🎵 𝄞 🎸 𝄫 🎷🎶 🎻 (jukejoint) wrote in repose, @ 2019-06-04 02:12:00 |
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He'd woke up early, 'fore the sun and 'fore Damian was awake, and that wasn't nothing unusual for him. He wasn't good at sleeping, or he hadn't been lately. He was troubled by dreams 'bout Heaven and Hell and what his role was, and it didn't matter much that he was calmer in the waking these days. When he slept, it was like his head went wild and filled itself up like a balloon ready to burst. So, waking up, it wasn't nothing meaningful, not all by its lonesome. Tonight, he'd got himself dressed quiet, warm and comfortable, no shoes on his feet, and the earbuds in his ears playing music that leaned toward profane rather than sacred any. To say he looked real unimpressive, it would be understating. Sometimes, when this happened, he went walking 'round the lake, soothing the auras of the dead 'neath the surface. Other times, he went to the Capital, to the school and one of the practice rooms, and he danced and pretended he was human and normal. Mostly, he went to the either of the town's churches, and he sat on the smooth wooden pews and soaked in the feeling of faith that filled the buildings. Tonight, he was walking among the dead. The cemeteries were quiet, separated how they were by a low wall, as if the Protestant dead and the Catholic dead couldn't dare touch, and he reckoned they both figured themselves the rightful inhabitants of the afterlife. He'd realized real early that religion was a real divisive thing, Christian or not, and he'd respected that, but he wondered if it meant that all them folks got themselves a surprise when they died and their angels came, garbed in whatever guise the dead believed in, taking them wherever they'd believed they would go, and all of them ending up in different gardens, but in the same town. It was cold tonight, but Misha didn't feel it none. He walked 'tween gravestones and listened, and he didn't have himself any good notion of what he was meant to be doing with his life. His daddy had said to go back to school, and he had, but he couldn't stop thinking 'bout who he was and what it meant to be who he was, and he'd been dealing with Upstairs too long to reckon they'd just leave him be. Could be that had lured him out of bed tonight, the feeling that something was amiss, and the hair at the back of his neck prickled as he turned to look behind himself. It wasn't that he thought he was being followed, exactly, but he thought something was there, and he whispered onto the night air and illuminated the darkness without moving a finger. The cemetery went gauzy and warm and glowing, and the boy stood in the center of it, his very presence incongruity in ozone cool and feet that singed the ground beneath their heels. "You can't kill me," he said aloud, seemingly talking like someone mad to the night air. But he was speaking at whoever'd been sent, and it felt cool and like alabaster, like those antiseptic halls he'd spent time in and being lied to. See, Heaven wasn't no better than Hell in the end, not truly. It was all a war, whether folks wanted to believe it or not. |