Work Text:
A FAMILY PHOTOGRAPH: All four of you wreathed together, three children and a doting father, leaning in to make the frame before the flash goes off.
III.
The day the world ends, you eat lunch in a brightly lit kitchen.
Few things can characterize a civilization like its eating habits. The Ancient Mediterranean Basin (among other places, you had told Thomas excitedly once, when he was still called Thomas and you were still hiding library books under your pillow) built whole rooms around the art of banqueting, from the private andrones in Greece to the Terrace Houses of Ephesus. There, they celebrated gods, kings, commerce; today, you celebrate a fair-weather Sunday.
How to break bread with one’s enemy? Some have made it an art. You, however, are not so guileful. You have always fancied yourself a researcher, an academic: eager to learn and quick to study. Your brother’s boy. Your father’s son. But to sit here at this table is no more fruitful than to bury your head in those books. No matter how far you stretch your hand, you can’t return to the past; there is nothing for you here.
The Gordian Knot, you told IV once: an unsolvable problem solved easily by approaching it from outside its constraints. To untie it, you need only cut it. From afar, you considered that boy’s own -- his spirit, his kindness, his outstretched hand -- and wondered if you could replicate it. It’s no use, in the end; a hand can go through Hell, but not through time. It can break bread, but it cannot make it whole again.
No matter. You have a Gordian Knot of your own. To the ends of the earth, you will hold it in your hands with pride.
V.
Elementary science: During a total solar eclipse, the moon renders the sun completely invisible for those in its shadow.
As children, you had witnessed one yourselves; III had been barely old enough to hold himself upright, but still you held him on your hip, free arm wrapped tightly around him as the other linked through IV’s own. “Don’t watch,” you’d urged. “You’ll go blind.” All around you, crescents bloomed in the dark like flowers. Like feathers on an ink-black sky; like your father’s old desk, rings upon rings of coffee stains looping on forever.
When III falls – brightly and quickly, comet-tails of wreckage in his wake – you spend hours looking at pictures from that day. You think of how small the three of you were, especially you, knobby-kneed and not yet familiar with the ache of growing pains. And you think, This, too, will be temporary .
III took his crest on his hand. When your time comes, you are not so subtle. Eager for transformation -- eager to shed the skin of your past life and don the soldered-together shell of someone new, someone who has never felt so small against the vast backdrop of the universe -- you take yours between your eyes.
You are no longer those children; those memories are no longer yours to claim. Abandoned by yourselves, the four of you will become something greater still: something stellar. Something impervious to any gravity but your own. Something bigger than the ink-black sky.
There are no lights coming for you. To swallow the sun is all that is left.
IV.
Once, Mich-- III told you about a knot that couldn’t be untied, only cut. You hadn’t looked up at him, only asked, “Why bother trying to untie it in the first place, then?”
Easily said by the one with the scissors. When you find yourself on the other end of that tangle, a marionette held up by a mess of string, jumping the gun suddenly seems unreasonable.
There’s an irony there. Since you were young, you’ve clung tightly to your love of dolls: marionettes and fantoccini , anything you could make move. Anything that could, with proper handling, be considered beautiful. And yet -- death with a child’s face clicks its tongue, takes an extra three sugars in its coffee -- you’ve always been the most inept at playing your own role.
“Am I not a deft enough hand?” your father asks. His hands are thrown up in exasperation, but he’s laughing, not looking for an answer. A comedy performance unto himself, no need for scripts or extras. At his feet are strewn the bodies of your brothers, discarded in a mess of strings.
What are you if not useful? You’ve never been the crowned son; you did not pull a monster from the water, did not braid its hair and bow your head and agree to call it Father . But you are the house on fire. You will do what needs doing, no matter the cost. If not a doll, then a tool; if not a son, then a matchstick. You wear your failure on your face and your desperation on the back of your hand.
The fire burns higher still. If a puppet cannot be properly handled, its body can still feed the flames. You’ve always been the villain; what more is there to become but kindling?
∞ .
It really is much easier to get some work done without any children running about.
Back at the old manor, your study was warm on the eyes and the heart. Recently, you’ve been liking things a bit more radioactive. The pale, nuclear glow of a screen or three sits much better on your mask than lamplight; there is something to be said for the cacophony of the digital. In the other room, the three of them hover on a precipice -- life and death, name and number -- and wait for quieter miracles.
The chemical act of transformation: to synthesize, to replace, to decompose. Anything is possible with the right amount of energy, with just the right push . You are, after all, a scientist.
0.
A FAMILY PHOTOGRAPH: Three kids and their shadows playing blind man’s bluff; you’ve got your blindfold on, you’re gonna shoot them all.