Work Text:
Rifle-Man
My biggest fear is not the bug on the wall, or a 30,000 foot drop; is not death and damnation, or endless torture and fire—
Nay, the greatest fear, that even my fear fears, and cowers, and hisses, and claws at, is fading into a ghost— another face in the crowd.
Another man working at that diner down on First, with eyes dark and skin pale, a spirit amongst reality, soulless jobs with average pay, and a life that is just that—average.
Wife and son, yes, but both as gray-faced and dead-eyed as I, both working at that diner down on First. And as my face, so pale and melted, wrinkles like those takeout bags that litter my shadowed apartment, and my dark eyes wither out of my skull, and all I hear is heartbeats and eyes that stare widely at the man I had become. At the letdown I had become.
And even as I run to the golden arms of my Father — the Father of light, the Father of faces — my fate is sealed, but in a place where people are gray, and light is void — mirrored, microwaved faces that drip and pop and boil
like me, who had been ruined with a rifle between the eyes.
Nay, my spirit screams for the stages— sings for gold-plated beds and gold-plated teeth, gold-plated suits and gold-plated ties, and gold-plated plugs that deafen the world to my ears as the people — my people — scream, “Encore! Encore! Encore!”
until my eyes bulge and my smile is teeth, until my mind melts into a puddle of mush— until the day I die in my gold-plated bed with my gold-plated wife, no mirrors, no rifles, no microwaved faces. Just me, drowning in stage light, drowning in love
until my lungs give and pop like a balloon, and all I exhale is gold-plated blood and finally go to Gold-Plated Heaven.
But I am not that man. And that man is not me. Nay, I am not the Man Made of Gold. I am the man who works at that diner down on First— I am that man, so wrinkled and thin, that man who planted that rifle between his eyes, that man who cowers and hisses and claws at that glowing, gold-plated door where the people bleed encores, and the people bleed love.
Where the days are long and blinding, and the grass is greener than a million Franklins, and sunsets so purple they set your soul ablaze. Where those faceless faces meld together in the sky, and their screams are drowned out by those encores forever.
Nay, for I am the Rifle-Man.