The sun opened its gaping mouth, the red tongue so ambivalent in their view, giving birth to the world before them. They have rested well under the blankets of snow, the little white hands of Death that brushed the home, the drug addicts that claimed the entire kitchen for their feed, the Oxy once again being dashed in all the counters and the tables, once again becoming little crystal granules of relaxation inside Miles' food. His little moment of joy, his little moment of forgetting his past, his present, and his future. When the drug reached inside his brain, he forgot everything. He would forget even why he existed on this planet, the planet that seemed to be so bare and so hollow and swollen when he arrived, when his parents were so loving and welcoming, when he thought he would receive so much attention, so much of his future was unfolded in the lips of the white lilies their hands formed, so much promise to be had, so much was to be told in his mother's cinnabar lips, the lips that told her she was pretty and she was a good mother, the lips that gave her so much success, so much sex, so much love for her child, the red blood dotting her nostrils, when she would sniff and snort the drug of her choice, the drug her doctor promised in his fine sateen lips that cure her of her pain from her car accident two years ago that gave her so much pain in her back and joints, that she needed an instant cure, a little pill to cradle the pain away, to usher it to small flames that weren't so large and rearing inside her lungs and so white hot that she couldn't deal with it, that she called her husband and demanded a pill to seal her promises, much like the promise that they would have their first-born child to be special and kindling with warmth and happiness.

Obviously, that never happened.

And Miles wondered why. His mother never was a bad person at first. It's just the Oxy talking. The pills. She really wanted Miles to be happy. To be a good child. To be a smart child. The child that tried the hardest. The child that was always good enough, to satisfy his mom and dad, wherever they were in the world.

Never at his soccer games which he soon was banned from playing after getting bad grades.

They always were at home; smoking what his teachers told him was sometimes called "weed", and crushing the pill. They always did this in their little circle. Holding hands. Laughing. Smoking Pall Malls after that. Her red fingernails that looked as bright as the center of the sun as it was when it was unfolding before him in his home, clicking against the walls, scratching at his daddy, screaming, panicking, that the police were coming to take poor Miles away.

Don't worry, her husband said. Take a little Xanax.

Pop. There goes another pill. They didn't have to crush it.

And she was relieved, even if her husband's hand was drooled with blood.

The Xanax she got a prescription for when Miles experienced an anxiety attack upon the first day of school, causing him to skip school for the next three days, wrapped in his blanket like a coiled snake, wondering how fucked up he was, how different he was from the other students. Panic attack on the first day of school. Like that could happen to any excited child. They wanted to go to school. To learn. To play with other students. To become a great person, a better person. But he wanted to stay at home, to never learn anything, to always draw of his pictures of his daddy's claw hand, wrapped with red ribbons, wrapped with the life of the insanity, the Oxycontin taking over them. No longer caring for poor Miles. The fox that never lived. The boy who became a fallen angel. The boy who became Satan.

Yes, he described himself as the devil the white men talk about. The one with horns, red skin, pale red eyes, the little hooves as feet, the little spindly tail. He was the one. He rejected God at birth. He knew a god so loving would never give him this family. He knew the devil would only accept him in his bare red arms, veined and bulging. He misbehaved when he went back to school. On the first day of recess, some children made fun of his raggedy clothes, how they smelled like nicotine, how black and sullen they were for parents who claimed to be so caring and loving. He told them they were privileged and they never understood what he had to deal with, day after day. But they only said, "Shut up, you two-tailed freak."

The two tails came from the Oxycontin his mother used while he was inside her.

He was lucky he didn't come with anything serious. Cerebral palsy. Autism. Retardation. Yes, he was thankful. Very.

But yes, the insult. He grew angry. As large as a lion's mouth when it roared. His teeth became fangs. His tongue became rolling hills; the throat became the black hole that could suck everything in.

Coiled like a snake in his room, with the blankets over him. He looked at his drawings. The one with daddy's wound. How red he made the blood. He even painted it with watercolors. His eyes were the searing flames of passion, as he drew and drew, and kids told him he was good at it. His teachers said he could draw so many things most kids his age couldn't. He could be a cartoonist. And that was all they complimented on him. Everything else, it was always how poor he looked, how much he looked a crack addict's child. But he was. A little bit.

