Return 3

It was the captain who noticed the significance of the feathers first — the children were simply busy playing with them, while some of the followers gathered up the downy ones and stuffed them into sacks. It walked with us, and as its feet grew callused on the stone-grass, its wings shed continuously, as though they renewed themselves every so often.

The captain picked one up, and stared at it for a long time, booted feet plodding along with the rest of us, until suddenly the grey sky was full of shouts and  laughter.  He held up the slim feather, and his fingers touched the rachis, and there was music, silver light and fire all at once, and it lit up his face from within.

Return 2

The creature was a fascination; the captain hadn’t come back in hours and no one had thought to call out. When our band crested the ridge, the few children left to us ran down the muddied, rocky slope, heedless of the exhausted, wordless bleat of warning that came from an over-protective few. The fallen thing fell silent and reached for them as they came close, and they crowded round, grubby fingers eager to touch it, their mudstained hands leaving redgrey fingerprints and smears. Our captain stood and carefully watched them explore, watching, too, the skything, as it struggled to respond to each querying touch. At last, overwhelmed, it lifted its voice in song, and the astonished crowd drew back, holding its collective breath. That is how we found them, surrounding and surrounded by it. It sang as though that were the only way it knew to speak. It sang as though its voice were Music itself. It sang, and we listened, with no thought to the lengthening shadows, or the coming chill.

For Trent (And Bill, and the people who read the refrigerator note but don’t understand it…)

Maybe because
it is spring
I am naked
and whitegreen,
newly formed
and forming.
Maybe because
I want the wind
on my face
and at my back.
Maybe because
I am burned
by the sun
but need it
to blind me.
Or maybe
the taste of ashes
means I am
a phoenix, rising,
and now
it is time
to fly
again.

Return

In the aftermath, there were those who uncovered the dead, and those who buried them. There were no services, no names, and no mark-stones. No one would look upon the fields sown with blood and ash. We were wide-eyed under the stars,  squinting under the sun. We staggered and tumbled, blown in every direction, fallen leaves in an unexpected storm. At times, there was little enough to say that we would go for weeks without speaking, without a sigh or shout or sound. Perhaps that is how, when it came from the heavens, cloudstained and broken-winged, the captain’s heart was caught — he was the only one who remembered what it was like to hear music. He stopped covering the faces of those who would never see again, and he followed the ghost of a memory as it drifted on the wind, to the spot where it lay in the stone-grass, shattered and scattered and still singing, staring up at the hole in the sky where it had fallen through.

Kneel

Listen, listen. Ear to the door and you can hear the heavy bass and slow, nearly-non-existant drums of something Top 40 Generic; she plays it while she lays on the floor and looks for galaxies in the texture of the ceiling tiles. When she’s high, she lets the white of everything melt down and puddle on the floor — later when she’s coming down, she’ll clean it up while she listens to the soundtracks to anime that she’s never had translated, a springing beat to the Japanese lyrics she can sing, but can’t understand.

Except today, while she’s staring up at the ceiling, her eyes will glass over, and she’s never going to breathe again — those nearly-non-existant drums are more like the nearly-non-existant heartbeat, slowing and slowing in her chest.

Listen, listen, and you’ll be able to hear it stutter.

She doesn’t feel it; she’s finally found her stars.

* * *

Kneeling down over the body, he rested his fingertips on the cheek, still warm, and kept his eyes shut. This was not the first body he’d seen, not the first death of someone too young, not the first death of someone who ‘didn’t deserve it’. Not the first time it was senseless, pointless, horrific, depressing, full of despair.

This was not the first time he’d fallen in love with a corpse for the way she finally looked peaceful.

This was not the first time he lit a cigarette in the midst of a crime scene and walked away.

This was not the first time it hurt — perhaps that’s why it hurt so strongly, so that he couldn’t get used to it, couldn’t be blinded by it, couldn’t be dulled to the fact that failure was not an option, that human lives are worth more than paper, money, drugs, sex, booze, contracts.

That every time he squeezed the trigger, someone else would find themselves kneeling.

I was dreaming…

And within the barren fields of Winter, there was, among the grass gone brown from the cold, from the dying sun, a line of trees that stood against the horizon. Tall and thick-limbed, overgrown with gnarls and twists, and they blocked the way to the beyond. We stood in a line, the hills to our back and the hills to the future, and we could not tell the time, for the sun was obscured by the dull grey dome that is the sky in perpetual lateness. Hard ground beneath our feet, and the line of trees was not forboding but forbidding.

No way forward, and the way we had come was only mountains threatening taller and taller.

Through the branches, I could see the white. I could see the delicate. I could see the lace of sycamores, silver and singing, and I was not sure of my place anymore. Something ephemeral danced there, something beyond the branches, where, across a line I could not see but knew existed, there was a field, low and fresh, that still hung sweet with spring.

We stood there, in a line, and looked through the trees while the grey sky fell slowly, threatening blankets of snow, ice that would keep us from ever advancing. We stood there, and looked to the white lace of branches beyond branches, and thought of spring beneath hills we had not yet seen. We thought of a sky that rained sunlight in blue-golden, and where we would not hear the rustle of frozen leaves and cold-cawing crows. Where the silver-white of sycamore was not the color of the frost on the ground, but the white of snowdrops come early, knowing nothing of midwinter’s meaning.

We stood there and knew that there was dancing, beyond that line, and that above all, it was not for us.

Distance

Resignation. Such an indelicate word for the most fragile of moments. It speaks of surrender and acceptance, of diminishing and death.

In some ways, it is fitting — and in some, not at all.

He has always been a ghost who sees, a whisper who walks, a shadow that touches, a spirit that passes over first and last born alike, Ending without judgment of his own. He is cradled by the gun, held up by its weight in his hands, supported by the sound of each bullet racking into the chamber, the oiled mechanism clicking darkly, soothing him as he breathes in.

Breathes out.

Squeezes gently.

It’s a muscle memory more instant, more perfect, more right than any other — than even the way one gloved hand closes at the perpetually loosened knot against his collar, while the other glides against the tail of the black fabric, straightening the line of the noose from his throat down his chest.

He keeps death close, a constant companion that has stained his hands and left him knowing things he cannot unknow.

There is no light behind the eyes that goes out. There is no relaxation as the body finally gives up. It ia merely moving, and then it is not. Sometimes there is fire. Sometimes there is blood.

Always, there is screaming. Sometimes theirs. Sometimes that of those who loved them.

Sometimes alone in the dark —

in the places he will lock himself, when he will dare to sleep, and face the faces of those he has seen in their last moments

– it’s his own.