"I'll break them down, no mercy shown; heaven knows it's got to be this time!"
The next morning was a grey one. The sun never teased a ray early, and instead our slice of the vault was pushed over by pile a thundering coal chunks, weeping showers down partnered by the vengeance of summer heat. By noon, the pavement was blistering steam geysers up, anyway, and with the torrent of rain coming down like arrows, the rest of the daylight spent its rage in vain trying to penetrate an opaque shield. Dusk never came by the close of the day, either, or dawn by the beginning, for that matter, so it seemed the night had simply grown sick of day's delays and stirred awake but stuporous, and now she was upset.
I'd skipped my first period, not caring for the subject as before nor concerned about grades, but it turned out the teacher was not to be insulted on this matter, and so took it upon herself to hold me after school for a tongue lashing. I made it out with no scars that weren't already there, and finding the school after hours empty and silent, I stepped into the sooty evening. Lying on the streets were corpses of wilted cherry blossoms and silver puddles, dead beggars passed by faceless cars dragging red tails behind them.
When I came again to the corner where I said farewell to my road-bike, no forlorn sentiment imposed itself upon me, but Death did follow and make itself known, perching as a black cat on the wall close to where that dog-girl once stood, giving me a pair of watchful eyes. There was no trace of any stygian admonition, but instead it emanated as an ambassador the primal fear of all mystery.
As I shimmied along the sidewalk wall, it scaled along with me, now prancing with haughty piston shoulders that bounced up and down, up, and down, until at the old village junction where the wall gave out, it left me. There, it stood sentinel on its hill until vanishing behind the fog, going out like a whispering breath through candle smoke. That stare never left, though.
On the antique street, the old folks were scarce and scattered. Some were slumped on their porches and rocking in chairs one-hundred years their senior, watching the drizzle wane and carry the hours of the day into a soft caress; but most were tucked inside their spider den cottages, spying out blemished windows and scouring the platinum road. Whereas downtown looked almost chrome under that layer of April's tears, this old town's argent varnish was crusted and speckled in turquoise tarnish—the old folk would go gently along, then, smoldering forever in a timeless epilogue rather than perish finally.
I passed the old woman's flower shop, where a bony hand waved kindness through the window, and I returned what kindness I could with a nod, given my preoccupation with a sling bag. Inside it were a few baseballs and an old aluminum bat I stole off some bastard who stuck me up out here last summer. He was a lanky one—taller and older than me, adorned with a lip piercing among other degeneracies. But I remember that day because of how sunny it was, how that glint of light shined treasurely off the barrel. I was angrier back then—I still am—but I beat him, and now it was mine.
I brought it with me today for no reason. The pitching machine worked, but I never used it, nor did I ever assume it worked, not with all that orange rust coating the trough. It was only a souvenir for that day—to remember that nobody could encroach on the little world I'd come to know in this backwater town, the place where people loved without object, risibly bereft of any of the callow transports of the modern youth, or the transient fancies of hormonal desire.
Yet, the beige rectangle was a mockery of this village, indeed; inside it, though, an altogether subversive ritual took place; where in seeking to destroy the dwelling of splendid candor that the modern men could never build, the men with hearts in their chests—the ones with their eyes pointed headstrong toward the mere shadow of an ever more luminous world—retorted a campaign that would never cease while they lived. It was ludicrous, of course, but authentic, nevertheless. They really believed in something, but they were all delusional.
For my annihilative ruminations, still, I pinched myself and entered the building, reveling in the new chorus as the incessant shower quieted to a deep, dull moan against the roof. The lights in the cages were already on and buzzing their fly-wing tune, so I threw my wet clothes with no care, and began toward the cages. However, as though startled by me, a frond of furry grass stuck up like a puppet show behind one of the panes of glass in the wall, soon gliding across the stage toward the door wagging. A brown snout poked out of the door frame and scanned studiously until concluding on one satisfactory huff, whereupon an elderly beagle appeared excited.
He had a baseball caught in his jaws, which he promptly dropped in front of me in anticipation.
"There's nothing you can teach me, old dog. Shoo."
Its wagging tail suddenly stopped, and as if by some demiurgic contrivance, its eyes turned inward to a canine contemplation; then, it trotted back into the cages, tapping its nails against the hard floor, and returned with a ball of tasty shoe leather in its mouth—or so I thought.