His cheeks flared from the heat. The house was warm that summer. Tepid waters tried to keep him cool. His mother didn't have a very big fridge. They couldn't pay for the A/C. He was sick, full of fever!

The scorching red hot flames, how they made everything black they touched! Even his hands couldn't ravel the flames inside him. They unleashed in his drawings, the sweat pouring down his face, the eyes swelling with gladness as he sketched all of these personal emotional sentiments for himself to see and only him, maybe his parents if they were lucky. But he didn't care at all. Make them look! Make them see how the fires have scorned and burned him to ashes! The hotness of the room, the warm wallpaper, look what it done to him, to make him a lunatic, to not go to school on the first day, to be full of cynicism and depression, the black snake inside his mind, his teeth glimmering through the fires of his soul, the sharp bladed hands as they crushed pencil after pencil, crayon after crayon, his insanity had to be unleashed, his hatred, his sadness, it must be poured out! The teakettle was brimming too much with heat, it had to SCREAM.

SCREAM.

That was what the lion did.

He screamed till his face was as red as that night of the first day of school.

He poked his fingers in the eye of his caricature. The light poured from them. He thought he was a god sometimes. He thought everything the light had, it was his. His kingdom. His ruling. He could command everyone to leave him alone. He could command all the soldiers in his army to shoot whoever said he was wrong. He could command the queen to eat maggots, because the queen was his mother, the crowned matriarch, the rosy-cheeked and red fingernailed and cinnabar lips Lakshmi. How lucky she was to have her feast of maggots, to eat their plump white bodies. Because it would forever be more than the king would ever eat.

The maggots that absolved her pain. Made it go away. To the heavens, to the eternal raging fires of Hell.

His father was the slave. He made the king into a slave, always doing the chores that he never got any benefit out of. Always pummeled to the ground when he wouldn't clean the entire kitchen with a toothbrush. Beaten like the African slaves that seemed like a fading memory in America, forced to eat dog food when he was a bad boy, filled with the remains of rats he bought and killed just for fun, always smiling with spectral teeth when Miles knew he was doing something wrong, until the king was forced to kiss the floor, to taste the linoleum and dirt, forced to eat the cockroaches that climbed the cupboards. At least they had nutrition. More than anything they would ever eat.

"You need to try harder!"

"Try harder for mommy, please?"

He hated that fucking face she made.

The cinnabar lips from Zanzibar, the ashy face, the little streams of blood from her nose, it was always the same. How she wanted him to try harder to behave.

Her little rings hurt too. The ones on her fingers. Their marriage ring hurt the hardest.

The one inscribed "I Love My Son, Miles" hurt the worst.

She wanted to punch her face more than the rings could. But he was so weak, so defenseless! These little seven year old hands could only do so much!

They could only draw. Nothing else. Not even provide comfort. As he wished.

The king would sit in his throne of shit, his crown of thorns, and he would think, what should I do with the slave? Make him eat the garbage and get sick? Make him clean the toilets with his tongue? Make him small and be drowned with his pain as he was when he was that small, beat him to submission, beat him to the little boy he always was?

No.

He had better plans.

The lion opened his mouth, rose up like the sun, and…

Make them all pay. Make them all get their death wish.

He crushed the Oxycontin pills. He crushed them into piles of dog shit. He told them that there was nowhere else the queen and her little slave could get the pills at, except in this lovely little pile of excrement, so proudly displayed on their thrones and beds, hissing with flies, ready to eat, with wretched, goblin teeth they had.

They would eat and snort that dog shit, to get their high, to get their little buzz to make sure they never remembered their past, present, and future, only to be told by Your Royal Highness that it never was there at all.

The pills were simply sugar.

Oh, how her fucking face would crimple like a piece of sad paper with his stupid inane little wreckages. The mountains turned into little dog turds that were black and jettisoned with jagged crayon lines. The color of her cinnabar lips have turned babyshit brown. And the king was satisfied with his little game, and now he thought, it was time to pull the end from its sheets.

