A Place For the Unfinished

Fear Not of Doves

 He should've died with them.

Ashes and grey, the grey of his eyes and their eyes - and the same empty howling that was everywhere and nowhere, in houses silently standing, in destruction wrought from what he could not understand.

He could've died with them.

One two three four steps before he stumbled, fell into the debris as the world went spinning. The rubble shifted under his weight, sliding sideways and crashing and suddenly his mind had begun to wander.

He thought of them, they who had been crushed, them who wore the masks, they smiled endlessly and easily with an empty even the demons would smite. She whose laughter echoed in his nightmares, they who left and returned when he had fallen into the deepest dredges of sleep.

It was abrupt, he found the liquid, a burning fire, tracking paths down his cheeks. Crying, he realized, and not with the grief he thought ought to have been the reason. Nor was it pity that hurt his chest so, sent him into a bout of dry hacking of disgust as he lay there in silence, the same silence he had always fallen back upon.

No. He cried not for those who had fallen as he should have, the hot pain in him was at himself, for himself. It was dirty, he told himself, that neglect. It was the realization, he thought, that he could not feel. Had not felt for them, they who were his family, who had raised him and fed him and brought him to life - no, not life. A living death.

He was neither alive nor dead, happy nor sad. So he hovered there, wondering for an eternity. Could he not feel, could he not think? Let the reaper creep upon him; he could not bring himself to care.

The ground shook and snarled with an abruptness that sent the cement groaning, rolling, tossing him aside then to the ground as though it cared for him as little as he did of it.

Like a bag of rocks he fell and sunk, his limbs a relenting gel until he hung over a ledge, and then the shock and something else slammed into him.

He did not want to die he could not let it end here hell, the chasm black chasm opening beneath him was enough to send thoughts spiraling in a panic as he gasped for air, fingers scrabbling against the grey remains and back towards steady earth.

It was a miracle, the sight his eyes fell upon. Unburnt. Hardly marred, though its edges the same colour as old rubbish, the cover a rusted brown. And when he knelt to touch it, a feeling other than stone beneath his bloodied nails, there came the fleeting thought that perhaps it was alive.

Alive and throbbing, stains and black ink spilling across pages with an urgency, a yearning to speak.

The boy blinked, for he felt a boy again, all simple curiosity and none the roughened edges. Simple wants and wishes, the need to know, understand, speak, think without the same restraint of a dead man.

They were feathers, aflutter and weightless, stained with runes of ebony, letters he understood into words he recognized into a story he could read.

Like a dove taking flight he felt the elation and wonder as he traced each page, the letters handwritten, copied down, crammed close into a space with forever more to say. Words folded together closer, much closer than he was used to, so different from the long posters along the highway, signs by the streets. But familiar all the same.

There was quiet now, the boy thought, and perhaps time.

He turned the first page and began to read.