It was cradled delicately, such that his incisors hung off the outside edge and spared any razor-sharp niceties from cutting deep into it. He came forward and presented his trophy, and I saw it: it was a glove, fashioned in shiny burgundy leather and threaded to completion by a loop of black strips. On the thumb, as though it were a rule, was an embroidery of wavy cursive letters suggesting the careless wanderings of the high 60s: "Wind-Breaker".
I received it like a gift and turned the palm up, where a few chicken scratch scuffs were evidently sanded away, but still leaving the indelible mark of a name: "Hanzo Masaki". Already my hand was urging to it, wanting a taste of electricity, and feeling no conscientious resistance to it, my fingers slipped right in. To say it fit like a glove would be a malapropism of infinite proportion—it fit better than my own skin. The leather was broken-in to my liking, too, clasping with just the sort of give that the water returned a swatting hand.
And again, I felt ensnared that vexingly noumenal inclination, and my soul moved first with my mind second toward the mound, toward that calling rubber. That unanswerable judge was inviting me to participate in a secret knowledge the likes of normal men can merely mock but never destroy—like the taste of chocolate. And what do I know about chocolate after it's all gone? Could I really ponder the taste?
And ambrosia as such came on a plate—a plate that was exactly sixty feet six inches away, which was more than enough to scare anyone like a desert cliff stretching out dry below them. It scared me a little, but the golden ticket at the bottom enticed a dual fate.
My wind-up had come to bear naturally. I never thought much about it, but it always felt like a circle, despite my tetrapodal station; my whole body would come around as though charging up a spark of electricity, rubbing cotton slippers on warm carpet. When my leg actually came up, that was all there was—no thoughts, no perception, just the movement of something phantasmal across an equally impalpable substrate, and off the impulse of my violent will would go into the ball. But not this time.
A soft but indubitably apprehending crack sounded out across the cages, jolting me out of that transcendent pond and into the world again, where everything was somehow blurrier than before. There was a small girl by the door—small compared to me both in size and confidence. She was standing with her one arm behind her back and other bent, grasping the former meekly, turning eyes downcast.
To wit, I recognized her right away as that girl making a bashful menagerie yesterday morning, only now her strobe light gazes were a warmer. She was see-through from the rain—her clothes were, too; and there was something bouncing in her mind begging to leave her tongue, but seemingly those restless pulses came out as nervous gestures instead, like her leg crossing over alluringly and tapping the floor, or her eyes darting innocently about, forsaking any single victim of perception.
I had to stop myself from staring, for one, since her unintentionally cutesy antics were stirring up a contusion where, for all appropriate and formal affairs, there should not be. Regretfully, though, that refrain came out as a sort of choking sound—the kind where one's voice begins to vibrate the chords and then snap away like strummed string on a guitar.
I hated myself for it, but this was the first time in three years I'd even looked at a girl. That's hard to believe, I know, but I definitely don't believe in myself, so any incorporeal intelligence who may be quiescently observing my sorry life can rest assured that it's true, at least.
She began, "I… well, so, you see—"
Her voice was faint and smooth like fingers cursoring over white paper, or cotton blankets fluffing and rubbing together. Pure comfort. I had trouble holding onto her words, feeding more on the way she said them; and it didn't matter, anyway, since it was clear she had no idea what to say, either.
"I didn't stalk you, I just—" She suddenly burst up stuttering. "No—I just saw you leaving and—"
Please stop. You're giving me second-hand shame.
"Don't worry. You're not creeping me out. That's just backwards, anyway."
It was the least I could do, after all. This poor girl had to be alone in this musty old rot with me, who by no means was an individual of savory or sacred appearance, but who, thanks to a stewing isolation, had come to unequivocally dismiss any spurious entitlements or social courtesies expressed for his benefit. Well, it still hurt to be ignored, but I tend to think I am a rather handsome man—the fierce, scary looking kind that might kill you. It was the eyes, you see.
"M-My apologies," she said, gathering a few strands of constitution, "I saw you leaving—"
"Alright, alright, save it for later. Just tell me why you're here."
Beautiful and unreachable as she was, I was really just getting annoyed. I'd been waiting to throw this damn pitch for three minutes now, and it was no undue affect of bitterness that I'd been severed from an ecstatic marriage between myself and my obdurately noumenal longings.
"I… ok," she reneged, looking astonished, "I came to apologize on behalf of my family for hitting you."
Hitting me? When? With what? Those gleaming eyes of alpine snow? With that adorable frosty voice and reservedly beautiful face?
