From East to Six Feet Deep: An Elegy.

Written as an imitation of the elegic genre, in the style of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

***

A requiem bell tolls again to start a mourning day,
Another long cavalcade winds slowly to the doors,
Some with sighs, and some with cries, for a girl—fifteen—to lay
To rest; but no body is there here to mourn, no box of sweet grandeur,

Now fades my sight from colour to grey,
As death removes all but death, how ever one may plea,
And all is now a memory; all that’s left to do is pray
That perhaps someday a body may find what’s left of me.

Millions of tiny hands push against a glass rib cage
While void violet veins think sometimes still to move, filled with worms
That writhe and so mock my people’s right and just outrage,
This rage, this grief, that begs my thief to shake and see him squirm.

My mother might weep to know of that worm that calls my eye
Its home, and my father might moan to see my heart pulse,
Alive again maggots; there is here too a gadfly,
That roils in my gut—from him my family recoils, so utterly repulsed.

While my sister—well, my sister has been gone these five years
And my mother’s eyes have not since been dried
And my father’s heart still pounds and suffers unanswered fears
As to the washroom floor my brother’s tainted liver him chides.

But everything is quiet here, serene and subtle calm,
The music of the great-horned owl wafting from her lofty tower
To harmonize with the fox’s howl, one distant and sad psalm,
Accompany the mouse’s bustles, welcoming the evening hour.

It is with these belov’d ancestors I can consider
Tangled in my hair, black like Raven’s feathers, yarrow,
Those feathery leaves that brush my cheeks, sending up fragrance bitter,
Flowers, I know grow white and yellow, blossom out of my bone marrow.

Under the shade of tall evergreens I lay here so still, where
Downy sprigs of ivy twine between my vertebrae,
Here cervical, and there caudal, now the nursery of hares
Who amongst my bleach-white spires play in the bless’d month of May.

Untamed thyme and feral rosemary sprout beneath my orbits,
Empty as they are, void, to take the place of common,
Better-lov’d blossoms; though the perfume of the moor be morbid
You will not find it in a rosy parlour, waiting to be forgotten.

Forget me? Never—my mother will dance until she dies
As long as she believes it may bring me home.
The bells will chime against her hips and ankles, in her hair
And against her chest, ringing in the ears of all my people.

They scream for justice—for me, for my sisters, the lost
And the enraged, we who do not rest, who never shall,
Immortal in the graceful doe, and in the soaring eagle,
In the river’s silver minnows, in the autumn leaves that fall.

We are the daughters of the stars, the angels of the deep,
The flighty forest nymphs who dance unseen amongst the trees,
Our bodies and bones are gone, with only our names to keep,
We join the wisps of cloud and storm, carried by the breeze.

May we well wander now until the end of all your days
The shades that hide amongst the wild thorny brush
And haunt those thieves amongst the haze, with empty eyes ablaze,
That they may always hear our screams at morning with the waking of the thrush.

Here and there, we angels lie,
The backbone of this country’s earth,
Who didn’t think to say goodbye
And never dreamed the trees to birth,

Our spark survives, that essence of we phantoms’ lives, the prized
Leg’cy of our ancestor’s cries, that unforgotten past,
And unforgiven yet, be now our descendant’s demands—
Find us. Find the stolen children of this underlov’d caste.

Until the powers hear us, honour us, their lost daughters,
Their used, abused, abducted, sacrificed; we martyrs
And love us like their foreign children, find our slaughterers,
And write our names forever in their new and lofty charters.

And as they lay us down to sleep, perhaps they’ll deign to say,
“Oft have we heard your cries for recompense, though we were all but deaf,
But now we hear and share your animosity; we beg
Thee now, allow us to your side and trust in our defense,
Pray receive us now, and forgive us the unforgiven then,
Our failures of the past, ye loved children of the fall,
The spring, the summer and all, hardy as the flighty wren,
Teach this nation justice’ name; deliver sweet mercy all.”

THE EPITAPH

Our images will haunt the Hill forever
Until the status “missing” might endeavor
To change to “found,” but never
Will “murdered” not be ours; however,

Though those killers may think themselves clever,
True judgment passes when the soul from body severs
To come meet us, or God, whomever
Happens to come first; but who instills more terror?

