaning supplies to disguise any odd scents in which some detective might locate me. I disposed of the bottles carefully in the garbage, and destroyed my mothers coupons. Perhaps weeks would past before she noticed.
Late in the night, I crept down into the backroom and opened my door. Mr. Prior’s displaced swing squeaked in the distance. If the moonlight was correct, she would sneak shortly into the darkness cast by her house where she would meet a bald, black kid in a red Honda. Together, they’d drive off seemingly unnoticed…except tonight she would open the back door, discovering my passion. Interest would peak under her brow, and she would scoop my letter like a bat snatching in avarice bugs. Oh, my plan ached within my mind, and with vengeance prodding feral avarice, I ran into my house.
The greased gears of the machine worked; Kelly, ignorant to the future awaiting her, stepped from the door. There, beneath her foot, the letter ached to be discovered! Her sunken gaze lowered. The letter shown bright in the moonlight, as if a halo sanctioned its intentions. Nimbly, she inspected the mundane paper and tossed it gracefully into the house. The door breezed silently closed, and her lithe form blended into the dark.
III: Catastasis
I could not open my eyes the rest of the night. Dinner was offered deep within the house. The night went on. Even Mr. Prior had the indecency to receive a phone call. Dumb rage and mute alienation raged inside my head. How could I have been so…stupid as to plan with such a common strategy! There was very little hope to be expected from the scenario. Only my careful and rather pompous writing would shield me from Mr. Prior’s knowledge, but would he perceive my message? There’s no way he could figure out the complex, poetic urging. Regardless of my sophistry, I could not convince sleep to possess me. Again, even in my most dire need, slumbering Morpheus slouched its selfish way far from me.
With little hope left for dreams, I began to read. It was the last fantasy available to me. Questions though haunted my attempts and I dropped the nameless book. Mr. Prior would discover the note, riddle out of the message, and discover his secret revealed. How desperate I became then. Did I truly misplace the abusive bastard, thinking him catatonic? When did I get so involved that I fell into this trap? None of the books on my shelf offered advice, and I thought wrathfully at how foolish they all were to write books about philosophical problems, narrow passages in abyssal time. Impotent creatures, how they had all failed me. How none of them offered near a perspective into reality. I knew what it was. Reality swung absently on a squeaking porch, waiting to live life through violence. How lucky they were to live daily a life of ease, penning some angst-ridden psyche and telling the world how to remember its ills.
Misplaced, I sat and attempted to type something important. The cursor pulsed some meta-textual insult. I typed pointless words and phrases, each linking together line after line of nothing. Disdain breached the screen, and I typed the various conscious notes, an inkless inkblot tests, attempting to see what mirror held my smoke. Whispering, the computer’s rhythmic hum urged me into a lull. The glass screen blurred and I leaned against my chair with not but dreams on my mind. Morpheus snickered guilefully in my draining consciousness…
I dreamed a wretched vision, my first dream in years. A dark, foreign room spun sickly about my person, and I saw a being resembling me. It stood barefoot on broken glass and fallen books, clocks and broken mirrors lay skewed about the room. All manners of poetry and lyrics wrapped the walls in distorted symbols. Some odd language spoke through broken speakers and sang some tune I had heard, but could not place. Then, materializing before me, a naked girl lay broken on the floor, her body twisted in a deathlike twitch. Seductively, a thin red line ran backwards into her body, and a bullet peeked its blunt head from beneath her pale skin. Sporadic weeping sobs ushered from around the walls, and an echo agued inside my ears. Spectral Mr. Prior slowly hunched his shaking limbs down to roll the girl onto her back. Her bare breast moved idly, and I tried to turn my neck away in mock modesty, but the dream would not allow it. How he wept onto her naked form, his fingers playing some imaginary piano against his scalp. Blood artfully spread out on the floor, turning from crimson to purple and back again. A sickly shimmer went through the puddle, and little spiders ran rapid, skimming the surface Christlike. Shoulders twisted in horror, the suddenly gray-haired man looked blankly into my eyes. Graceful, the vision of me offered an open palm, as one might extend to a lost dog, but Mr. Prior only spat onto my shoes….again, odd echoing noises pounded my head…sporadic books floated from the ground and attacked me, shelves fell from the ceiling, and the world quaked beneath my feat. With a sudden start, I fell in innocence and cried out for an end.
