Mother squalls her rage at the thief. Father springs into action, yelling his own brand of fiery throated threat. Down upon the wind he spreads wide to gain his steam and with it, courage.
Larger, cold, and hungry; a broad tipped and brawny bully. The norm of nature, piracy. He kicked in the doors, front and back, and declared his stomach plundering might and moral. No time to digest plump prize; the locals have their anger after all––a weapon of its own kind.
A fervent but boyish pursuit ensues, knowing no court to petition and recompense rare and elusive. Snapping at ankles like a hellbent Pomeranian–frightful in fervor, not fight; quarter sized and half-regal, unrespectable and so, unrespected.
“Goodbye son, I am a failure and you are my dead weakness.”
The killer goes free not from trial but by mass and quick cunning.
Mother is his first thought: “Fuck.” Just meters away and in full sight, his lowly loss. Acceptance of a new reality and a reluctant bounce of the branch. These white tips fly always a spectacle, even in sorrow. The short branch before the second loss; first a son, then an angry mother; a stopping place for small reflection before getting on with it.
Silent upon arrival, head hung as low as it would, go–further even. Too close. A second provocation, he does not need––a silent hop and flap instead, she turns her back, and lands three feet away but a mile in her mind and by the metaphor all mothers make: ignore a failure and punish him. You both need it this way.
Only two remain and they’ve shut the hell up, having had their first brush with life and its wiping away from above, the sky’s talons tearing carelessly through siblings’ hopeful hearts–they’d never seen what’s inside. Red to stain the color of hope; the only two shades these creatures ever see.
Father gives some distance, recognizing his guilt. Its going to be a long week; there is no distraction from his son’s death, no art to be found in a wife’s lifeless rage staring straight through him, into far-off disbelief at life’s cruelty amidst such beauty and freedom. Only the next worm. The sexual act, cold now to repeat. A cold lover after a murder.
And that is how this world works? I refuse it. A hymn to Hermés must ensue: a lie, a comedy, we need! Or we might just as well all kill ourselves in protest of that terribly truer pigment. We measure fairness, and thus we need our love stories and our lying: boastful and ignorant fireworks to do battle with wet tears and apologetics for dreaded misfortune. We need the idea of fortune itself, and fate, and to lie about God, calling him the sun when the sun was his first weapon against wholeness.
Dad never needed to wake us up in the morning, but he did. And now he knows our suffering as his own; a weight to his wings, death of the life he loves–and loves for want of having a commiserator, if he’s honest. Without hopeful lies we act like these white tips; angry at every fucking thing in passing perdition; dive bombers and mad nihilists squalling but never singing. Lowly, we must have our tall tales and mead and cigarettes; songs for our lost sons––songs for our sorrow: soothsayers for a life we cannot possibly live, nor live without.