the church bells were all broken; malis/jenger pony

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife There are a hundred selves, a hundred deaths. Velvet was there, owner’s name carved upon his belly. Velvet knows toy boxes and a clown with a Glasgow smile, knows the sensations of falling, of drowning, of a head twisting off. Velvet knows, she loves us. Cloud was there, a creature reborn, taken by God’s hands (her hands) from the garbage. Cloud, who was made whole again, made complete, the scars painted over. Cloud knows tenderness, a girl with brown hair and a medicinal touch. He knows how she fixed things, ministered to them. Cloud knows the feel of moss under his feet. Cloud knows, too: she loves us. Sleaze knows the feel of moss. Sleaze knows he burned. Sleaze knows he was dead. Sleaze knows he was called, somewhere, and then there is nothing: an empty spot, scrubbed. Sleaze knows a prayer, or part of it: yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil. His mind was never strong to begin with, and now it is worse. Now his mind is glass, delicate. Outside the glass are memories he cannot comprehend. Outside the glass is an inferno, a knife, a tiger with no face. He cannot look too long into that abyss, lest it gaze back. His mind is frail, and it is no longer his. His mind jumps into things, sometimes. Into trees, rocks, a river. The sensations – sunlight like life pouring into chlorophyll, the cool wet completeness as he carved paths through the world – are strange and unnerving. Once he slipped into another person, and their thoughts were there, he saw himself, blank-eyed and mouth slack. He saw himself, and it was terrible. Sleaze never particularly liked himself, but it’s worse, now. Worse, now, with the strange toybox memories and the slip-sliding mind that Sleaze cannot quite control. He tries to pray, but the words are dead on his tongue. He doesn’t know what he believes anymore. He doesn’t know who he is anymore. So he walks. He walks and he focuses his mind, keeps it to himself. He walks and he tries to think of the prayers he once said, kneeling on the moss with Garbage’s head laid across his withers. He walks and he tries not to think of the things that dance beyond the glass of his memory, the grinning clown, and, somehow worse, the devotion with which he once said the words: she loves us. sleaze cancer x garbage