The mountains he would draw. How dark they were, how jagged, how they lunged towards the viewer with its wretched fangs that was always brought down in his family! The lemon yellow sun that would shine for him, that would give him hope as he climbed these morbid mountains, how they gave him the false sense that everything will be alright, that everything will be okay, because Miles was the king, the king of shit and the king with the thorny crown, he will be able to conquer anything, as his parents raised him to be this immortal being, this god among gods (his father and his mother, the Lakshmi and the vengeful Christ), how he wished he could bring down the sky and make it crash among the mortals, make them pay for what happened on this recess, the recess of his inner insanity inside the black holes in his eyes that shed light to all those who saw him. Miles, the Mountain King! Oh praise be to glory of the Mountain King, hallelujah! May he shed wisdom on our blind, deaf, and dumb souls! May he bring the end to what is simply the beginning!

And the Mountain King wished for his mommy and daddy to die. The Queen and the Slave no longer needed to live. They were useless to the king. No more use. They were the short stub of a pencil, while his arm had to rub off the graphite marks, the unused lead he could've used for his works. Too bad, so sad. And he must let them go.

He opened his lion teeth, the mountainous teeth, the sea inside his mouth, and he bit on her nipple.

The recess lady screamed in anguish, said that Miles had done it again and that he was a very bad and naughty child, and they would report this to his parents. Let them, he thought as he smiled widely. Let them and see how my power, my influence, has grown upon you. And I will use you and throw you away too, like the Queen and the Slave, like the Princess and the Raven.

And he said to his mighty people, HANG THE WITCH! HANG THE SLAVE! LET THEM SUFFER FOR THEIR CRIMES; THEIR LITTLE WAVERING SENSE OF INNOCENCE THAT WAS LEFT SHALL BE MAIMED! The Queen cried heinously, while the Slave simply called his Master the Piece of Shit he was all along. But the King laughed. He had no time for this foolishness. It was time for the Queen and the Slave to die, for they truly were the Pieces of Dogshit.

And in that flash of lightning that he drew as bleeding and as coarse as a broken slitted vein, his mother, his father, the Queen, the Slave, they were hung to dry like wet clothes, their backs shown to the world, as the ropes coiled around their necks, and their faces purple and hung with shame.

Like deer jerky hung to dry. It was delicious.

And it was time for him to be hung too. To be christened as a martyr. To be fully realized as the suffering artist, the artist who lost his soul, a long time ago, by the unhappy childhood, the parents who didn't care, the angel who could only help so much.

He held the rope in his hand with great care, hoping that Sonic would get the message of how much he truly wanted to die.

"No."

That was all he said, and those words seem to have taken such a strong effect on Miles' soul. Like the heavy chains were released, that someone cared. He could see Sonic's wings glowing, his heart illuminating his red bloody room, and he simply held him close, as he whispered that he was a good person, a nice child who honestly didn't want do any harm, why would he want to kill himself?

"To seal my legacy," he said.

"Your legacy of what? You haven't built much of a legacy, Miles! Those pictures you draw, of course they're very good and very…expressive, but…"

"I haven't lived long to realize my legacy is what you're saying. But I know that I will love long with you, Sonic. Just a little while ago, a nice little fairy just appeared by my door, while my parents were out playing with the razorblades and the drugs. Chip came here. And he offered me a deal. And he told me about your wish too. You were so desperate to save your brother, that you wanted to kill yourself by drowning in the sea, while the sea goddess was alive and wanted to swallow the world whole. Is that right?"

His brother, the weak little frail child that was stuck inside his soul like a little sliver of crawling rain drops on the roof of a house, he was awake, and he asked Sonic what he meant by a wish. As he stared into the red womb room beyond him, Sonic's eyes became weak, shallow, and his nose began to dribble and his breath was shortened, as chronic, gasps of breath began to emerge from inside his rib cage which seemed so fragile to him now, holding two souls inside, the little cat's eye marbles that children simply forgot to play with in this world.

