Here’s another interlude chapter from my epic poem, Souls Unsure.  If memory serves…I wrote this chapter, by hand, last St. Patrick’s Day, in Chicago, after partying, at the hotel, while Steve, Torrie, and Jess slept and the sun was rising.  As you may have noticed (if you’ve kept up with some of them so far) – this first batch of interludes are little prose bits that I use to indirectly tell the tale of my ashen angel character (who has not yet had very much direct info…nor even been named).  There are aspects of this celestial creatures history and background that I would be hard pressed to do justice to, in telling directly.  Better to leave things to the readers imagination to go in spirals instead of lines.  So, instead, I tell more or less mundane stories that might get across some aspect of my sad little elohim’s story…in more down to earth ways that the reader can relate to.  Of course…those two realities tend to bleed into one another when I write…

 

 

Interlude:  Ghost of the Fly

 

“I pulled off your wings

Then I laughed

I watched a change

In you

It’s like you never

Had wings”

-Deftones, “Change (In the House of Flies)”

 

            Little Toby smiled, feeling a wickedness of such purity, it is only ever found in serial killers.

            And children.

            The fly, fat and slow, he had lured with some of his mother’s sugar cubes into his room.  He fed and played with the insect, letting it land on his hands, huge by comparison.  Toby was a giant.

            But all games grow tedious and Toby tired of being a giant.  He tied a string to the fly, forcing it to soar in the arcs that he decided.  And when this was not enough, Toby tore the wings off.  He felt the power of taking away the creature’s most valuable asset, of robbing its identity.  Its name had no meaning now.  Toby was a god.

            Then a match.  Then tweezers.  Toby does not know the word, but the word is SPARAGMOS.  And then the godling grew tired of his sport.  He opened the closet door to darkness, faint light touching the mangled remains of bygone action figures…heroes and demigods stripped of their dignity and molded-plastic flesh.

            Into the dark, the young deity tossed the creature with no name, no function, into a web, and awaited the predator and the primordial violence.  Then, he shut the door on his subject, out of light.

 

            That night, he awoke to the beat of broken wings.  The night light dimmed.  Shadows deepened.  Toby shivered in the angry darkness.  Staring, the boy whispered, “Are you…are you the ghost of the fly?”

 

            In the days to follow, Toby’s mother noticed, with some satisfaction, the subsiding of her little boy’s more destructive tendencies.  She was, however, more than a little concerned with his frequent night terrors and the little, white hairs sprouting on his head.

 

“All cruels else subscribe; but I shall see

The winged vengeance overtake such children.”

-William Shakespeare, King Lear, III.vii 65, 66