I woke with a horrible headache, drool running onto my encrusted keyboard. I said something along the lines of, “What the fuck?” and wiped my eyes profusely. The horrible vision of woe left me reeling…not to mention with a horrible migraine…
Then a gunclap tore me followed by the thunder of past explosions lulling around dazzed mind. Confused, I swore it could not have been, but I heard the television die down, and the music across the street cease. They too heard doom, but for who? Some passion possessed me and I worried, “Was she home? Fuck me, He killed her!” Slow, the sounds of the night began to peek out, and doors begin to open, and it seemed that the neighborhood asked the same questions as me.
I made it to the back screen door when my mother stopped me with a shrill voice, “Don’t go out there!” she gripped, pulling with ruthless nails at my shoulder. “Just…” I pulled away form her, the blue bathrobe I wore tearing. There was no scenery on the way to the door, only the door standing before me. The steps yielded, and I hit the back door. It was locked, but with a shoulder, I forced it free. Almost savage, my eyes blurred in tears. I rounded the corner of a house I didn’t know, and struggled over hampers before a washer, and around a kitchen table violently shoved in the corner. An open foyer with plastic table lay discard to the side, and before me lay the belly-breathing of a sunken husk. Blood spray discolored the room; the carpet, a sponge for drying blood cells, aged quickly in the assaulting oxygen.
Mr. Prior rolled onto his back, an exposed hole in his chest marked by the black soot of a close range gunshot. The blood gurgled, bubbling out of the wound. His clouding eyes turned and looked at me. “…kid next door?” he asked. I stood transfixed by the act of dying in front of me. His voice continued, shimmering under its wounded weight. “dying,” he said. I didn’t know if he was or wasn’t, or even what was happening to his body. I saw the blood and the hole and the gun and all those pieces of him no longer where they should be, but I did not know if he was dying.
His conscious
began to fail, and his eyes closed. Floods of words and phrases fell from his
lips like some broken well of internalization. Did this world existed in artifice? No, would be speaking a real stream of
consciousness, not the abrupt and perfect sentences of deluded theory. Given
the reality of death, his lips pumped the death inside his lungs until it
bubbled from his mouth; two thin blood lines marked
his lips. “Fallen down… Dead trees waving…” he continued, abstract in his
demise, but he opened his bloody palm to me, “..my
selfish prayer for light.” It grew almost to the sense of some bizzaro painting, where black on white made the colors of
the mind screw in Dionysian revelry. “
What ever secret light he sought drained quickly form his lungs, and he bled to death before me. Slouching over in a sickening ‘plop’ noise, he lay placid; I took a step back. The sounds of the house rushed forward: A shrill cry form the tea pot, CCR and Vietnam on the a distant radio, a polished revolver thumping unrealistically to the floor, a slamming sounds of broken wood, a inquiring voice behind me. A young girl screamed and rushed naively forward.
Sight returned to me, and I saw Kelly stooped low with arms about her father’s dead chest. Pitifully, she rocked him. Between sobbing fits, she asked what happen; She asked, pleadingly, for an ambulance; she asked, with so many spent tears, why.
I did not answer her, but cruelly made my way back into the kitchen. So many moments were captured on its doors, pictures of past pleasures. The age had long past for pleasures and glee. Consciousness returned to its full most, and I stooped to gather ‘my passion’ in its brown envelope. I wanted to burn the bastard, to forget all those certainties I held, and the immature angst and pity pushing forward my stupidity. This was all; Such matters were at an end. Again, society with its impotent gears passively waited until nature took care of itself.
I traveled back into my house defeated. Mr. Prior was dead. Each step I traveled up should have been a symbol, I told myself. I should be ascending into some state of humanity, into a new moral mentality, greater than once I was. But these things were not possible for reality. I traveled my journey feeling lesser, sadder, or at least more fucked up than I had been. This was my artifice, my reality. I sat down at the computer and, with all the glee of a mortician, I pounded mechanically into the night. Again, that dark muse beat its seductive wings, the tragic benevolence now insipid and routine. It was just another simple series of words. This reminiscing of the past had brought me a sad wisdom, the sad knowledge of human error, and so many imperceptions.