"I don't understand."
No, actually, I get it now. It was yesterday when that black limo went hurling down the street in that fit of abject pomposity—it was that abnormality of fate that killed all the wild yearnings for tour de France. Still, if she was driving at her age, then she'd already exceeded my languid adolescence by a mile.
"Our butler was driving—"
"Your butler?"
"Let me finish, please." Her face relinquished finally that care for appearances. "We will claim all responsibility for the damages."
"Well, I'm fine, as you can see. No need."
That was my chance to recover those dashed aspirations of riding down the white winding caps of the French alps, but my pride had always been bigger than my imagination, and far larger still than my will to assume the burdens of indentureship.
"I-Is that so?"
It looked like she'd come here with a plan and a script of robotic expiation, but now relieved of any material collateral to afford me, she had only, perhaps, an impromptu set of meager encomia that she was by no reasonable means compelled nor responsible to deliver to me; and better that way, indeed. A girl like her shouldn't have to stoop so low. It was making me feel bad.
"In that case, I suppose I'll be going."
It was eight o'clock already. The walk here was an hour and a half, which I took already an hour late after being held by the teacher; and so, already the light of day would have long departed. She'd walked all the way out her out of respect for her family and the way they'd wronged me… I'm assuming. Anyway, she'd be a teenage girl—a fine one, by my lecherous estimates—wandering alone through the night city. I didn't like that.
Fretfully, she picked up an umbrella at her feet which I presumed her dropping was the start of our awkward exchanges, and began shuffling toward the door.
"Hold on."
She looked like a treasure chest at the bottom of a river.
"I'll walk you back."
She didn't make any effort to disagree, nor any effort to hide her distress; though, her reaction did seem—and this is my opinion, now—a bit exaggerated. At the very least, she'd be safer walking with someone, even a ragged vagabond, but here she struggled to even look in my direction.
Her feet came to a dragging stop at the lobby, where, with myself following, she made a rapid barrage of reticent glances at the reception desk and then back at me. She did this eleven times
"What?"
She hooked her finger at the desk.
My clothes were damp on the counter where I suppose my careless toss had damned them, and maybe she thought I would forget them (I wouldn't). Rather, I had forgotten that her condescending—to invoke its most etymological meaning—society had taken place while I was shirtless; but it wasn't like she'd never seen anyone shirtless before, no doubt. Was she looking at…? No. That's not how girls work, not for me.
But Insofar as the prototypical fifteen-year-old is sharpened to the sturdy contour of an Olympic athlete, I was there proud at five-eleven one-hundred-sixty pounds. Yet, considering the circumstances and the merits of my vagrant caste, a girl's gaze lay beyond a mountain's climb.
I indulged her anyway and picked up my rags, declining the shirt and wrapping just my zip-up jacket to my collar bone, stuffing what remained, including the glove, in my sling bag. By the door she was waiting, holding out a quavering diffidence in the umbrella wondering, I think, where in the manual of social convention this scenario was archived and explicated. She looked ready to fall apart, and given it was all her venture, I decided to carry the yoke—maybe for good.
·◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆◇·
As we came out into the rain, I peeled back a secant slice of the round shield to reveal the twilit sky above, where a white crescent and her day-shy companions visited their premonitory glee—I waved a goodnight, and down the road we went with her blessing. Soon, we beat the old town's nocturne sigh and joined the screaming city, where the still wet pavement sparkled like fish scales, and the curbs glittered from gold dust plumes falling out of dream-walk windows and ramen shops.
Behind the guising curtain of night, as I've always said, the humble hobos and the neck-tie nobodies, whether in their creaky shacks or sky-scraping pillars of glass, all bowed before the same arresting terror. That's why the cars went slow here: for one, to appreciate the white dot in the black swirl; and two, because you could really trip in the dark, no matter how many night-lights you carry on your sleeve. There's no banishing dark without forsaking light; so, in the end, maybe it all had to be grey. A grey world without black, without white, no right and no wrong. No checkers. Nonsense.
The girl beside me had been quiet for the most part. All she had parted with since we left the more withering outskirts was a murmur which I don't she meant for me to her: Yukinoshita. Under-snow girl. I thought she needed that name for anything in this world to make sense; for you see—and I hate this about myself—I think the world rhymes in a sort of startling way, like when the billowing branches of a pine tree abruptly smack you reeling with the fact of its pine tree-ness, and the sobering reality of its ferocious animus.
