Catastrophe Jones

And within the barren fields of Winter, there was, among the grass gone brown from the cold, from the dying sun, a line of trees that stood against the horizon. Tall and thick-limbed, overgrown with gnarls and twists, and they blocked the way to the beyond. We stood in a line, the hills to our back and the hills to the future, and we could not tell the time, for the sun was obscured by the dull grey dome that is the sky in perpetual lateness. Hard ground beneath our feet, and the line of trees was not forboding but forbidding.

No way forward, and the way we had come was only mountains threatening taller and taller.

Through the branches, I could see the white. I could see the delicate. I could see the lace of sycamores, silver and singing, and I was not sure of my place anymore. Something ephemeral danced there, something beyond the branches, where, across a line I could not see but knew existed, there was a field, low and fresh, that still hung sweet with spring.

We stood there, in a line, and looked through the trees while the grey sky fell slowly, threatening blankets of snow, ice that would keep us from ever advancing. We stood there, and looked to the white lace of branches beyond branches, and thought of spring beneath hills we had not yet seen. We thought of a sky that rained sunlight in blue-golden, and where we would not hear the rustle of frozen leaves and cold-cawing crows. Where the silver-white of sycamore was not the color of the frost on the ground, but the white of snowdrops come early, knowing nothing of midwinter’s meaning.

We stood there and knew that there was dancing, beyond that line, and that above all, it was not for us.

Resignation. Such an indelicate word for the most fragile of moments. It speaks of surrender and acceptance, of diminishing and death.

In some ways, it is fitting — and in some, not at all.

He has always been a ghost who sees, a whisper who walks, a shadow that touches, a spirit that passes over first and last born alike, Ending without judgment of his own. He is cradled by the gun, held up by its weight in his hands, supported by the sound of each bullet racking into the chamber, the oiled mechanism clicking darkly, soothing him as he breathes in.

Breathes out.

Squeezes gently.

It’s a muscle memory more instant, more perfect, more right than any other — than even the way one gloved hand closes at the perpetually loosened knot against his collar, while the other glides against the tail of the black fabric, straightening the line of the noose from his throat down his chest.

He keeps death close, a constant companion that has stained his hands and left him knowing things he cannot unknow.

There is no light behind the eyes that goes out. There is no relaxation as the body finally gives up. It ia merely moving, and then it is not. Sometimes there is fire. Sometimes there is blood.

Always, there is screaming. Sometimes theirs. Sometimes that of those who loved them.

Sometimes alone in the dark —

in the places he will lock himself, when he will dare to sleep, and face the faces of those he has seen in their last moments

— it’s his own.

Cab rides, bus rides, train rides, subways. Walking the street, the malls, the shops and businesses. Every now and then he even walked himself right into someone’s front door and had a look around, curiosity compelling him to seek out humanity and fill himself to overflowing with their lives.

There was a point, long ago, when he was convinced he’d lost her — he almost gave up hope the way Sam had, but clung to something, perhaps a desperate insanity that should’ve died, but couldn’t.

Now, closer than he’s been in eons, he keeps seeing traces of her, here and there, in the smiles and on the faces of a sacred few.

Dropping change into the hat of a ragged man playing the guitar, he caught a nod and a wink and gave both back, feeling a smile curving his lips.

“I know you’re here,” he murmurs to himself, whispers to the city, believing that somehow, somewhere, she’s listening.