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And that promise, Sabian....that promise was good. It was great.

"It was us, you see, who brought the hurt."

I pulled back, gazing up into her face, her gaunt, memory-laced face, with its eyes like lumps of coal and its thin, crescent mouth. I nodded once. I could understand this.

She gave me hope in the times when the scrabbling claws of life's little demons sounded upon our hearts' windowpanes. But she was not strong.
Well, perhaps she was.... strong in the way of a strand of barley hanging on to its last tiny semblance of life in the midst of winter's assault. My mum thought that maybe, just maybe, she could shelter me from the ice that scored her flesh. She was wrong. The Great Artist may have been good, and His work may have been perfection, but somehow in the midst of all the colors and spice He allowed my mother to languish and fade away. Maybe she never had a chance to begin with.





I sit now in this weathered chair, this weathered skin, and gaze into the flames of a fire that does not exist. The wood has long since crumbled to ash, and the smoke that rises in lazy curls holds no promise of warmth. I am lost in my thoughts. My head.

So often that is the case, now. Where once my youthful longings overlapped each other in streams of brilliance, now there is only a blank, stony riverbed with nothing flowing over it. I am a wanderer in a false reality. The past, the future, the present, all are created, all are as deftly managed as the finest poetry. I find myself more often than not retreating into this safe place, this world in which the sins of my life are grafted onto other people and I stand in justified fury as the savior of all.

But I am wrong. I am not a hero. I was never that. Not even in that self-embracing story I've written for twenty two years in my mind have I ever truly believed it.
In a few hours, I will put aside this parchment and quill, wash my hands, and settle into a rhythm of sleep that holds no joy, no dreams, no nightmares, just blank, welcoming escape.
In the morning, I'll awake, stand in front of a full-length pane of mirror, count my scars carefully, remembering the circumstances of each, and sit down to continue what I have set out to do. To tell a story free from myself.

I squint at the words before me. There is a small bit of moonlight filtering in through the streaked pane of a crescent-shaped window, and it is all I require to see by. I have no desire to begin a new fire...anything about me that ever burned has long since turned to cinders.
Once, my name was used as a curse word, as a means of silencing willful youths, as a threat to all who would dare defy the common cause. Does anyone remember now? Does anyone suspect that the withered hands I hold before my rheumy eyes are stained deeply by the crimson life of thousands?

Yesterday, as I walked a bucket of water back from the well in the center of the village proper, a rangy lad in buckskins spit on me. Spit on ME. It only took a few moments of staring for him to leave, but I need not say the desire to do with him what was my right weighed heavily on my cold heart for the rest of the daylight.