She'd caught me by surprise when we reached the train station, where the swelling crowds and the bustling car horns must have assuaged a comprehensible anxiety on my part. As usual, she spoke softly and with no less of that mollifying fluffiness which angelic metaphor understates. So subtle was she, that I nearly forgot her.
"What was that?" she asked, tugging my sleeve.
"Hmm?"
"I thought perhaps I had interrupted you before."
She did, but I didn't really care. This thing I had—it was more than just a hobby. It was a blasphemy in every sense of the word; blasphemous to me, to my own stubborn faith in the faith of unfaith, whatever it really was, and to the ineffable truth I knew already to be.
"That's uh… it's nothing."
She never pried beyond that, though I wanted her to for reasons I can't explain. I'd cultivated something in my own garden worth showing off, and still I never felt compelled beyond an inchoate day-dream fantasy to act. There was a blanket of grief covering it. I just… she wouldn't judge me, but that was exactly what I needed; and in my inmost tendencies, estranged of any one object of desire, I wanted it, too.
"How did you find me?"
I asked that without thinking. Maybe I wanted to fill the silence instead of watching the lights of that distant metal bullet come cruising more slowly by the minute, or maybe I wanted to know what a girl of conspicuous dignity was thinking chasing me down, even if she did nearly kill me. It didn't matter now, though; the words were out.
"I…" she seemed perturbed, coming off acerbically. "I followed you. I waited till you were finished with Hiratsuka sensei, but you were very fast."
"That doesn't—"
I didn't think she was going to like that.
"Never mind."
The train came to a screeching racket on the rails, opening doors to an empty cabin. With her next to me still, I felt I had company enough to last a century or more. I don't know if she just said the right things at the right time, or if she was a phantom run fugitive out of the heavenly realm of good sense, but if there was ever a need for a partner in the conspiracy of making good sense, I would ask for her.
Entering the portal, we left behind that conversation for the next train, which was sure to come again crashing through a white-blanket blizzard to bring that sojourner's appointment a proper resolution. But trapped in the fold of finitude, we could be only at this place at this time, on this train, skating bumpy on the rails.
It was a twenty-minute ride, but we saw everything. In the downtown distance, the tallest buildings were cut at the neck by an obscuring fog—atop which a giant probably lived—such that the radio lights gleaming were the brightest stars in the night sky; and below them, ants and other people scurried like caravans through the narrow glass canyons, making promises to bosses they hated, and taking their vices out to dinner on the weekends who hated them more. It was pissing me off.
When we left at the next station, we, too, became ants beneath that cosmos; and though fleeting as it was, I began a strange delusion that our paths had not merely met for a transitory promenade, made to conclude and go on swimming back into the endless ocean, but that our magnitudes would clash and stir a maelstrom; and by the end of that riotous rage, appearing nimbus in the storm-eye, would be life-sustaining myth. Some kind of myth.
Whatever that maddening myth was, it was wrapping like a noose around my neck and pulling my head into a pillory as we came rolling down the stretch, where I was prone to speak suddenly, lucidly.
"I'm sorry," she said with a little ice on her tongue, "Your family must be worried."
"Hehe, no, actually. I hate them, and they hate me; we haven't spoken in months."
By that point, she'd already slipped out from under the umbrella and was showing lips that could say something, that could smile, or stay pursed and placid, and let time wash away the awkward air. I'd said too much, and I knew it, but how could it hurt me? It wasn't like my family would hear it like a curse bouncing off the sky; nor would this girl, even if given to asinine whims of defamation, ever leave a mark such as I had not already done to myself.
"They didn't chase me out, either" I began to laugh some more. A knot was coming undone. "Real family does that. They just let me walk."
Her legs split ever so wider apart, as though the spying eyes of a predator had triggered a feline instinct. Her voice became stern, affected by some predilection to pithy moralisms, prepared at once to deliver an inculcative speech on the matter of family.
"That's unfor—"
"But I'm not just wandering." Again, the urge to speak and purge this knot ambushed me. "I'm walking… feels sometimes like I'm sprinting to it. I don't know what it is, but I want it. And even if it's just agony forever and ever, it's something realer than arithmetic. Something true. I-It's so optimistic, I can't even forgive myself for believing it."