Perhaps with death we birth a revolution
Demand both prosecution and resolution
Though there be few means of reconciliation,
Perhaps there is peace in newfound retribution

John Doe

My wife had loved the colour yellow. Just adored it. She used to say she could find yellow in everything–in the sun that split the sky into a million other colours at dawn, in the washed-out light of crescent moons, even in the flaxen hair that topped my head, long turned peppery-grey with age. I had little to offer her when we married besides cheery moods and soft smiles, so as a surprise wedding gift I painted the front door of my house bright butter yellow–oh, how she smiled and laughed when I brought her home that first night! That was many years ago now, but I can still see her in my mind’s eye. I find I can no longer remember things the way I used to, just small things. Mundane things. With her, though, they never seemed mundane. I remember the way her shoulders moved when she aired out fresh linens early in the morning, I can remember her in the garden, her hair tied back with a white bandana, tending to sunflower seeds–yellow flowers to match our yellow door. I remember the way her teeth looked when she smiled, all straight and pearly and perfect. I remember all the things about her that she forgot about me. Dementia is an ugly beast, but we never let it bring us down; I delighted in retelling our stories to her, in making new memories by reliving old ones. Forty-eight years of marriage passed blissfully until age finally took her from me. Now, I am left only with a yellow door and a field of sunflowers. The only things left that mark her time, her place, in this world.
It was four loud knocks on that front door that roused me from the dregs of a late-afternoon nap one midsummer night. It was hot, the kind of stifling heat that even a breeze can’t alleviate. Dusk had fallen, the evening star twinkling bright through the kitchen curtains, a hot, hot night that threatened to choke me when I opened the door. On the porch stood a couple, young, bedraggled, dressed in rags that betrayed too-thin frames on both of them. Naturally, I invited them inside for dinner–a remnant of an old habit of picking up broken things to fix them, bringing home strays to show them what love is. How my parents had rued me for such a drive in my early days. But I was excited to have company for a meal. It had been so very long.
Under the dirt and grim, they could not have been older than their late 20’s. Bright blue eyes shone out of the woman’s gaunt face, analyzing me from underneath shaggy black hair. The man’s hair too was black. but his eyes were so dark a brown they glittered a similar colour. I could see my reflection in them, clear as day. Looking at them made something click inside me, something protective, something attached, as if they automatically assumed the representation of a future that could have been for me, but never was; as if in their faces I could recognize the faces of the children my wife and I never managed to have. In that moment I wanted to offer them everything they so clearly needed, and then everything they wanted, and it both delighted and terrified me, because they were really just strangers, and what can strangers be to an old man living alone in a field full of sunflowers, really? Dangerous, is the answer to that question, but I lended them my trust the moment I laid eyes on them. I suppose it was pity.
While I cooked, I tried to speak with them, ask them questions, but they were so withdrawn from me that I wondered what kinds of terrible things had forced them into nomadic living. Names they would not give, and when I asked if they were hungry (a silly question, I know, but you know how it is sometimes trying to make conversation), the woman only smiled wanly at me. The man simply stared, as if he couldn’t hear me. They were strange, queer folk from the start, staying so quiet while they sat with perfect posture at my kitchen table while I bustled around them, busy as a bumblebee with dinner. Very strange, very queer, to think they would receive my hospitality like that, now that I look back on it. I remember that they both sat with their hands folded on their laps, their gazes never leaving me. Now, it is unnerving, but at the time I only remember feeling somewhat awkward under their stares, failing so miserably to make conversation. I must have appeared such a foolish old man to them, although it hardly matters now.
I served them a meal I remember having been one of the wife’s favourites, but for the life of me now I cannot recall what it was. I just know that they never touched it. They sat across my table from me and never so much as looked at the food I had served them. They just stared, silently, at me, watching every bite I took. I think I only managed half my meal before I couldn’t do it anymore, I was so self-conscious, so I packed everything up into my wife’s Tupperwares and stored them in the fridge for later. I was never keen on leftovers, but she had hated to waste food. They watched me do this with some interest, but never moved. I could feel the weight of their scrutiny, and I wished they would leave then, but I could see even in the corner of my eye that they stayed perfectly still. I felt rather than heard myself speak.
“I usually turn the television on after dinner. I…I hope that’s alright by you.”
