I Don’t Feel Anything Anymore. I Don’t Know If I Miss It Or Not. It Can Be Nice Being Withdrawn From

What use is death to a creature like me?

Well, I’ll tell you:

Death is an old bedfellow, a partner, a wife;

Is there anything so sweet as a union born in blood?

A promise to always be at each other’s finger tips?

Tool the marble into statue, we sculpt the world,

To improve it, cull those unfit for life by scythe point.

A silly question to ask me, what use is death to a

Creature? Without it, I would not have a life at all.

Like a mutant calf, my village shunned and cast

Me out to meet her, Lady Death.

Art by Jason Scheier

I had abandoned all intelligence seeing as it got the world nowhere. Maybe in a good world, with good people, advancements would forward us and make us more humane, lessen suffering, feed the hungry, clothe the naked and so on.

But put knowledge in the hands of a brute and he grows ever crueler.

The sailor girl slides down her boat’s rope the hour after sunset and awaits her black haired siren on the far end of the beach. She fusses with her hair. Tries to part it differently, and then differently again to no avail. She kneels on the shore to get a glimpse of herself under the budding moonlight on the still ocean water. A pair of eyes stays on her, gently raking over her battered, poorly patched clothes. She never was one for sewing. The sea called her. It always called her, to what she didn’t know. Suddenly, the pair of big black eyes in the water rose like fishing bobbins in her reflection, and startled her.

“How long have you been there?” She asked.

The siren smiled coyly, and held a finger up, telling her to hold on a moment.

She disappeared under the water and bobbed back up with something in her hand.

“What’s that?”

The siren rubbed the sand off of it with her thumbs, and held it up. A small abalone hair brush.

I belong to my animals as much as they belong to me. I am no owner, and they are no beasts.

Hands wrapped around my neck squeeze tighter. I wonder if this is how I will die. My eyes bulge but I see nothing but black splotches and bright stars. Night has followed me into day, just as I dreaded it would. Just as I dreaded it would.

Something bent so far in me, but never broke. I kept thinking if I went far enough in the wrong direction something would pull me back. That’s what they don’t tell you about abandonment. When you do it to yourself you don’t even feel it. You don’t feel anything anymore.

When the vine burst through cooked earth, and curved to and fro toward the sun, I knew growth was not linear, nor was it impossible to come back from the dead.

Time keeps passing, I fight hard for change. It does not yield to me, wind against a mountain. I carry on, I carry on, still. There is nothing left for me to do but die.

In the blue hour, we find each other. Our voices are the only that exist.