(no subject)
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.
Neil Gaiman, Sandman
What are you?
I am called Killalla of The Glow.
You are very pretty, and you have a nice name. But what are you?
How do you mean, what am I?
Well, i mean... what I mean is, what are you? Like, um, are you a superintelligent cosmic cloud formation, or a dimension that has incarnated like that or a star or what?
I'm...I'm a female. That means I bear the young of my species. I come from a planet called Oa. I am...
You mean you really are just what you look like you are.
yes.
Well, that's pretty weird. Why are you here then? Do you own the mily way or something?
No. I'm here with Dream of the Endless. I'm his companion.
Oh. Oops. I.... OOOOHHHH. I'm sorry. I should have realized. I am so embarrassed. I think i'm just going to hid under the table until i'm not embarrassed any more.
Don't be silly.
Delight and Killalla. Neil Gaiman. Sandman.
__________
The First Portrait.
Her eyes are grey. Her hair is straggly and wet. Her fingers are stubby. The nails are chewed and broken. Her teeth are crooked, jagged things. There is a vacancy in her gaze, a feeling of absence when you are ner her that is impossible to put into words. Her sigle is the hooked ring. One day her hook will catch your heart. Describing her, we articulate what she is and why she is: when hope is past, she is there. She is in a thousand thousand waiting rooms and empty streets, in grey concrete buildings and anonymous hotels: she is on the other side of every mirror. When the eyes taht look back at you know you too well, and no longer care fro what they see, they are her eyes. She stands and watits, and in her posture the pain no longer tells you to live, and in her presence joy is unimaginable.
The Second Portrait
So when the Bishop's secretary said he wanted to see me, i knew it had to be something to do with the drinking. It's not htat i'm a problem drinker. I'm irish: son of a hundred generations of serious drinkers. But these days, the church needs to avoid even the apparency of wrongdoing.
I know a few priests go to A.A. I couldn't go as a cleric. It'd have to be "Hello Dermot." not "Hello Father Byrne," when i stood up to say my little bit.
And i've been letting things slide a little recently.
It wasn't the drinking. He said, ten years ago there was a girl. He showed me her picture. I said i remembered her: Odd little thing, always making up stories, wanting the attention.
She says you interfered with her, he says.
I told him never. I could prove it, too, even after all this time.
No, he says. You cannot. We're paying her three quarters of a million, Dermot. And you need to reconsider your vocation. It's the insuarance company, you understand.
But i never, i said again. And, i'm a priest.
We need to be seen to be taking action, says the bishops secretary. We can't seem to be condoning this sort of thing. If you stay in the church, we'll have to report you to the police.
For what, i say?
Molseting young girls, he says sadly.
But i never, i told him, and i could her the whine in my voice, like a dog you've kicked when you've had one too many, who just can't get it into his head why.
This isn't fair, i said.
No he says, but its right.
And when i got to the door, thinking about trying not to cry, at my age, about starting all over at 54, about a bottle of Canadian Club in the bottom drawer of the desk in my study, i say, Father, think for a moment. What would Jesus do?
THe bishops secretary shook his head. If he had to deal with the insurance companies, he'd probably hang you out to dry, same as the rest of us, he said, and he didn't smile.
The Third Portrait
She decids to make a list of the things that make her happy. She writes 'plum-blossom' at the top of a piece of paper.
Then she stares at the peper, unable to think of anything else.
Eventually it begins to get dark.
The Fourth Portrait
It starts with a cat twining against your leg, two, maybe three years ago, just after you hurt your leg, and it's a stray, and you put down milk in a saucer ofr it, and when you live in a damn trailer on the edge of the town you can be glad of the company and hell the kittens were cute and you put down more milk and pretty soon don't it seem like all the money youre collecing on dsability is going to buy these sacks of catfood and you can hardly keep clear who is whome mother or brother or sister anymore and the trailer stinks of spray but you dont hardly notice it, because those cats are family and so its a bitch when your brother-in-law over in Moose Hill says hes got you a job on the dairy farm there and its tree hundred dollars a well, and a place to stay, and thats the best money when you're nothing but a farmhand with a leg thats shot to hell and you dont know what to do with the goddamn cats, the kittens in the drawers, sixty maybe seventy cats and there's more now out in the fields who'll come back tonight to be fed.
Be here Friday, says your brother-in-law, or they'll get someone else in. And that disability won't last forever.
So you lock the trailer door and you go, thinking maybe you'll be back at the weekend to feed the cats and knowing that you won't.
And then there's just a face on teh sheriff's man as he tells you that they had to wear air masks to go into the trailer, that five of them cats were somehow still alive, that sixy of them, maybe more were found part eaten, and he waits for you to say something, anything, and you shake your head and dont say nothing at all.
The Fifth Portrait
He collects his lover.
He has nail clipping, and photographs he has cut form magazines, and a ticet from teh only tram journy they took together, to a late-night Chinese restaurant where his lover was not recognized.
After sex, while his lover sleeps, he takes things, slips them into his bag, a tee shirt that smells like his lover, underpants, a dusty asprin taken from his toilet kit.
His lover exists for him chiefly as a body in a sequence of hotel rooms. In his bedroom he has made a small shrine to his lover: his greatest treasure is a knotted condom, retrieved from a waste bin, with the cold remains of his lover's seed congealed inside it.
Sometimes he does not see his lover in teh flesh for months at a time. At night he watches his lover on television.
"If you smile before the commercial break," he whispers to his lover, "it means you are thinking about me. If you blink now it means you love me, you truely love me, and one day you will come out here for always."
He buries his face in a tee shirt that no longer smells like anybody at all, and waits for his lover to blink.
The sixth portriat
It wasn't the loving eachother or the knowing they could never be together.
It wasn't the wind in the eaves of the empty house, or the bone=dry rattle of the pills in the brown-glass bottle.
It wasn't the bitter taste, with only a stale box of red wine to wash it away.
It wasn't waking, with her dead and you all too alive.
It was the way your fingers shook. It was a stammer, and the thickness of your tongue as you tried to speak. It was the sound of the sirens, coming closer,. it was knowing that you would never gaet another chance.
The seventh portrait.
Will come later.