The man stood within that ocean, heart in a blunder, eyes out reaching to the legion before those worn shoes. The little crimson flowers devoured everything. His venerable leather, his logic, his attention, his core, now bleeding upon his ribs in an unforgiving deluge. Lips gaped. He had slit the throats of all their fond memories, and this is where those poor stupid entities ran. Then they bled out, painting field poppies with their hue. The same poppies that once engulfed the two forms of the ones who birthed them, the pretty gods who were too frequently stacked upon a marble pedestal.
He should have known.
He should have known.
Now the sullen blade grew heavy with the life of all he had lost, all that was tossed into that wild conflagration that claimed their lives. The same conflagration that was set by his own weary palms and an abundance of oil. The flames kicked to the sky as though they had eaten explosives, devoured gunpowder and sent that staggering warmth to the star's shivering grasps.
Now, there he was, amongst the army of angry red poppies, feeling guilty because he did not feel guilty. Remorse rising from the black ashes of his own foul disregard. There should have been an ill feeling; there should have been an unending sorrow and the resolve to solve each of those sallow injuries, committed upon either side of that pristine white fence.
But emotion cannot be pulled out from a corpse's skull. The inanimate simply cannot feel. Sentiment is not bound to dust.
Simply, that once passionate heart had been yanked out and gutted long before now.
It would not have been entirely his chaotic mistake. No. Not wholly. It did not start upon his end. He did not craft the misery required to do such a deed. Why ever should there be overtaking anguish when the fault was not entirely his to hold?
It begun with a Polish man.
Always, it did.
The Lithuanian closed his eyes, his grassy green eyes, and he considered the catalyst.
Her.