03-19-2020, 05:55 PM
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane; It is strange, for he still thinks himself an ancient thing. He spent so many years gray-haired and swaybacked, persisting and persisting and persisting, that it became all he knew. And he died that way too, aching bones walking into the ocean once and for all. And yet. And yet. A new body had emerged – he had been reborn, entirely against his will. A new body, primed, dark and sleek and knowing nothing of the aches and pains of old age. It had been strange then, and it was strange still, even as he has inhabited this new body for years now, and it, too, has aged, though there is only the faintest hint of gray at his muzzle to belie such a thing. He watches her, not privy to the things that take place in her mind. He notices the ears shift, the butterflies flitting about her, and he knows he has done something, but he does not know what. He does not dwell on it, though, for her next question comes, and it is his turn to have panic claw at his ribcage as his thoughts usher forth the image of her narrowed amber eyes, of the words spat on the sand. (“You’re nothing. You’re filth. You’re garbage.”) “My mother,” he says. A stronger man would make a joke here, something like she didn’t like me very much, but Garbage, of course, is not a strong man. He is a rather stupid one, as more thing pour from his lips, confessions to a woman he barely knows, who needs to know exactly none of this. “I don’t think I was meant to live long enough to have a name.” Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain. |