And the scars carry numbness where the wounds once screamed.
They had climbed the fence and were starting for the cars when he turned the lights on at the front steps. They were frozen in the dark. Two black men standing knee-deep in the soft brown field. He didn't have to think twice about pulling the trigger.
The childrens' eyes were like secret caves, hidden; now unleashed in spreading gapes as the firelight whithered into the night sky.
And their writhing strokes accentuate the bone. Their firm knots like piano cord. Look closely. You can see what made them.
He was older than the others, but they were alone and young and afraid. So when the fence rattled suddenly, and the dogs burst in a clamor of cries, he didn't have to think twice about grabbing the rifle from the kitchen pass-way.
At dusk, a window shattered on the silence. Pause. Everyone was awake. The alarm rang out into the city. It stabbed their ears with dread. Those that thought at all in those final hours spread thoughts of fear. The frantic, the hysterical, they were the normal. The whispers of war on their brows crashed through their roofs in fire. Their hope was like a needle of sanity pointed to balance the earth.
I live, but not quite so. And in doing, or not quite doing, I wear them and ignore them, and I forget them. But they remind me of themselves; and when someone sees them, they remind me too. Tangled somewhere between these words is regret, trapped in my regret lies lies.
The dead did not look dead. Not to him, standing over them. They stared, their glass eyes now locked in the moment of their waking fears. The thoughts of their brothers and their names, the women they'd loved and hated and fucked, the food they'd tasted, the men who'd beat them, the men who'd taught them, the sounds of the world that gave them peace, the peace they'd torn from others, all manifest in their eyes. Their past was forgotten, departed, no more. He looked down at them in the dim light and saw their final thoughts of life, now trapped in their dead, dark eyes. It was the last of what they had.
A symphony of cries, beneath the falling bombs, above the stars, echoed on the banks of that earth long past the night. And years later, civilization was unknown to the roots that grew into the soil of the Dead, and in their spring they bore fruit and green leaves that cut the wind. The city was scattered - ash in a soft breath.