OBLIVION [Thomesa]

twenty three

•

Scrape,
Scrape,
Scrape,
As gentle and rough as the surging rise and fall of salty waves,
Newt's blade slid against the sharpening stone.
Scrape,
Scrape,
Scrape.
It was an hour after they checked in
to the room with the moth-eaten ugly-orange beds,
And the peeling paper plastered on the pasty walls.

Scars.
so many scars.
A curtain Newt had once been swept behind, in another city, in another life,
out-of-sight.
A curtain who hid the very death of his dear Jeanne, that dreadful night.
out-of-mind.
Right?
But it wasn't right.
Not to him, one who knew,
who, when he finally emerged from the curtain of another city, another life,
it was because he burned it down.
burned it all,
Watched, as it tore the rest of the city to ashes,
those who had ignored as men tortured her,
and put the frothing muzzle of a hungry gun to her neck,
and pulled the trigger.
He stood so still,
Watching as it burned, that
it caught fire to him too.
And then -
Scars.
so many scars.
Scrape,
Scrape,
Scrape,
Scraaaaaaape,
Scrape.
Losing himself in the blade.
Losing himself in the thoughts.
Scrape,
Scrape,
Scars,
Sick,
Sick
It was an hour after they checked in,
that he started to feel the panic, the stress, of Waiting.
and a fear that he too,
was pretending.
A promise hovered painfully in his memory,
a flower,
somehow finding a way to poke through the icy sheets of snow
that suffocated all surviving souls.
The flower,
Doomed? as it begins to decay and die.
As he doubted whether he really could do this for her, save him for her.
Or had he just been pretending?
He saw nothing but her, her beauty her smile, nothing but her, her blood her pain,
She was all he ever thought of anymore. And he knew, or he thought he knew, that he was hardly even a murmur in her sea of thoughts, her beautiful, horrible, once oh-so-innocent thoughts.
Automatically, mindlessly.
He took apart each of the seven guns he carried, laying them out on the sheets, cleaning each piece carefully, as one would an instrument, for it was an instrument of war.
He counted exactly how many people he had killed with each weapon.
He conjured their faces in a starry room in his mind, the
scarlet, bloody faces on the outside,
pale and bloodless and brainless within.
This blade, as he put down the last gun,
had hovered above Teresa's long elegant neck,
a thin line of crimson like a loose sticky strand of a scarlet spinning web,
Appearing at her smooth bronze skin.
This blade,
had plunged into Thomas,
had buried itself in his flesh
and scraped at his bone.
Until, no matter how well he polished it,
no matter how long he sharpened it,
the faint rust-color of blood still clung to it like wet fabric on soft skin.
Even if in his eyes only,
and the silent eyes of those sufferers.
He lost himself,
while trying to lose those others,
In the strokes of the blade.
But they remained,
restlessly, relentlessly,
condemning me,
damning me
indefinitely.

Now,
if he took a strand of silver hair,
And held it above the knife, letting it cascade down,
It would need only brush the top edge of the blade,
before it would slice,
engine blades biting through the warm air,
and cut the single strand of silver,
into a perfect two.

Fingers, with scars like Newt's engrained on his knuckles, curled around the bar.
He pulled himself up,
and lowered himself,
trying to burn away the anger and the pain boiling inside him.
His muscles flexed along his bare arms,
like the strong coiling muscles of a raging bull,
easily seen shifting and writhing beneath the thin membrane of skin.