When I finally looked at her again, I couldn't believe it. There was steam rising up from a pot of boiling blood beneath her, and soon she'd be seeing red. I didn't even know what I was saying—just spouting the first thing that came to mind spurred on by a pathological bruise left by someone or something lost to memory. Then, just before her retaliatory wrath came spilling, her shoulders relaxed, as though an epiphany had descended like angel's wings to lift the burden for her.
"So that's what it was," she whispered.
I realized then that my heart was racing, and my breaths were coming out like clouds in front of me, and I was staring at her with bloodshot eyes like a madman under the full moon. But that lightness of spirit didn't long before a demon tugged her shoulder again.
"It's certainly foolish," she said smugly, "that was suitable once when monsters lived in the dark, but now lies are suitable, too."
Any modicum of sense left in me was shattered by that speech. A few years ago, I would have been—should have been—inclined to agree with soapbox fervor, but the bloodletting cynicism dripping off her tongue painted a vision of reality so vapid, so vacuous, so degenerate—so like the future I once prophesized was the real image of all mankind, that the already frayed thread of my nihilism snapped with unremitting venom.
"Without that foolishness…? yes, without that, the pain of existence will twist you into something so vile and cruel that even you will wrench and coil and writhe, and the words 'evolutionarily maladaptive' will stick to your tongue like quills. You'll choke on the words: all the machinations of your reason will crumble, and you'll certainly vomit, but you'll hurl up your stupidity and not your foolishness, because you were not born a sophist; you were born a fool! And who could be more honest than a fool?" I was slobbering over myself, embarrassing myself, but I couldn't stop. "And you would rather listen to your foolishness because it's too stupid to lie, too stupid to see how fucking absurd this world is, too stupid to even dream wild about some futile rebellion against…! Gah! Too stupid to be arrogant, too humble to lie; because what is more evil than to use the gift of your smartiness to look two plus two and say five because even the wrenching—and you will certainly wrench for that—pleases you for the very fact that you could lie, and because, like most good things, the truth is not mere pleasure? And perhaps because pleasure actually makes you sick!?
"That's—!" She cried wearily, keeping her pearls clammed beneath the shell, "…this is far enough. I can walk the rest of the way."
With that, time marched through mud, even as she sauntered away quickly as she could. Two blocks down, she stopped in front of a pool of light pouring out the door of a high-rise apartment. The sign was too far away to read, but I could tell it was French because the letters looked slippery. It was the kind of language that only rolled off the tongue if it was loose enough to lie.
So that was it. That was it, as she put it. I puked my guts up and came no closer to draining this swamp of stifling miasma and or scattering the creeping abominations therein. The wetland waste could drain through time perdurable, and by the end of the age be just as full as before for the simple fact that it poured out into itself.
Maybe she was right, too. A bunch of lies would've been better—would have been a lot less screaming, a lot more peaceful. Peaceful…? Yeah, peaceful… like margarine. I can't believe it's not…
·:·:·:·:·:·:·:·:·:·
Twilight takes what little light the sun can give her, and the sun gives her everything, so they are both slain by the jealous usurper, the witch of the hour, who takes the black throne. She was with me on the way home, thinking perhaps I would treat her to a tryst, but she's a whore. That's why they call her the lady of the night—it's why they call it the witching hour.
For me it was the bitching hour, though, a time for me to cry querulous at the moon, to loiter sick in carmine alleys, kick wind-chime cans into sewer drains, stomp firefly cigarettes on concrete curbs, pick mean fights with folks I don't know. Kick some ass; get my ass kicked—wakeup next to crack-heads and other mendicants, shake hands and trade numbers, shake down and trade places—just so something different would happen. These nights aren't rare anymore. These nights… these lonely nights… The days are bad, for sure, but oh, man, the nights.
Acting out was easy at first; I'd just walk out, roam till my own thoughts nauseated me, and come back after midnight to find the door unlocked. But after the third time, they stopped pretending to care, and I came every night to shake the hand of a cold unturning knob. I couldn't blame them, nor did I ever dare to, feeling no due recompense for some passionate commission exceeding the bounds of simple courtesy. But not receiving an ounce, or a hair's whisper—I mean the most diminutive sound a hair makes when it stands on end and startles the air—that penury turned to stone what flesh was left.
With that over, I took the remainder of my nocturnal mournings on south to Chiba's moorings where I dumped them, watched the waves for a while, then drifted back a mile with the winds of no more than a few back-alley forays, arriving finally as flotsam washed up on the rocky shores of my front lawn.
