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Sing me, oh Goddess, the rage. It went something like that, Carl was pretty sure. He had heard it once, whispered within the hard and cold concrete walls of the prison when he was much, much, younger.
He wasn’t sure where it was from, but it had stuck with him throughout the years. Carl wasn’t even sure what it meant, but he wrote it in his crude and yet still somehow spidery handwriting on whatever spare paper they had, or when they found markers. When he had been in that house all alone while his Dad lay in his second coma, and he had almost been caught by that walker, he had thought about writing that on the door of the bedroom. He hadn’t. It hadn’t seemed right.
He’d written it on his hand once after he’d gotten his hands on a black Sharpie. They were raiding an old dollar store, the kind that had everything. When they got there, it was mostly filled with dust and dirt and empty wrappers and cans. He had found a pack of Sharpies, though. Carl hadn’t been sure what to do with them, and when he asked Dad, he had shrugged his shoulders and said, “Whatever you want. We can’t eat Sharpies.”
So, Carl pocketed them and wrote his little words on whatever he could. Sing me, oh Goddess, the rage. On telephone poles, the sidewalk, walls, floors, and old receipts he found, a large rock by a creek. On his arm once, in big bold letters. Daryl had looked at him a little funny but didn’t say anything. He’d had a cigarette burn on his knuckle at the time, so Carl decided if he had said a word about him writing on his skin, he would have been a hypocrite. That burn would scar. That was permanent.
Sometimes, on nights when they were hungry and cold and tired, Carl thought he knew what it meant. Sing me, oh Goddess, the rage. He thought about his Mom and her screams when Maggie cut her open. He could see the blood leak from her stomach onto the grey floor as her face turned pale. His nails would dig deep into his palms—a part of him wished he could dig deeper until he hit muscle and bone, then he could dig through those too; a part of him wanted to see the tips of his fingers pop through the back of his hand—and Carl would take in cool air through his nose. His breathing would even, his heart would slow, and he would go back to thinking.
He wasn’t mad at Maggie, he would always decide, Maggie had done what was asked of her. He wasn’t mad at Judith either—God, he didn’t think he was capable. Then he would try and figure out who exactly he was mad at. Shane? Yes, but Shane was dead, and long in the past. The Governor? Even more dead than Shane, Carl reckoned. That foul-smelling man on the side of the road? No, no he had nothing to do with his mom’s death. (But if he thought too long about him and the way he had smelled his hand and thrown him onto the ground, Carl would shove his nails so hard into his hands that they would come back bloody, and his palms would ache)
No matter what, Carl came to the conclusion that he had no idea what the words meant. Sing me, oh Goddess, the rage. They rang pretty in his head and made him think of the prison, before the fall. They made him think of his Dad waking him up with Judith on his hip to go farm early in the morning. So, did it matter what they were originally intended for? For a long time, Carl thought it did. Then he decided it didn’t. Not to him. Not anyone who saw him write on his skin or the floor alike.
Before he had the Sharpies, if the dirt was just right, he would be able to write the words into the Earth. It would always rain the next day, and they would be washed away. It made Carl smile, it made it seem like the grass and the mud liked the words as much as he did, to accept them into itself.
When they got to Alexandria, he met Ron. Carl liked Ron’s smile, the way he talked, and how he scratched the back of his neck when he didn’t know what to say. He was sitting on the edge of Ron’s bed when he decided he really liked Ron.
“What do you have on your arm?” He said. Sing me, oh Goddess, the rage. It was smeared and mostly washed away from his skin now, but it could still be read if you squinted.
Carl held his arm out for Ron to see.
Ron wrapped his fingers around Carl’s wrist. Gentle and careful—afraid to hurt him or spook him, Carl didn’t know which—he could feel the callouses on his fingertips and his flesh rose with goosebumps. “Sing…me…oh…. I can’t read the rest of it.”
“Sing me, oh Goddess, the rage,” Carl told him. He thought about snatching his arm back, but instead, he let Ron keep holding onto it. He hummed and ran his thumb over the bottom part of the last e in rage. It was right on Carl’s wrist. He shivered.