"Sonic, I realized I was dead and then revived but…I didn't realize that you…wanted to sacrifice your life to save mine. And I can feel within your brain wires that you wanted to kill yourself when I died! How could you, my brother? I wanted you to spread my words, my pages, my story, unto the world when I was gone, and you decide to off yourself instead! How can my bigger brother, the one I looked up to, the one I trusted…"

Miles' eyes shrunk back to the floor of his room, the red royal carpet that his parents could afford what seemed to be so long ago, before he was born. "So…you really do believe in suicide. You really do believe that it can make you into a martyr. Your brother's death seemed to make you so depressed that suicide was the only option. The only way out. And you're supposed to be my angel. Angels are supposed to be perfect, Sonic. They aren't supposed to be…so flawed."

He couldn't get enough breath in his lungs to revitalize his brain. He knew that the truth of what happened in his past would affect Miles deeply, as he needed to show him a perfect example. Angels were all but nothing but perfect examples. Nothing but shining little artifacts for humans to gaze and marvel at. Statues for the museum. And he soiled his perfection by attempting suicide what seemed to be so long ago.

Soiled angels. Their wings were not of clear bleached white, but of mud, of maggots and of rust and grime. And Miles knew it. He possibly knew it all along. How ruined he was, how deplorable he was, with his selfishness, how he thought of himself as flawed as well, how his flesh seemed to rot and spoil away and he couldn't save any for Miles to eat, as Jesus Christ would've done. His flesh was everyone's flesh, everyone who wanted it.

He held his body, shivered of the frigidness inside, his breath visible like frost on a windowpane. The fact that a child used to look up to himself so much, and now thought of him as a flawed useless being, a mortal…

Miles began to think that maybe, just maybe, he was useless to the King of Shit too.

Sonic simply said as all these thoughts were absorbed inside his brain, "But I still don't want you to throw your life away. You're much too young to be doing that. At least wait until you're like, 40?"

He smiled. "I will do what I please, Sonic. My life is not of precious use to anyone. My parents thought so, but they ended up wrong in the end. And that's enough evidence that I'm just as much as a sacrifice to the gods, to have my wish granted to become a god, only to have a true, definite way that I will die. By defeating many other gods, by being remembered in the souls of people who worship me. Yes, I wanted to be remembered by people. But I told Chip that I didn't have to become a god to be remembered. If a seven year old boy commits suicide because of neglectful, abusive parents, then that's enough of a sensationalist news story don't you think? That I will be remembered by thousands of people? That I will be remembered in songs that artists decide to dedicate to, the paintings and drawings they will do, my art being in museums by default, a statistic, a number, that I was one of the ones who committed suicide at a young age? Of course. I will be remembered. No matter what Sonic. I will be…a martyr to everyone. I will be someone worth remembering, for my suffering, for my downfall. Everyone will remember me. Everyone. And I will make sure of it."

Sonic's eyes wavered as the little boy finished his speech.

He wanted to believe that this little boy will be alright, that he will be loved by many, that his parents would regret not raising him to be the proud shining boy he will be in a few years, a few months even. He wanted to show him that love does happen in these stories, and it was true. He wanted to show him that angels were real, and not made of plastic and chiseled stone, but they were invisible to the naked eye, not many people could see them.

Except to those who did believe.

"But would you rather be remembered for your drawings? Would you rather be remembered as someone who touched people's lives? You can get better at drawing. You can have people appreciate your art. You can enjoy drawing and painting much more than you do now. To have your work come to life. If you died, you won't know what you could really learn in this world. You could become a great artist, someone that people will remember for many years, like Leonardo, like Van Gogh. People remember things that touched them for a long time. They really do. And if you could survive a few years, think of how many people's lives you could make a difference in. Just think of how many you could touch in your lifetime. Life is all about making other people's lives better. That's why we live. To help. To make something out of ourselves. That's a lot of people's reasons for living. But yours…yours is just to die. Do you see how pointless that is? Just to kill yourself? There's no reason for that. Now come on, just wipe yourself off all this dirt and muck and live the best damn life you can. You are here for a reason; I can assure you of that. So come on, live! Live life like you always wanted to! Run, and keep running until your feet really feel like they can't take anymore. Until they shatter like glass. I want to run like that one day. To run until my feet collapse and I break down and I see how truly life is. I attempted suicide, I may have almost died twice becoming a god, you may feel like I already died, but I see life is beautiful, and if you can't see that right now, then you need to."

