In Form And Moving
By
Chanlin Marr
Beauty.
Both the bane and addiction of my line. So I'm told.
The intellectuals would say it's subjective.
Eye of the beholder.
But they're not of the blood. The blood tells me what beauty is. The blood does.
Paintings. Sculptures. Cliché, to my way of thinking. But the blood knows better.
I saw a car wreck on the way home the other night. Nasty one. Escalade t-boned a Honda at an intersection. Looked like a mom and kid bought it. Homie in the Escalade wasn't even scratched.
Beauty.
What's more incredible than the chaos of chance and tragedy?
Fate turned that Honda into scrap; shaped it into something it had not been. Completely original. Spontaneous. Unique.
Fate turned that lady and her kid into hamburger. They died uselessly. Everything they had done, everything they had meant before that instant was all they would ever be in this world.
Beauty.
Whatever Mr. Escalade's life had been before that moment was suddenly, and entirely different afterwards.
Maybe he was a good man. Maybe he was a bad man. But now he had two lives under his belt, and he'd be paying for that fact for the rest of his.
Beauty.
And I stood there, staring. The blood calling me to it until the bodies were covered; the wreckage towed away.
The blood makes me pause at a fine work of art.
The blood makes me pause at a scene of tragedy.
The blood tells me what beauty is. The blood does.
It has to be the blood.
If it's not the blood that finds them so equally beautiful…
What does that make me?