“That’s pretty.” Ron let go of his arm. Carl let it sit in the air for longer than was comfortable before he dropped it. Ron was staring at the floor, then he rose from his bed and went over to his desk. He rifled through the drawers and took out a Sharpie. This one was fatter than any of the ones in the pack Carl had. (All of them still wrote, and he was very proud of that.) “I could rewrite it for you. I could even do it fancy if you wanted. My mom taught me how to do this…weird fucking calligraphy shit. I dunno. But it’s pretty.”
Carl’s stomach did a flip and his eyes widened. He held his arm out. Ron sat back down and got to it. He watched the words be spelled across his flesh in the most beautiful they had ever, or would ever, look.
The letters curled and twisted and danced. Carl wanted them there forever, and he wasn’t even sure why. While Ron was writing, his sleeve slipped up and Carl saw the colors purple and yellow swirl together and wrap around his wrist in a horrible bruise. He stared at it but didn’t say anything for six minutes while Ron wrote the words. Sing me, oh Goddess, the rage.
“How’d you get that?” Carl only asked when the cap of the marker clicked back into place. He didn’t look at him while he asked, he kept his eyes locked down on his arm.
He saw Ron freeze out of the corner of his eye for no more than half a second while he put the marker away. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Fucking around and finding out.” The draw to his desk shut.
Carl thought of Ron’s father drinking his weight at the welcome party Deanna threw. He thought of his own father tensing just at the mention of the name Pete. Sing me, oh Goddess, the rage. Carl’s teeth pressed down on each other so hard he thought they might crack. His nails dug back into his palms. “Okay.”
Carl went home that day and looked at his arm for a very long time. When he showered, he put this weird cling wrap around it so that it wasn’t messed up, and he showed it to his dad when he came home. He had raised his eyebrows and nodded. He was tired. Carl felt bad for bothering him.
He went to find Michonne to find her to show her, instead. She took a good long look at his arm and told him. “I’ve seen that before. Or I’ve heard it.”
Carl was excited and jealous all at the same time. Excited that his words were being shared and impacted more people than just himself, and angry they didn’t only belong to him and the echoing halls of the prison anymore. “I heard it at the prison.”
Michonne shook her head. “No…no. I’ve read something like this somewhere. Just now sure where. Did you do the calligraphy?” She said, skeptically.
Carl shook his head. “Ron did.”
To that, she grinned something stupid that made him red with shame, and he looked at his boots. “When I was your age, we got little notes that said ‘Do you like me?’ then little boxes that said yes or no.”
“Shut up.” He laughed, and she laughed harder.
Only a few days after that, Carl was on the roof with Enid, and that was how he learned about the way he dealt with his own rage for a time since no goddesses would sing about it for him. It was a hot, hot, night. Humid with the singing of cicadas and crickets in the background. Enid wore a magenta tank top, leaving her shoulders and arms on display.
The patches of scars were messy in some places, and others perfectly aligned in rows of two or three. They were all horizontal, never vertical. Some of them were thin and old, others were pink and raised and think. Some of them reminded Carl of the scars on Beth’s wrist he had seen once on accident.
“How’d you get those?” He asked her.
She didn’t answer him. “Do you like Ron?” She pointed to his arm.
The calligraphy was still there. It was faded, but still stronger than what his Sharpie illustrations usually looked after this long. Carl thought about it away. “Yes.” He decided.
Enid nodded. “He’s a good person to like.”
Carl agreed with her, then stared at her arms until she sighed loudly, and climbed down from the roof.
Sing me, oh Goddess, the rage. Carl had a knife he liked more than the other ones. He kept it in a holster on his thigh. The reason he liked it was simple: One day, Ron needed to cut open a box he’d found in a closet, and he reached and swiped the knife right from Carl’s thigh. His fingertips had brushed against the seam of his jeans between his thigh and the back of his leg.
Carl’s stomach turned hot, his face turned red, and his eyes bulged from his skull while he looked down at the counter. He was pretty sure Ron was more focused on the box to notice, but if he had noticed, he hadn’t said anything. He was good like that.