There was silence in the little womb room. Tails continued to look down on the royal red carpet, seeing the tessellations that the many shapes created with their little edges. The edges that were created by an artist, someone who believed in living their life until they could create something that would be remembered by so many people, something that Sonic claimed could "touch people's lives". But as he stared at the carpet, he thought it was barely worth remembering, that it reminded him of being in this lonely house that was built with shit, the house that his parents wished they could build with love, but only with scorn and hate and drugs.

He wished he could make something that people will remember how terrible his parents were for a lifetime, and he thought it could only be with suicide. And the suicide, the hanging, of the Queen and the Slave.

"But I want to be remembered for my works too, Sonic!" his brother clamored inside his rib cage, making them shake like glass chandeliers. "I wanted to finish my novel; you know how important that is to me! If we're going to die because you're not fighting any more gods and getting any more demon eggs, then you might as well give me all the time you can to making my novel. You know I have to write it. You know how my hands are shaking and dying to type at the typewriter his parents have, you know? I want to fully live and have people know my name, even if I just publish one novel. Can you do that for me big brother? Do we have a deal?"

Sonic smiled. He wanted to make a difference in other people than Miles. He wanted to make a difference to both his brothers.

"Of course. And you know, I think this particular novel of yours, we're going to make it into a bestseller. A bestseller with artwork that people will remember will stay in their minds as they read it. Isn't that right, Tails?"

Tails. A name given by someone who claimed to be his big brother. Someone who loved him. Someone who wished for him…to live.

And he realized that he, too, could touch Sonic's life. This angel who decided to give him a second chance.

And with these illustrations he could give to this novel they were preparing to write…if the novel ever became a bestseller, he would be remembered. Remembered for how emotional, how much he could touch other people with all the pictures he painstakingly made with his small, fragile little hands. He could do it. He could touch people's hearts with his hands. He could make their hearts grow bigger like he was a planter, a gardener, who knew how to grow these hearts as if they were ripened strawberries.

Tails, the new boy who was just given birth to in this womb room, with the design on his floor that the artist created to be remembered, he will remember it, because it was the first thing he saw when he was reincarnated, when Sonic, the fragile angel who was as fragile as himself, his other brother, gave birth to his new purpose. To be remembered as the great artist, the artist as emotional and as loved as Van Gogh, as Rembrandt, as so many artists whose deaths were recorded in history books, who painted their works with love and passion. He could be one of them. He could become a god in people's lives by just simply drawing and painting.

He didn't need to become an actual one. He just needed to live. Breathe. Age. He could become the tender ripe age of 90 before he could die. He could live for many generations. He could become a painter whose life was always marked by the works he did, what style he decided to use, he could become loved in the art community, yes, that was all he truly wanted. To be loved. Not in newspapers. Not in numbers. He could become loved in images. In people's eyes.

Sonic found the typewriter, aging like fine wine inside the neglectful parents' attic, the cobwebs and dust shaken off. And his brother, with the mind of a writer whose words were also aging like fine, black and red wine that was now lying in the streets as Sonic's elder, Shadow, whose throat was ripped and torn like a velveteen doll, he typed and wrote more of the raven, whose wings were as black as the gutted throat, as the hole inside the second mouth, as it was stitched by the lady rabbit, whose hair and ears were the same color as creamy sateen.

And Tails thought to himself, before the pages were to be flipped over by the reader, that this page, this moment of happiness, will truly last forever, or it was a simple mania, that the writer made him have, until at last, a few pages later, his back will be arched with sorrow and misery, and like the red wine on the Seattle streets, his blood will be spilled.

The Queen and the Slave still had to be hanged along with his body, he thought. Along with the Mountain King.