The enormity of my desire disgusts me; pollock

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray


If the boy is a breath in full, then he is a sputter and a gasp.
A trickle of blood and froth coughed.

He was once a sharp inhale, held until uncomfortable and desperate in the dark. His ribs depressed and pulled inwards, hoping to make himself small and smaller still, curled away in some dark crook of pine and nighttime. Unseen, he still felt vulnerable – as if those blinking eyes he thought he could see from behind the bends of wood and stone could pick at his cloak of invisibility and reveal him, tangle-legged and alone.
Utterly alone.

He had been too young, but life finds a way for boys like them. He had managed to dig deep into his own blueprint and find something sharp to wield (not given to him by that bitch nor that faceless man; his ability had been drawn into that schema by a hand unknown – the same cruel humoured god that saw fit to sever his right wing and crack the other into a million, painful pieces; a trickster deity). He waved his ability to go unnoticed in one hand like a sharpened blade and in that space (all his own) he grew and grew darker.
(He would say he grew stronger, but that would a be a lie. Revisionist history. He grew angrier and bitter.)

Not so long ago, he would not have gone to her or him.
But that was before the snow and the northern times.
That was before he was remade – now he finds himself compelled to reach out to the young and unfortunate; to flagellate from them their odious fragility. To punish and reform. He watches the boy, with that ungainly gait, and grinds his teeth together. Wide-eyed and unsteady he bobs, as if in a dream, through the moss and pinkish-white spring-beauty.

And just like she (his Elve) had been, he is alone.
And Pollock knows alone. He knows alone.

He is standing near the boy without notice (invisibility and his supernatural speed made to catch unawares – he enjoys watching the roil of shock; he is given away only by the drag of his wing, washed clean from the previous night’s efforts in spring melt). He inspects the boy, slinking around to check both sides. Ribby and leggy. So terribly new. He clucks in mimic of concern, bending his brutish head to the boy’s level (the crust of day old blood still flaking off his bridge and cheeks and horns like old paint), “you should not be here alone, boy.” He pulls back and up, peering down at him and quirking the sides of his lip.
“How very foolish of you, child. How very foolish.”


POLLOCK
Lone Artist and Phina’s