if the heavens ever did speak
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
His mind was never a strong thing – Before (before the purple, before the girl who was and was-not, before the burning, drowning, falling) he was a religious man but not a particularly strong one, he was a man whose knees were worn bare from prayer but had nothing to show for it. It’s only now that he realizes how strong it had been, with a single consistent string of memories. With a mind that stayed put, stayed placed within him.
That man did not know the strange feeling of reaching your branches to the sky, or the way the scent of rotted meat is suddenly ambrosia in a predator’s mind. That man did not know their histories, the piecemeal moments he collects unwillingly.
He’s touched broken girls and boys, and wicked ones. He is always sorry. He does not mean to know them in such a way, but his mind is an unleashed animal, it runs to them and does not heed him.
It is exhausting enough, to exist like this. Add in the dreams, add in the purple – the sensation of other lives lived tickling in the back of the mind, the strange symbols floating up, the thoughts, the sensation of loss – of losing her, losing himself.
The thought, too: She loves us.
He is not a strong man. He is not even a religious one, now (somewhere along the line faith was lost, drowned in what is surely madness). He is a lost man, a confused man. A man with the piecemeal knowledge of a dozen strangers, knowledge he does not want to bear.
(A man with the knowledge of how he looks, in their eyes – slack-jawed and stupid, colored a purple so dark and deep it’s black, unless you’re in the right light.)
He passes the girl and flinches involuntarily, expecting his mind to jump out to her, to return with some terrible knowledge for him to bear. But it does not. He feels it reaching, for a moment, and then the sensation is gone, and he is steadied.
He stops, and looks at her. He did not intend to speak to her, to anyone. He intended to walk on. But she stopped it. She did, or something else.
“What…” he says, struck, “what are you?”
sleaze
cancer x garbage
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