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AUTHOR
Incarnadin'd
  • Sarah. 23. Reader. Writer. Book-lover. This was formerly WritersFriend, but I'm switching it over to my primary blog, so I can do all the great primary blog things! :) Follow me there to stay in touch. Or keep coming here for more artsy aesthetic blogging.

Incarnadin'd

Sarah. 23. Reader. Writer. Book-lover. This was formerly WritersFriend, but I'm switching it over to my primary blog, so I can do all the great primary blog things! :) Follow me there to stay in touch. Or keep coming here for more artsy aesthetic blogging.

A STORY: “Part 1: Scars Can Be Fond Footnotes”

My mother never talked much, and she spoke even less when she was finally gone as she would be in a year’s time. I speak not of her tragic passing, rather my mother was one day simply expunged from the records of my reality, a stain that had come away easily under enough rubbing…though those stains that were washed easiest were those that were freshest, the sooner you got to a stain the more the chance you could leave a carpet behind smooth of tarnish or wrinkle (and how full our home always seemed to be of ornate carpets whose weaving all seemed to be old tales of Mongol rampage), something I had observed from staring long enough at the activities of one of the many nameless frightened-looking sweaty women that cleaned the rooms of my wing of the house every two weeks.

My mother was still there that day, however, and as always we seemed communicate more expressively through the soft touch glances of our muddy eyes above our genetically guaranteed bushy eyebrows. I had her nose, her eyebrows, and her unspoken drive to be a tragic hero like one of the protagonists of the old silly Euriphile myths I used to be able to read in my father’s library before they had inevitably gotten an invitation to join the always-burning pyres out on the main thoroughfare that were constantly stoked by masked shifty shadows of men whose ferocity seemed extinguished the moment they noticed I was watching them.

Anyway this was an unspoken urge inside of her that never needed expressing for me to take note of it in the tired lakewater of her eyes, that dream she now had exclusively to be a seer whose prophecies were never believed or a king doomed by his traits to wreak havok on his family or some hero who the fates had determined would fall from grace. Always it was fate that served as the one calling the shots, the Lieutenant General Amandi of the myth (I’ll speak more on that reptile in spectacles at some point I’m sure, unless he finally manages to mix some organ-burning noxious mixture into my dinner of fresh salmon and guacamole) the taskmaster, the clear sign that you were free to absolve yourself from responsibility. Believing your downfall is totally and utterly predetermined created the comforting sort of feeling I usually had in the rare moments of silence from my father’s wrath at home when I was within an elevator, staring at numbers that succinctly conveyed to me of the hellos and goodbyes of the floors of our house as I rose or fell past them one by one.

I had never touched the delicate pale skin of responsibility, of accountability, any more than I had touched the similarly tantalizing breasts of one of my father’s household of housewives (those with the strange hair the color of sand, imported mostly from Euriphile bloc countries, always had broiled my youthful juices the fiercest…but I’ll touch on that topic at a later date. Get it? Touch on it?) or witnessed any sights not visible from the balconies and gardens of our sixty thousand square foot home…which was quite a paltry home as my father would often quake in rage thankfully momentarily directed at not-me-people, specifically at his never-not-smiling remora men: “In my name, I tell you I have heard that the home of Chancellor Jadagi is more than twice the size of this…this…shack! Shall we allow a neighbor to humiliate us in such a fashion?!” (“No sir, absolutely not sir”, I would silently respond in one of my many brains before they voiced their actual replies, though unlike my father’s advisers I never had the burden-releasing comfort of obsequiously addressing him as “sir”).

I know that I have strayed far away from the subject of my mother and my last visit to her compound, something I often found myself doing, there was less heartbreak in simply imagining she did not exist and now presumably because of the generosity of my ten-brained father I need no longer use my measly six brains to imagine such a situation! I do feel the urge to say something before I wade back into that little room of heartbreak, paper surgical masks, and my best friend Rouhi’s solemn rifle-toting vigil at the door of my mother’s hidden space: I learned about remora in a book I read, I bet you were surprised by the fact that I even knew what they were! Leafing through pages of spotted octopi and sharks with too much ambition to identify with, the blurry yellowed photograph of the little tapering trifle of a creature seemingly more serpent than fish attached to a large water beast that did not even notice its presence…that page felt like a mirror into my six terribly hefty hearts, particularly the one that sometimes ached with the most immense sort of sorrow out of all my sorrows: the sorrow whose cause I could not place, who came like the sudden seemingly-random nightly appearances of a leather belt’s familiar bite and loud command in the night that I needed to be stronger if I had any hope of being half the man this currently-beltless man was according to his very-convincing rocket-propelled words.

I know a remora has nothing to do with my mother, a remora has nothing to do with anything but other fish in the vast lakes my tutor Miss Bellia says cover most of Father’s Earth, I may be the only Son of a God who you wouldn’t be able to pick out of a crowd if I were stripped of my normal silky robes and family uniform heavy with medals I had earned every time the stony fist of that aforementioned Living God graced gospel against my increasingly chipmunky cheeks. But it’s not my fault Hassan II never felt it necessary to breathe and live when departing my mother’s loins, that was his stupidity and what an idiot my should’ve-been older brother had been to forget that breathing was one of the most important parts of being able to be alive! I have heard it said that the little lifeless human they took away from the deadening chorus of my mother’s screams was double the size of my form when I was divinely birthed upon Father’s Earth: then I wonder why it was the smaller Hassan that remembered to breathe when exiting the wonderful void it had been inhabiting up till now in the grand hundred year span of all human history! Perhaps he had merely overpacked his luggage, as my father is want to do when he attends those wonderful televised games of sport full of pale soggy sunlight-haired men arguing and shouting at him in some Euriphile tongue I could not understand (though there was always the tenth or twentieth word familiarly Hassanese, such as “weapons” and “destruction”, words that seemed to make up at least ninety percent of Loosy Goose Amandi’s expressed vocabulary when he deigned communicate through sounds from his throat rather than steely glances of the two black beans so comfortably stationed behind his thick lenses).

Suffice to say that mother’s inability to recreate my great father’s bravery (which had overcome a thousand Euri-funded armies!) and definitely unmuddied tempest voice and tempest eyes (which would watch over our homeland for a hundred years more!) was probably one of the many reason my visits to her had always required the strange introduction of blindfolds and blind jeep rides to undisclosed locations (always with kind reassuring conversation from my greatest friend Rouhi alongside me, ever since my first visit when I was still a tiny copy of my father without any facial hair to speak of, he always made sure I was not frightened or far worse bored).

10 years ago February 27, 2014 27 February, 2014