They made no response. It felt like it took years for the television to turn on. The screen came to life in slow motion, turning from black to gray to unearthly blue. It gave me time to feel every pinprick of those two unmoving stares along my spine. Everything felt dreamlike around me–the shining of the stars outside, the movement of the curtains in the hot, heavy air around the open windows, the low buzzing of the lightbulbs humming in the kitchen behind me–until the television snapped me out of my reverie with it’s harsh, cacophonous voices. As usual, it was the news programme.
“…under no circumstances should you answer the door tonight,” the anchor was saying, “they are not what they seem.”
My eyes were fixated on the screen, on the anchor’s face. He always does the evening news, that chap, but I can’t remember his name. He’s young, but that night his face was full of worry lines, and I suddenly had the impression he was much older than he had always looked onscreen.
“Whatever you do,” he cautioned me, “don’t let them inside.”
I looked away the, catching my own reflection in the glass of the window. Outside, sunflowers danced in the dark, and little spherical lights my wife has wound around the porch railing glowed yellow. I looked comical superimposed on that quiet scene, television remote clutched in calloused, blue-veined hands and a checked shirt tucked tightly into my trousers. I was floating there, watching the sunflowers wave in and out and in and out of my transparent chest. And then, behind me, I could see my guests, standing now, still staring, their mouths both gaping open. The reflection made it look like their mouths kept growing longer, almost to an inhuman size, like the way snakes unhinge their jaws to eat bird’s eggs.
I turned, slowly, my stomach knotting itself over and over again so tightly I could feel it making its way up into my throat. I thought then it might choke me.
They were already upon me when I faced them, moving with deadly silence. My face was mere inches from hers, her eye sockets all empty and black and hollow, her mouth a cavernous one lined with tiny clear teeth shaped like ice cream cones. The only noise she made was a quiet hissing, constant, as if she were taking one long inhale. I thought she might scream, but she just kept hissing. I couldn’t make a sound, I couldn’t even scream, and I felt my jaw go slack as my shoulders tensed and the remote fell from my hands to the floor.
She put a grimy hand on my face, thumb on my chin and fingers on my temple. Her mouth met my other temple, sinking tiny sharp points into my cranium. I felt the blood trickle sticky down my face, blurring in my eyes, as she pulled something smoothe out of my head. It felt like she was unfolding all the gyri of my brain and sucking them out of the hole in my head. I know all about the brain, you know, from when my wife was sick. Her mouth felt wet, and I could only think that it was my grey matter dripping down her chin and onto my carpet. The pain was unbearable. Stars exploded behind my eyes, excruciating bright light that dizzied me, and after that I could only see blackness. I would have collapsed if she hadn’t been holding me up. How she had so much strength in one arm, I will never know. She was so small, so slight…so fragile a thing.
I did lose consciousness. The shock, it must have been. I woke up with my face in the carpet, breathing in my own coagulating blood. I can’t remember what colour the carpet used to be, but it was rusty when I woke up. Everything I looked at bent around me as if I was looking at it all through the bottom of a bottle–all shaky and almost circular. I was so dazed, I couldn’t remember my name or where I was or how old I am–all things I used to ask my wife every morning when she woke up. I was afraid. I thought I was losing myself like she did. I could see the front door open, could see the little yellow lights paving the way down the stairs to the road, and I moved towards that, the yellow, crawling, until I was outside. I had to use the stairs and the railing to stand up. After that, I lost time. It was pitch black and I walked out into the sunflowers. I didn’t know what time it was. I still don’t know where I was trying to go. I was just…going. And then I was on the highway, walking, I don’t know how long I walked for, but I didn’t think of a single thing. It was as if I didn’t have a thing left in this head of mine.
You know, they call them “hospitals,” but there’s not much hospitable about them. I understand now. You keep us all here like animals, locked up with no freedom to do anything. You’re not helping us, you’re studying us. You’re trying to understand them. Those things that came for us and ate us and left us like this. Hollow shells. You make me tell you this story every godforsaken day and you never think about what it does to me, because it’s the only thing I remember anymore and it’s the only thing you care to know about. You never even tell me who I am. I’ll bet you don’t even know. I’m just another nameless face in this crowd to you. You treat us like your lab rats, damn you! Let me put your experiment to rest; I’ll tell you what I know to be true. Those things were here to hunt us, and they will come back for you. You people who remember them and remember me and remember what it’s like to feel sunshine on your face and hear your loved one’s voices and have hopes and dreams for the future. And then the next batch of up and comers will lock you up like me and you’ll know what it’s like to be treated like refuse. You won’t even let me sleep, you’re so afraid of losing the rest of me. You think I’ll let the rest of myself slip away and I’ll lose my value to you. Well, I’ll tell you what: maybe it’s not such a bad idea. So maybe I will let myself go.
Maybe this is the night where I say goodbye, and remember that I said it in the morning.