At the end of the day, he handed the knife back to Carl hilt first. Carl took it, twirled it between his fingers, and put it back on his thigh. Ron watched with his head tilted. The way his eyes worked over him made Carl feel naked, so he looked away. “Do you think you can re-do the calligraphy on my arm?” He blurted after a while.
Ron seemed surprised but shrugged. “Sure man. Uhh…let me go get my big Sharpie.” He ran up the stairs. Carl drummed his fingers against the counter for two and a half minutes. (Yes, he counted. His stomach had butterflies and his face was warm, and he counted how long Ron was gone. Maybe he was going insane.)
He came back not with his Sharpie, but with a small pouch of drawing utensils. “I think Sam stole my big one for one of his stupid drawings… God knows if I’ll ever get it back.” He unzipped the pouch and dug through it. With his eyebrows downturned in confusion, he took out a red pen. The tip of it looked a little weird, clogged, and clotted, and when he pushed the top to click it open, the pen exploded all over Ron’s jacket.
Carl jumped. Ron squeezed his eyes shut, his lips went into a tight, thin, smile and he nodded. “Yep. That seems about right.” He muttered. He threw the pen into the trash, wiped his hand on his jacket, then he took it off. He must have done it without thinking because his arms were spotted with those same horrible colors from his wrist a week and a half earlier.
Carl scanned them. He tried counting them, but with a few, he couldn’t tell where they ended and another began. Carl was no stranger to bruises. Being out on the road did that. These were different. These seemed deliberate and Carl thought again of Pete drinking his weight, and his father muttering about it, and Carl watching the entire Anderson family from afar.
Anger curdled in Carl’s gut like milk. He bit the entire of his mouth until his tongue was covered in a tangy metallic flavor he had tasted many times before. His nails went back to his palms. Ron realized what he had done by taking his jacket off, but when Carl said nothing, he went back to searching through his writing pouch with shaky hands. He took out a sharpie significantly less thick and re-did the calligraphy. “I like writing on your skin.” He told Carl. For just a moment, the hot rage in his belly turned into a different, pleasant, sort of warmth. “It’s the easiest I’ve ever seen skin take to calligraphy like this. You know, done without a tattoo gun. It usually puts up some resistance, but yours doesn’t.”
It was the weirdest compliment Carl had ever received, and it made him wonder what Ron’s lips on his own would feel like.
Sing me, oh goddess, the rage. Dad didn’t talk much anymore. He left early in the morning. If Carl was up while he was still home, he had been up for five minutes. He came home late and didn’t want to talk about anything. He did what needed to do, had the arguments he needed to have, and then slept it off.
Carl realized that part of the reason he spent so much time with Ron, was that he was one of the few people in this place that gave him any sort of attention. He liked the attention, too. It was different from any other kind of attention he’d ever gotten. Still, he missed the attention he would get from his dad. He wanted to feel the hand on the back of his neck again. Those odd hugs he gave that made Carl’s ribs feel like they were going to splinter.
He wasn’t angry about that. He was still too busy being angry about the bruises on Ron’s arms to be angry about his dad not talking to him as often. (Hell, when he saw all of those purples and yellows and greens and browns all mixed on Ron’s milky skin, it made him feel bad for ever complaining about his dad ever.) Carl sat on the cool tile of his bathroom, and he stared at his own arm. Sing me, oh Goddess, the rage. It told him. He didn’t have a goddess. No one was singing it for him.
He slid the knife from the holster on his thigh and pressed the tip to his finger. He made a tiny slice on the pad of his finger. A red line appeared, and he brought it to his tongue. The taste was all too familiar. When he pulled it away, the line was barely bleeding. He had barely cut it, anyway. He looked down at his arm again.
The anger he had felt before was still sitting in his stomach like guilt from a bad idea. He thought about Enid next, and her arms. The patched, scarred, raised skin all over her. She had so much rage, but she seemed to keep it under control. Or at least she hid it better than others. Maybe it worked for her.
