Cold

Cold, cold. So cold.

I sit here, in this room, in this cage. And there is something on my shoulder and it is a hand and that hand is cold. But it is a comforting cold, a cold I know.

The reporters are staring into my face now, asking me questions about my home, my family, my life. I answer them like the sheep that I hate myself for being. The reporters are the sheep, are the followers, the suicidal lemmings…not me.

In being a sheep, I disappoint him. I know it and I feel the icy, slithering python on my shoulder constrict.

But it is a comforting python, a python that belongs to an arm that belongs a man I know.

The cameras are turned to this man now, the faceless sheep, the lambs, the reporters are asking him the questions they asked me.

They fall on deaf ears. He says nothing. I say nothing.

And still that hand, that six-fingered hand, is cold. And I, his son, cannot warm it, and my mother cannot warm it because she is colder than that hand; she is dead.

And his eyes, for all their maroon redness, their hue like flecks of blood, are colder still.

Colder than death, colder than ice, colder than the vile thing on my shoulder, crushing it like a helpless little bird.

I wish he'd let me go.