Phantasma

There is a phantom that makes his home in the dust and cobwebs of my bedroom, a poltergeist flitting in and out of sunbeams and bumping in the dark. I can hear him sigh my name in the back of my mind every day at noon; I can feel him ease down onto the arm of my chair to read over my shoulder the newspaper, and I know the door opens just a little too quickly every evening when I come home. When the pages of my book refuse to stay open, when all my houseplants begin to wither and die, or the cat goes galloping down the hallway in a random panic, I know that he is restless. His presence lingers around me, heavy like an uninvited guest, but he always welcomes me home with the open arms of an old friend.

He keeps me awake at night when he cries, terrible, awful, heaving cries, coming from the darkest corners of my bedroom. Some nights, I can feel his salt tears on my cheeks, leaving cool colourless trails down my hot heartbeat skin, whispering like autumn winds past, or his fingers trailing across the bony bumps of my hips, turning once-rosy skin blue and rotting, deadening under his airy gray touch. He sings sweet nothings of a time long ago to me in the dark hours of the morning, his voice soft as cold September rains. When I close my eyes I dream of him, his face flush with colour and the sun dancing through his eyelashes, his smile a night terror I can no longer start at. I awake, and there too is his face, grinning out of the darkness and relishing the circles of purple he puts beneath my eyes. On hot midsummer nights, he slips a knife between my shoulder blades, a sharp sliver of cold biting between my vertebrae, popping them apart and relaxing all my muscles, stinging and burning where his poison fingers probe my wounds for my bloody essence that he seeks to make his own. I wake with bruised flesh, hues of purples and blues and browns, where his hungry hands have grabbed and pulled at my limbs in an attempt to make me his.

He lives in dismal grayscale, and I in ghastly technicolour. He cannot find his place within my watercolour world. He begs me to recall his name when his hands gently caress my shoulders while I make breakfast, three syllables that tumble across the tongue in shades of red and orange. He queries after the colour of his hair while I brush my teeth in the bathroom mirror, toying with once-black tousled curls now white and streaked a grey translucence. He asks me desperately to remind him what colour was his favourite when he still lived as I change out burnt lamp lightbulbs, staring at me with empty eye sockets where once eyes so dark a brown they glittered black resided, deeper than the deepest outer space. I remember falling into those eyes for the first time, drowning in them, feeling that I could both know everything about him and yet leave him a sparkling enigma all at once if I just let them wash over me like a gentle deep-ocean wave. I floated content in the great voiding depth of those eyes, never once suspecting that they hid a raging riptide, a famished black hole, that they had trapped me as a pitcher plant traps a beetle, feeding off it for days.

On my bad days, I ignore him, and he screams at me, a terrifyingly loud and angry bass, like an upset child with the voice of a man, and he opens floodgates that force me to remember everything I push down deep inside. Our play at contented coexistence comes to a screaming halt, giving out a dying gasp of sad summer air that ushers in the cold of autumn with it. On those days, my hair turns white and falls out in clumps, more fine lines around my eyes crease, and I become older and slower and quieter while he stays young and powerful and angry. Later, the colour returns to me cheeks and lips, but I feel a little more tired inside, and in the bathroom mirror I mark the growing transparency of my own skin, knowing I will join him soon and render him content. He cannot give up his living past, and I cannot reconcile what he once was with the thing he has become. It will be the death of me.

The saturated colour of my eyes, the eyes he always loved so dear, dulls every time his fingertips trail my face, never to return. What he touches, he ruins, just as I once ruined him. And I want to leave, I want to, I want to, I want to run away and never look back and never be found and never relive his horrors again—but he is forever bound to me, holding on to that pre-summer bliss of our childhood, when we were two imperfect souls finding perfect solace in one another, reveling in what we were, what we could have been, what we planned to be.

I can bury his skeleton in my closet, but I can never outrun his ghost.