Carl switched the knife to his non-dominant hand, and rolled his sleeve up past his elbow, then decided that wouldn’t work. He shrugged his flannel off his arm until it hung off his opposite shoulder. As carefully, and timidly as he could, he pressed the edge of his knife—the one Ron had touched—to his flesh. He took a deep breath and pressed down, then sliced. It was one of the weirdest things he had done that brought him instant relief. Instead of keeping his jaw locked in place with his teeth gritted, he relaxed, and let out a deep breath.
The cut was shallow, but it bled. Tiny little beads pushed their way through the thin slice. Yet, something still nagged at him. He tore his eyes away from the first one he had done, then decided there was no harm in a second. It had the same effect, but all of those bad things from before faded away into nothing. His head was quiet. He could hear birds cheeping outside. He could hear Judith giggling a couple of rooms over.
Carl looked over at the calligraphy. Sing me, oh Goddess, the rage. He didn’t need singing.
Two weeks after he cut himself open—he’d done it three more times by this point—his dad threw Ron’s dad through a window. He and Ron had been over the walls for the first time. They ran around the forest, and Carl carved his words into a tree. Ron showed him how to skip rocks, and Carl showed him how to catch frogs. When they saw Pete and his dad fighting in the middle of town, in a puddle of glass, while everyone surrounded them, they didn’t know what to do.
Carl reacted as quickly as he could and went to try and pull his dad off, Pete. In hindsight, it was one of the worst ideas he’d ever had, as just moments before Ron’s mom ran over with tears in her eyes only to be slapped away. Enid was the one who caught Carl when he was thrown back. Then, his dad pulled a gun, and Michonne knocked him over the head.
Carl saw Ron kneeling with his chin and bottom lip trembling next to his sobbing mother and that same feeling in his stomach he’d gotten while looking at Ron’s arms. Seeing both of their fathers passed out among the glass made it worse. Then, they were both dragged away, as though they were equally at blame for this, and that was it. Carl ripped himself away from Enid’s grip and as much as he desperately wanted to go over to Ron, he was busy consoling his mother. So, he went back to the house.
He locked the door. He drew the curtains closed. He spent some time with Judith, then she fell asleep. He paced, he paced, he paced. He tapped a rhythm against the wall and felt a sudden weight on his thigh. His knife, the knife Ron touched. He pulled it from its holster.
Carl went to his bathroom. He didn’t close the door, his dad was locked in a cell somewhere and there was probably some kind of meeting going on to discuss whether or not he deserved to be exiled. Carl shed his flannel and then looked at himself. His eyes had heavy bags under them, his cheeks looked hollower than the last time he looked at himself, and his eyes were duller. That didn’t make any sense. They were in a place with food water and beds. Why did he look worse?
Carl shook his head. Whatever. Things so seldom made sense to him, anyway. He went to put his shoulders to the test when his right arm beckoned him. It was faded, his favorite words. He worried Ron would hate him because Carl’s dad beat up his father and he would never get the calligraphy again. (Of course, he thought about Ron’s honey laugh, too. How his fingers felt, how his voice sounded, the way he talked, how his two front teeth fell slightly in front of his others.)
Carl held the knife in his non-dominant hand. S. It was jagged and crude, and it hurt, but he did it. By the time he was done, he was breathing heavily and his hand shook. He still had the rest of the letters. Carl got through Sing me, oh Goddess Before he had to take a break. The S’s hurt the most, the uppercase G, too. It looked not nearly as good as Ron’s calligraphy, but he kept going. Sing me, oh Goddess, the rage.
By the time he was done, he felt light-headed. He was glad he did it over the sink and not the tile like he had been. His arm looked simply red. The letters read what he had been hearing in his head for years, though. His favorite words. What he lived by, maybe, if he knew what it meant. What haunted him. Carl started to blink rapidly. He stumbled, and he turned on the water to the sink. Horrible swirls of red curled down the drain, then he heard the door downstairs open. How? He locked it. “Just a second!” He called down, and he turned off the sink. He grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his arm. Cool panic planted its roots quickly at the bottom of his belly and slowly grew upwards to spread all throughout his body.
