Burning Alive

Do we live in a moment that happens before us, spread wide like a vacant lot?  Do we sputter with weeds and broken glass, laughing at the blood that flecks upon our naked feet?  Do we live there, draped in a forever that smells of stale beer and smoke?  Or do we pass it by, looking for a pretty object to rest our eyes upon, looking for eternity behind glass and mortar?  As we live, we write our history upon each awkward step, backwards glance and gasp of hesitation.

I lie near her, holding my hand against her chest.  It quivers beneath my fingers, clutching to the life that lingers there.  Each breath, a frightening conquest, a small victory… She is far from me yet I stay by the doorway, watching her leave me behind.  Her eyes are wide in knowing.  I must let her go.  To love is to let go.  But I hold on and plead with her, “One more day… just one more day,”

Blood spattered across the tile, marked with bits of skull and brain like shrapnel of an ugly war.  I don’t remember the gun but I recall how neatly his hands lay at his sides, how soft his naked chest lay, and the belt looped through his jeans and the casual flop of his feet as if asleep.  My father showed me this photograph and my eyes became wide in knowing.  So this is what death looks like…  We are broken pieces that spill across the floor, faceless and ugly.  I asked him to show me more.  It became a novelty, a game to which I could never succumb to for I was a sweet girl, and the gun does not blow the brains out of sweet girls.

The coffin lay miles before me, each step sinking into the carpet.  I swam amidst grief until I came across the specter, dressed in white.  His hands were neatly folded at his sides.  Makeup caked his skin in a mockery of life, hiding the scars that lay beneath.  The crowd gathered before him in reverence and curiosity.  The wolf had struck one of their own, killing the helpless creature and leaving the specter in its wake, a reminder that it continues to stalk.  As they mourn, I turn my head, eyes wide in knowing.  Is it there, I wonder, looking at me?  The gun does not scare me but the wolf salivates in wanton indiscretion to devour a sweet girl.  I cannot play this game anymore.

Sweetness grows sour in the eye of knowing and I quiver on the vine, frightened of the fall if I should rot.  She looks to me, ready to leap.  “No,” I plead, “Just one more day…” I reach for her but she turns away from me.  She does not ask for guns or wolves but only my love.  How did my love become a killer?

His face was full of fragile sweetness, freckled and dark.  It took one bullet and his face spilled onto his sheets, remnants of an ugly war.  Fragments of his family littered the battlefield.  My hands were clumsy, picking up a piece here and there, giving them up as an offering to please the wolves at the door.  Why do they come so close?  Why do these tears not satisfy their appetites?  Why do they lick the feet of these mourners, hungrily eyeing their throats?  I see his face in every reflection, every pause.  I see it in my own.  To love him was to watch him die.

My hand lingers upon her chest, keeping time with her uneven beat.  She cannot appease me instead she can only give me visions of a forgotten history.  She can only pin me to a moment.  I must let it go.

Oh but please… one more day…