***

PLAYLIST:

The Best Idea I Ever Had—Sew Intricate
Heaven in Hiding—Halsey
I Knew You Were Trouble—Taylor Swift
Somewhere Else—Artist VS. Poet
Million Dreams—The Greatest Showman soundtrack
Unbreakable—Artist VS Poet
Summertime Sadness (cover)—Megan Davies
Edge of Seventeen
I’m Not Dead—P!nk
Saviour—Rise Against
Devil’s Backbone—The Civil Wars
Everybody’s Fool–Evanescence
Apologize—One Republic
Dancing with a Wolf—All Time Low
This Means War—Marianas Trench
Ordinary World—Joy Williams
Man Overboard—Blink-182
Erase This—Evanescence
Ghost—Ingrid Michaelson
Outlines—All Time Low
Oceans—Evanescence
Dearly Departed—Marianas Trench
B-Team—Marianas Trench
Young and Menace—Fall Out Boy
Eyes Like Yours–Shakira
Amnesia—5 Seconds of Summer
Nina—Ed Sheeran
Down—Blink-182
Grand Theft Autumn/Where is your Boy Tonight—FOB
One More Night—Maroon 5
Outer Space/Carry On—5 Seconds of Summer
Dark Side of your Room—All Time Low
Rhythm of your Heart—Marianas Trench
I Miss You—Blink-182
Daddy Lessons—Beyonce
Don’t—Ed Sheeran
A Drop in the Ocean–Elenyi
Nightmares—All Time Low
Call Me When You’re Sober—Evanescence
End of an Era—Marianas Trench
.
(BONUS: The Patron Saint of Liars and Fakes—Fall Out Boy)

Pt. 3: Nuance.

You and I met on summer’s sunny morning

Where sunflowers dance in zephyr,

And, swirling round, the fae

In yellow skirts, soft as magpie’s feather,

Are always upwards soaring.

Amongst the fields of plenty,

As clouds made the sun remnant,

You picked a cadmium bouquet,

And looked to me with resentment;

I, at you, with contempt, my hands, empty.

Pt. 2: Nostalgia.

I once was a girl that lived by the sea

In my mind,

With rattled bones of white.

That girl never ate peaches.

That girl dreamed saltwater dreams.

 

She would watch the waves break against the rocks

And gulls soar

Against gray skies.

Her veins were violet and gold,

Her skin was blue, and cold.

 

Pt. 1: Nectarines.

My skin is not the colour of peaches,

But of nectarines;

White flesh, blue spider web veins,

Thin, like paper,

Smooth, like vapor.

 

My skin is soft, but not supple.

It is unyielding;

Teeth have tried to pierce this skin

To taste my blood

And failed.

 

A Brief Hiatus

Looking on this site in retrospect, it should be noted that I was encouraged to create a blog to put my work out there in the ether of the Internet by many of the overwhelmingly supportive teachers I had in my high school days. I did so, but was entirely disheartened after letting it fall into a sort of angst-ridden ruin of vents and emotionally-fuelled drama. While the majority of what has been published here are works from my high school English days, I have since removed many of the incoherent ramblings that were posted as products of my looking-back-to-the-past-and-being-sad-about-it sort of phase. These things do not, and did not ever, represent me as a person or an aspiring writer, but I’m glad I wasted some time on them. I’ve even come to dislike the domain name of this blog, but can’t bring myself to change it because 1-I’m technologically too challenged to and 2-never have the words “the shadows of yesterday” been more apt than in the situation of my entirely bizarre little online portfolio. I have been on a journey of true self-discovery–in fact, I still am, and am entirely happy with my direction. I feel like I can write again (perhaps not frequently, but frequency is not what ultimately matters). All of my old writer’s block is gone, I have moved on from the past, and I have gained an education well enough to resume putting things out into the world.
To you, my reader, whatever your origins may be–be you my family, my friend, and old mentor of mine (if so, you’re still my teacher and you always will be), or one who stumbled across my little blog at some point during its creation, I’d like to thank you for sticking around through my little hiatus. Things are coming for you from me, though I’m not sure I would call them a reward for your patience–you’ll have to be the judge of that.
Really, you can probably expect more of the same.

2014 In Review, Courtesy of WordPress

I thought this was interesting, considering I’ve only been posting my work here for a year, and sporadically at that. My total stats may be humble, but I am flattered none the less!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 10,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

The Prison Cell

The skies had quickly become overcast, more quickly than I could have imagined possible. The stars that had burned so brightly, the crescent moon that illuminated the city streets, had all but blinked out, plunging the world into a sudden, impenetrable darkness that the street lamps fought valiantly to overcome.
It was when I was walking through the deserted streets, eyes cast warily to the skies, that I heard it. A jolting bang, a shortened scream. Footsteps rapidly disappearing into the night.
I found her on the corner of seventh and 12th avenue, staring up at the hidden heavens. Serene, quiet, and utterly broken. My hands worked faster than my brain, but I could hardly stem the outpour of blood flowing without precedence from her stomach to the sidewalk. Before I knew what I had gotten myself into, her head was cradled ever so delicately in my lap and my hands aiding hers in pressurizing the wound. It felt like I was walking through a dream.
In the darkness, she looked at me at last. And strangely, smiled—I could not bring myself to smile back.
“It’s you,” she said.
“Yes,” I replied in my trance.