It was dark then, but by now matters of elucidation or deception were wasted on me. A languid light poured out like droplets on the window—the kitchen window, for I knew what was about to happen—and the doormat was a cruel judge, "Welcome," in that lofty cursive.
Scurrying up to the patio, I made no attempt to stretch time by making haste of staying my step, for it was fate, what was about to happen, and she neither waited nor urged her playthings along—they would always go to her, because she was everywhere. Coming through the door already were a few muffled objurgations: two voices; one to admonish, and one to forgive. One was my father's, and one was my mother's.
Neither of them held any favorable disposition toward me, but my mother had shown me the occasional tepid smile in the mornings before school; and my father, whose face I had not seen since November, glued a kind of smoldering disapproval to me whenever we did meet. There always seemed to be an inexpressible desire for him to 'teach' me something—that if only I knew what he knew, I'd be chatting up mixers and making routine reports to the executive suite.
The knob turned fatally, and coming to the foyer lip, my leg naturally came up along with my hand, but I hesitated right at the moment of slipping my shoes off—whatever was about to happen would be over like a tsunami, so I left them on and proceeded to the kitchen, where my parents already sulking under the lone lamp were waiting. When eyes laid on, my mother buried her face into the table, and my father stood up, holding the twisted metal corpse of my bike along with a contortion of no uncertain juvenoia.
"Hikigaya Hachiman!" he erupted, "do you know what have you done to this family!?
"I—"
"Do you know how much this is going to cost, young man?"
Instead of anger, a chill ran down my leg, causing me to shamble backwards as my brain dangled precariously on what my father, my own flesh and blood, had just said. My ears were foaming up and ringing, more and more scraping down to the piercing drone of a detuned radio.
"A-Are you fucking serious?"
His face contorted disgustingly. My mom was beginning to soak the table in tears, and already I could hear footsteps thumping the stairs, my sister surely awake.
"Do I look like a joke to you?! You don't do anything around this house; you sleep, you eat, but you barely go to school, and now I'm hearing you ran into a very wealthy family's car! What if they press charges? What if they sue us?"
Out of the corner of my eye I saw my sister stalking the stairs, her hand fixed on the rail. She was sneering the dirtiest look at me, and I already knew what she was thinking—what she was going to say. I hadn't been nice to her at all these past three years; in fact, I'd been vicious, cynical, repugnant—I'd been mean to her friends, I'd ignored her, made her cry. I deserved it.
"Deadbeat brother," she muttered, and stormed back upstairs.
My father seemed stunned, stuttering on what he was about to say, though whatever it was, my body apparently didn't seem keen on sticking around to find out. A surge of adrenaline was chilling my legs nearly to sleep, dragging me toward the door; and when I pushed out, it swung back with a vengeance, slamming shut. Then, I walked, and walked, and walked, and walked, the houses passing as phantoms by, giving way to cobblestone.
Plunking down the loose rocks, watching weeds grow slowly, mulling under powerlines and streetlamps—twelve miles later I was back where it all started: the old carrion rectangle; the one which was decaying endlessly but never dying—that startling immortality. The place which sustained far beyond the means of rainbow painted men, sustaining on its own elixir. By night, this place came alive, became a new creature.
Inside, what once was old was new again; the broken ballasts buzzed like a sonorous song, the stale air flowing smelled fresher than the spring, and the jaundiced walls were gilded like glitter. Buried under the black blanket, estranged of hedonistic distractions, was when its wisdom came howling out of the grave, arms out-stretched doggedly toward the starry sky, putrid macerated fingers peeling yellow rotted nails. Decay but never death.
The bench by the wall, which I had always thought a pathetic vestige, was hard and cold, but it never said no. It was dry, but the air was damp, carrying from over the arid mountain's shadow the endurance of our sea, sustaining beyond the means of food and water. I hated it, and yet… there's nowhere else to go.
That's something worse than wandering—you're wandering because you're not where your supposed to be, but I'm not supposed to be here. It's worse than exile—they want you to come back out of the desert dunes with hands and conscience bleached white by the hot sun, come crawling back to open arms and rings and robes. But this is banishment.
The hard planks made no attempt to soothe my heavy head or lighten my shoulders, but instead parted a somniac vision, slipping in through the woody pores and into my ears. A green leprechaun field, an Irish stream gurgling from a gale, a flock of sheep keeled over dead and pure white wool stained red. A shepherd weeping a flood of tears like rapids crashing rock, washing me against the sands, washing bleary eyes awake…
What the fuck do I do now?
