SRθ: Grim Inquiries (2023-2024)

Sit.15: The Exile

ALONE

We try to do right by each other
we try to save from sin
but time again we screw it up
and laughing demons win

this moment might just be our last
we have to make it count
and if it's not then we'll rejoice
each hardship, we'll surmount

but sometimes things go dark and wrong
and ruin what once was home
they sever ties that bleed for years
and leave us all alone.

* * *

I woke up to a horrible commotion – someone was screaming. 'Here all goes again,' I thought. My friend was no longer next to me in the hay, and I thought that strange – because his cane still was. I took it and got up to look for him, as well as check up on the screaming.
A crowd had formed in the center of town, and I rubbed my eyes to see through them, but couldn't. The sky above us was a cold, dark morning, which meant I'd slept an entire day from yesterday's hotter sunrise. I pushed through the stage, and was numb to the shock of what I saw: The Author was dead, throat cut, and splayed out all over the stage floor. His blood was dripping along the boards and through the cracks between them, where mosquitoes were playing in the waft of heat and smell of flesh. I wanted to cry, to scream, to thrash about on the stage and demand to know:
'WHY?! CRUEL WORLD, WHY?!'
But the tears wouldn't come. I'd already lost so many. What was one more on the pile just outside the wall? All I could do was grip his cane, and fall to my knees, and hurt. An elderly lady rubbed my back, but the others shook their heads, and she backed off.
'Yeah, best to leave me be,' I thought.

The funeral was drenched with rain. I stood at the edge of the field, outside the fence that herded the graves, headstones, and little wooden crosses. Bagpipes scored the air, dour and wet as the rain itself with sadness. When it was time to bury him, I walked up to him in his coffin, mask down from shy, and put his cane in his hands. I gave his corpse a kiss on the nose, while hoping it wasn't too on-the-nose a demonstration in my current means of dress.
I whispered, "I'll miss you, best friend."
Nobody else said a word while I stood there. I walked away, and he was planted deep in the earth.

The next few days were a blur. After my trip with The Author, I had an eerie sense of clarity, and a strange sense of pride that'd been loosed from fog and confusion. I figured it was a side-effect of coming down from the shrooms. Everyone seemed to give me space, no matter where I went... to get breakfast, to see them re-stain the stage, or to plant flowers on The Author's bed of dirt. They must have known we were close, I assumed, and wanted for me to mourn. But then, after the rain dried up, and the sun came back, they kept their distance yet.
I tried asking The Scribe about it, but she didn't want to be seen. For days, she'd be locked in her room, only leaving for something vital – when I waited for her, she'd walk right by and ignore me. As if I was no more than a threatless intruder. So I wandered during the day, retracing the forest paths where I'd had my strange journey with The Author, seeing them in plain for what seemed like magic on that fateful night.
Finally, one night, she turned to me.
"I raped him," she said in cracked, dry hush. "When we were kids. I wanted him all to myself. When he started seeing that stupid little girl... I just lost it. Stomped his leg while 'e slept. He was never the same since. He'd always been frail, but then... he was just broken."
I looked at her, saying nothing, only listening.
She took it as permission to keep going. "He'd sit own, at that fuckin' desk, every day... and just write about her. She was the same age as we were, when I... y'know. 'But she's fuckin' young, mate,' I told him. 'Younger by five years!' He said, 'I don't care. She's shown me more love in words and kindness than you ever have with your flesh.' And I knew he had a heart, but he was a heartless bastard t' me. And then the twee fucker would wobble off with 'er, into the woods, to cast stones an' look at fuckin' flowers together. That was what -I- wanted, that was how -I- felt. I just couldn't fuckin' show it yet, alright?! I didn't know how!!"
I nodded along, in support. Silent still.
"And she thought he was fuckin' babysitting!" She sniffed, tears in her eyes, and wiped her nose on her sleeve. "She's the raven, in the play. She's sixteen now, finally old enough for 'im, the twenty-one-year-old bastard. I think she knows it's her, knows he's groomed her for her whole life. Made a spectacle of her. Nobody else knows. But I did." She stopped to feel her eyes, wiped them dry, and cried into them again. "Every fuckin' time I had to read his scripts, go over the sordid fuckin' tale with 'him, check his God-damned handwriting. Cross his stupid tees, dotted his cursed ayes. I screamed at him sometimes, and he'd just tell me-" She took a breath, and leaned on the wall. "He'd tell me: 'If you'd never broken my leg, I never would have written this play. And this town would have nothing again, nothing but war and soldiers. So you either-" she choked. " 'You either write my works with me, or you get out of my life. This town will miss me, but it won't miss you.' An' I felt that harder than anything he'd ever said to me in our lives." She slid down to the floor, and moaned, "There'll never be another man like him. I didn't hurt him for the power, I'm not sadistic – I needed him. He was everything to me, an' I was nothing to him. And I loved him for that, because I didn't want to be wanted, not by any greasy, filthy fuck in beard an' armor, not ever again. Because they got me first, before I got him. An' they took turns, and they spat beer at me, an' they laughed. And there's not a goddamn man in town who went and put a stop to 'em, the lot of fuckin' cowards and lillies..."
I felt a shiver down my spine. But I said nothing. To my horror, my demon was smiling at her misfortune, as if everything had gone according to plan. In my mind, I walloped it in the face, and its tendrils gripped my imaginary hands. In real, I sat as still as I could. I was glad she was busy looking out at nothing, instead of at my struggle.
She laughed grimly. "We all just wait for the big ones to leave, for another useless war, and we all hope they come back deader than dead, or not at all." She looked at me. "And I see that you're different, but you wanted me too, and I wanted you back, but now I can't. Because he's gone, and you..." she pointed at me, leering with glazed, soggy eyes. "You're just his fuckin' replacement to me. That's all you'll ever be." She stood up, grabbed a bottle of whiskey, chugged it where I could see her, and went to her room – slamming the door with a WHAM!
I sat in disbelief at her kitchen table, arms crossed under my head, looking out the window. I remembered that I'd been born some time in winter, which had already passed before I'd arrived. If it was thirteen-fifty-three, then I was nineteen now. Halfway between The Author's age and his junior crush – already a father of two. There were no stars that night – only clouds.