We had never met.
Her frail fingers trailed up my jawline. She laughed, a rasping and gasping laugh riddling with pain and laced with coughing that pushed blood from her lungs to her mouth to her lips.

“You have eyes so deep I feel myself drowning in them,” she said quietly.
I couldn’t reply. My mind grasped at every word in that sentenced.
“The last man I met with eyes like yours, I fell in love with.”
And she laughed again as she painted the cement crimson.
“Don’t worry. Paramedics are coming. You’ll be okay.”
“Your voice is so deep. It’s like a drum, has anyone ever told you that? It just resonates in my chest. Can you sing to me?”
Despite myself, my cheeks flushed. “I can’t really sing. I don’t know any songs.”
Instead of replying, she shuddered in her agony. When her eyes closed, I thought I had lost her. But she opened them again, and swallowing blood stared up at me once more. Her fingers grasped in their frailty at my toque, pulling it from my head. Pre-winter air bit at my ears as one finger curled my hair for a moment before dropping to her chest. She smiled easily, happily, sighing in admiration.
“I see why you’re here now. You’ve come to take me away. Back to God.”
My heart then broke, and I watched her smile one more time before the light left her eyes a clear, unseeing ice blue and her neck lost its strength.
I let myself sit there with her, feeling her body go cold, for a long time, feeling emotion after emotion after intense emotion wash over me in a fictitious warmth I knew did not exist.

The needed someone to blame. I had not a motive, nor a weapon, or any means to speak of. All I had was a heart too big not to care. But he couldn’t be found, nor could the curséd pistol that robbed that girl of her life.
And so that’s how I ended up here, in a prison cell, with tally marks and cold, ice eyes as the only art to decorate my barren walls.
Waiting.

Juxtaposition

He was the definition of juxtaposition. This whole time, he has been both the LORD and The Adversary, the lamb and the serpent. He fought so hard to save me, a mislead child, and raise me to my salvation and a place with his Heavenly Host, all the while damning me to an eternity of fire and suffering. Give and take, give and take. He was an unmerciful God and a merciful demon, all at once, and with one clawed hand he took hold of my heart as another hand, soft and loving, caressed my face with gentle care. While one thumb traced my cheekbone with all the attention of a lover, those malicious claws ripped my forsaken heart from my very chest and squeezed with all the hate of a wronged brother. My blood dripped from between those unearthly fingers as his lips tasted mine.
My salvation.
Just as soon as he now owned what he thought his, he let me go and stole my pathetic, half-beating heart to add to an ever-growing collection. His hands would touch me, one hand burning and scratching and the other cooling and soft as water. His teeth bit into my flesh to taste my blood, and only once he had learned to memorize every valley and every mountain of my body and my mind did that angel leave me. Free falling through a cutting, icy wind he left me, and went along his merry way as I floundered to my demise. He had not even the good nature to sew to my back wings of tar and feathers.
My body hit the ground, but I felt no pain. I was a hollow shell, a hallowed hall, that no longer housed a holy spirit he could attain.
And so this is what I have become–a monster, an unholy being with his name carved into my flesh. One moment I am a calming breeze, and the next I am a raging storm. I love and I hate. I hurt and I don’t. I fall and I fly.
I walk by all the places he is said to be seen every day. I want to force him to see, force him to look at what he has turned me into–a shade, a phantom dark as night and sleek as smoke he cannot touch. An empty temple of a long-forgotten deity, standing piteously lonely and full of vengeful natures, full up of songs and hymns that speak his name in words unknown to him. And he does–that demon, he hurts, but not so much as I. Somewhere, in his care, my faint heart still beats at a distance from me, long since forgotten on a shelf in his mind. He has filled it with pins, ripped it into pieces with his hands, made it a play-thing he may have once found amusement in.
But the monster that came to live under his bed would like to have it back, to cram back into her ragged chest that she may breath again, and become the very thing he fears the most. For it is her turn to conquer him.