The Shape the Memory Requires

Serenity accomplished. Silence restored.

Power comes from necessity.

Not protection.

Fear.

Uncertainty bleeds.

Trust was never promised.

Hope did not arrive.

As the life drains around me, and filters down into the streams that I stand in, I wonder if they thank me, in their cries, or spite me. It matters not. It matters not. Repeat for emphasis, repeat in mantric form, until it becomes the last thing they remember. Before they are forgotten.

The void.

The Unravelling.

The last great work of magnificent brutality.

We are told, the light is safety, the darkness, a trap.

We are told, the day brings to light what is done in the night.

But.

As the destruction at the hands of my invention comes to fruition, I reflect.

On my throne—wrought from the bones of those who dared stand in opposition—I thought to the loftiness of our creators, the Caprificus. Even as their kin genuflect before me, with blood draining from the burr holes I gifted them.

I was one of their selected few, the Offspring of Anathema; hatred was the string to my bows of desolation.

The Naufragiais—or the popular alternative, Vastare—was the name given to me as I rose to fear-inducing prominence among the ranks of my people.

I remember it this way —

or perhaps this is only the shape the memory requires.

I think back to the Atrocity and their pitiful stand against my kind.

An opposition fraught with—

It had been a long time since I had slept during the daylight hours.

I had tried to avoid it, ever since the week following my eleventh birthday.

That was when a rupture tore the ligaments and tissue that held everything in my world together. It happened at midday. Away from the twilight hours. During the bright safety of an afternoon of no consequence.

Then there was blood in my mouth.

Memories faded behind a wall of sleep.

Misery or Missouri. I'm sure there's a bad pun there. As two local boys with long-established heritage in the state, we knew better than most how easily small-town existenz can chew you up and spit you out.

Strum, strum, strum, strum, strum.

The strumming reverberated from the banjo upon my father’s lap through the floorboards to my soul, ingratiating into me a sense of… nothingness.

Seems I hear those banjos playin’ once again.

Hum, hum, hum, hum, hum.

That same old plaintive strain.

As boys we felt the growing strain of Arrow Rock living. Moonshine-tainted blood passed from generations, supped on from the Ozarks.

Hear that mournful melody,

It just haunts you the whole day long,

And you wander in dreams back to heaven, it seems,

When you hear that old-time song.

Recounted and recalled as something like nostalgia.

Hush-a-bye ma baby, go to sleep on Mommy’s knee,

Journey back to paradise in dreams again with me;

It seems like your Mommy is there once again,

Even after she disappeared in Marvel Cave — or was it Taberville Prairie. Memories are so fickle, so lost on plaintive strain of existenz.

And the old folks were strummin’ that same old refrain.

Binaurally as we waved hush-a-bye to our childhood, Thomas looked like Mommy did.

Then.

Nothingness.

Too late.

Too beyond.

I was once aware.

But awar—

no.

That isn’t right.

Way down in Missouri where I learned this lullaby,

When the stars were blinkin’ and the moon was climbin’ high,

And I hear Mammy Cloe, as in days long ago,

Singin’ hush-a—

The tune slips.

The words will not finish.

When I woke, the blood was gone.

And everything else was with it.

We are told to take care when walking home at night.

Stick to well-lit places.

The lie.

We are told.

Woe to those who look for another, as I stand in their midst.

The Reckoning is by my hand alone.

Woe to those who look for another.

The Reckoning is mine, and mine alone.

The shapes that once were bodies, whether those still fighting pitifully for survival or those who have succumbed to inevitability, now lie still in the wake of my final act.

I do not know what happened to me all those years ago.

My eleven-year-old mind locked those memories away and strait-jacketed them.

Fragments seep into the melodrama miasma maelstrom of everyday life.

I stood around, marvelling at my masterpiece.

At all that had gone before and was yet to come.

The Unravelling, my life’s work, was delivered to me as I looked out at the void for an answer to why — and the void, in its way, responded.

My everyday life is spent sleeping at night, staying awake during the day. Without fail.

That sounds easy, you’d think.

It isn’t.

The illiterate — those bastards of existence — might claim I was simply playing a score written by another.

Oh, if it were — trouble would be calling me from the bloodquake that surrounds me.

Those odd days when you can’t cope with life.

Migraine.

Hangover.

Grief.

And need to sleep when you need to sleep.

What do you do then?

Do you let sleep take over?

Or do you fight it?

As I look around, the massacre, to the untrained eye, seems an unmitigated disaster, one that beauty has forgotten.

To the trained eye, the maestro’s vision was one of untapped wonderment.

Where crisis and chaos sculpted into something majestic, beyond the ordinary, beyond the—

Then sleep takes over.

Then sleep takes away.

Then—

Well.

I can never remember.

Consequences, mapped, spread, and stretched across the chaos they so deftly served in their given time, are ordered by unseen forces.

We grasp at straws to find reason and rhyme when the seemingly random shatters our steady ground.

Once, I found a park bench.

Sat.

I waited.

My hands shook.

And drifted down melatonin-soaked rivers of my mind.

Warmth surrounded me.

Strum, strum, strum, strum—

The hatch appeared.

Though the note, the creator and the author were unknown, the end brought a sense of peace and grace to my world that was also unknown before her gaze.

Perhaps truth shall be granted to me.

The blanket, the shadow she shrouds over me, offers enough reason.

Beyond sense, surely, but not beyond love or hope.

Found me she has, and we belong, we become one and are complete.

When the start and the end are the same, peace and order hold and own us.

She — my Empress, my Temptress, my Start and my End.

My world complete.

Hush-a-bye ma baby, go to sleep on Mommy’s knee,

The children of Atrocity, exsanguinated alive, their shrieks my lullaby.

Their suffering, my throne.

No one speaks of it.

No one remembers.

Even our creators, the Caprificus — filigree, cancerous things.

Reason was their sadism.

Control their creed.

Even they prostrated themselves before me.

I met a girl from Ipanema.

But not the girl.

She welcomed me like a captain and offered me my wine.

No spirit had passed through me since nineteen eighty-nine.

Bombs and guns were the playthings of children of a greater kind in the playground of the Vastare.

I counterbalanced fate with despair, hope with horror.

She took me to a room.

The hatch just ahead.

There were flashes.

Wounds.

Saline-heavy water draining everywhere.

During the second, I subjugated and enforced my will upon a world that posed no real threat.

As I opened the hatch, a disquieted rage filled my brain — not with action, but passiveness.

A surrender.

I reached in.

I bled nations each night of the first year of my life.

I felt my eye bulge, full of saline water leaking from remembered wounds.

My form began to shift.

To melt.

To forget its name.

The Laughter of the Gods was upon me as I sought the wisdom of the fallen and the power of the leaders.

Stubbornness dictates I retake the same pathway again.

Sleep does not yield easily.

I ate my way through the crusted and bitter tomb of my mother’s degenerated body and left her for dead in the pit of Despair.

Breathing shallowed into blurs.

Gravel scraped across the vitreous coating, through the pupil.

A burr hole.

A burn blast.

No one considered that one insignificant child — the product of violence and coercion — could pose the threat I did.

In the waking from the hatch, I see nothing but daylight and its terror unleashed.

Nothing is quite remembered.

Quiet remembered.

Born from the wretched and venomous womb of my dear mother, I was brought into the world.

No screaming.

No red flags flew overhead.

Pretend we pretend we pretend until we make pretend a trend.

Forget what FDR said.

He never met me.

There’s nothing to fear except… me.