Above the Mantle

This rack is prison. This wall is a prison.

Perched over a roaring fire, staring at the same walls day after miserable day. No sky, no fields. No danger.

I'm sour again. Ages gone they hung me above the mantle, longer ago than I can remember now, and thinking about it has made me sour again.

The graying woman of the house sits in the parlor now, wrapped in her worn-out coat, nestled by the fire and looking tired, same as she does every afternoon. Sometimes she stares at the lightning box with its big black face that flashes bizarre images and fills the house with discomforting noises. Sometimes she stares at large, weathered books filled with strange scribbles. Sometimes she just sits. She is many years older than she was before I met the rack, the way I too am older now. This does bring me some comfort. In some ways, she is the same as me. Trapped and dusty. And old.

She sits here, doing nothing. Same as me.

Time has changed her by force, and it has not been gentle.

Sometimes I see his face in hers. Sometimes she looks like him, in a faded sort of way, but life is wholly absent from her eyes.

It's been ages since I felt alive. In days passed, I was bright and shining and loud. I was free. The boy and I, both free!

The boy would clean me, polish me; and how I would shine! He would run his rags over my barrel, wiping clear refuse and dirt and all else besides, bathing me gently but purposefully in Brasso or oil, buffing until the light flickering from my metal body could rival the stars. And with a pull of my trigger, how I could scream... I would shout into the world with a red-hot fury, bursting with smoke and flame, the boy behind me with steady hands. One piercing cry from my burning steel lungs and his enemies would fall or flee, and we were powerful.

I was powerful.

But now, I sit above the fireplace, collecting cobwebs and dust. I haven't been cleaned in ages, and what once was polished, shining black is now red and crumbling rust. And the woman, she rusts with me, in her own way. Darkened and cracked, she sits sadly sometimes, hanging her head and speaking to no one. Occasionally, in the afternoons, she looks at pictures of the boy and shudders quietly, but the pictures show a much different boy than the one I recall. The boy looks newer, the way I looked when he and I first met. When we were together in the fields.

I think of him often, and I sometimes feel the woman thinks of him, too. I remember the way he fell that day so many years ago, his chest blooming with roses before he landed heavy in the grass surrounded by fire. Like he was waiting to fall, waiting to rest. I think he was tired. I wonder if I'll see him again.

I think the woman wants to see him again.

Same as me.