I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
Was it really him, who died?
It’s a question for the philosophers. If you lose yourself so completely in a magic-made body, a new identity, and that body – that name – is the one that is beheaded, is the one that burns, was it still your death?
Sleaze was there, somewhere – but Sleaze was buried under other identities. Other realities.
Perhaps that was a kind of death, too.
Whatever the case, he does not try to correct her, for the situation would be much too complex.
(“Oh, it’s quite all right, for I was a toy, I was hers, I wasn’t myself….”)
He focuses instead on the rest of her words. She alludes to her own deaths, likely closer to home then his, and he nods. He doesn’t know what to say to that – doesn’t know what to say to her at all, really, with the strangeness of this twilight conversation – but he listens. She speaks further, of another death that will not come, and he thinks, suddenly, of his father. Garbage had not idolized death – not then, not with Sleaze – but he had never spoken of it with any apprehension, and there had been an undercurrent of something in his words, something that unsettled Sleaze.
“Why?” he asks, bold and stupid as the water rushes past his ankles, and he thinks she’ll leave for the insolence of his question, which, he realizes now, wasn’t even clear at all, so he doubles down, keeps on digging that grave.
“What’s happened that’s made you ready, now?”
Sleaze
@[Agetta]