Without thinking about how it may be a burglar, or someone else bad, he ran down the steps. There was a trail of blood behind him and the hand clamped over the towel on his arm had grown wet with it. He came face to face with Michonne, who was confused for all of three seconds before she ran forward and put her hands on his shoulders. She did not take him to the infirmary, she took him to Carol’s house.
Carl didn’t remember getting stitches, but he had them when he looked down again. “The Iliad,” Carol said. “When the hell did you get time to read that?”
Carl cleared his throat. He hoped the stitches didn’t mess up the scarring. “What?”
“That quote, sing me, oh Goddess, the rage? That’s from the Iliad.” Carol explained while she washed her hands.
“I haven’t.” He told her. “I just heard it once.”
She didn’t ask any further questions. Carl was asked questions, though. Michonne asked them, when his dad was released from his little cell, he asked them. He wasn’t sure if he answered.
He saw Ron again six days after Carl’s dad killed Ron’s dad. He walked to the house, and Jesse smiled sadly at him. Ron was in his room, hunched over and drawing something. “Hi.”
Ron looked up with glassy eyes. “Hey,” He greeted. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a cutter.” Great. He’d heard, then.
Carl winced. “ I didn’t kill your dad.” He muttered.
Ron glared up at him, looked down at whatever he was doing, then sighed. “No. You didn’t.” He scooted on the side of his bed.
Carl walked over and sat down. He leaned over to look at what Ron was doing. It was done entirely with ballpoint pen, there was broken glass all over the floor, torn paper scattered with it, and a hand, limp. The hand was red. On the wall in the drawing, in purposefully rough handwriting, Sing me, oh Goddess, the rage.
“Pretty,” Carl told him.
“Which arm did you do it on?” Ron blurted with a set jaw.
Carl blinked at him in confusion. “Wha…what do you mean?”
“Which arm did you carve this into?” He asked. Carl immediately felt horrible again. He had messed up the calligraphy, and his perfect skin to write on with this. He looked down at the bedsheets. “Which one?” Ron asked again.
“My right,” Carl answered.
Gently, Ron took his hand. He rolled up his sleeve gentler. Carl was confused while he watched Ron examine his bandage. His heart thumped in his chest, heavy. “You can take them off.” He told him.
Ron hesitated, then slowly unraveled his arm. Some of them needed stitches, and some of them didn’t. The uppercase G needed it, some of the S’s. Ron stared at it. He rubbed his thumb on Carl’s wrist again. “Pretty.” He whispered and Carl was more confused at that moment than in his whole life, until he remembered Pete.
Sing me, oh Goddess, the rage. Ron had no Goddess singing for him. He could only scribble and get so much of how much anger he had out. He hadn’t figured out Enid’s secret to being so chill. “Thank you,” Carl whispered back to him, finally.
Ron set down his notepad and his pen. He walked over to his bedroom door and shut it softly, then clicked the lock. He took off his jacket. The bruises on his arms were faded, but still present. Ron through the jacket onto the floor, then sat and held his arm out. “Do it to me.”
“What?”
“I want you to do it to me.” He told him. Then, Ron took a breath, and spoke plainly, directly, and that was somehow worse than any veiling he could have done. “I’ve been writing it. Over and over and over. On everything. Drawing it, painting it, whispering it. I want it in my skin. Please. Carl. Please.” He begged. Pleaded. He even reached down and snatched the knife from his holster—the only reason he’d been allowed to keep it after what he’d done was because when his dad tried to take it away, he cried. It was the knife Ron touched.
He handed it to him hilt first. “Try not to make me need stitches.” He added.
Carl held the knife. He looked at Ron’s arm. Then, he took the red pen from the bed and handed it to him. “Write it on your arm first.” He told him.
Ron did.
While he did, he thought of his mother's screams in the hollow halls of the prison, and her blood pouring onto the ground. He thought of his dad falling onto the ground in a ball and sobbing when she died. He thought of the man on the side of the road. He thought of Enid’s scars. He thought of Pete and his drinking.
Ron finished writing. Carl took the tip of the knife and began to scratch the letters into his skin.
Sing me, oh Goddess, the rage. His favorite words, carved into the skin of one of the best men he knew, in matching madness with his own.