10-22-2019, 08:07 PM
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane; There’s a memory that’s not faded – His mother, recoiled in shock, in disgust, cursing at him, banishing him. He had not known why then, (those eyes, those goddamn eyes) he’d only known the strike of her hoof to him, her cries for him to leave, her final hateful name as she drove him from the desert. The last thing his mother called him, and so it had settled into his skin. He’d been called other names, briefly, but this was the one the always circled back to. And it was a rightful enough name, and whether his wretched existence begot the name or the name begot the wretchedness of his existence, he does not, and will never, know. He doesn’t say all this, of course. Though he is wont to overspill his emotions, he has enough common sense to keep the truth of the story locked away, at least the grisly details of it. “My mother did,” he says, which is true enough. He never met his father – only knows he shares his eyes – but from the faint tales that lasted, he knows he was not a kind man, and would not have cared a whit what he was named. “She didn’t like me very much,” he adds, a whisper of the truth. Even such a droplet is stupid to share with a stranger, because the rest of the tale is wretched, just as he is. He turns his attention more fully to her, then, struck by her eyes. He wonders why she’s in the meadow. But then, why are any of them? “What brings you to the meadow?” he asks, and maybe it’s a diversion, but it’s a sloppy one, it sounds more like some sad pickup line, and he lacks the suavity to carry such a thing off even on his best days, of which this is not one of. Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain. |