Grace

    There was a leaf in my hand, the kind of leaf that softly urges you to turn it over and examine the veins that course through it and the blood that courses through the veins. The thing would intermittently pulse as its life force ebbed out of it, stubbornly attesting to its life in the face of having been stripped from the bush on which it grew. This was a fittingly strange bush, the only thing that glowed with vitality in the gray plane of the graveyard.

    The moonlight shone metallic on my body as I walked endlessly in those nights, those trying nights that would never be complete without some sort of pain, be it a prick from a thorny tree or a struggle with a hand spider. I think I craved to be let to feel a little spike on the flatline of my life, and if I did, then this was what we all wanted, all of us who worked nights in the graveyard. All of us wanted to see our visions more crisply, and the mute roar of the moon brought lines and shapes into a sharper definition as we went placidly through the night, taking steps with no direction and paying little heed to obstacles. When we came to a tree, we would press our entire bodies against it and listen to the sound of the two edifices meeting. We would draw breath and feel the sexual pull of the tree as it expressed its loneliness for contact, any contact, and we didn't realize that this feeling was emanating from us and that the trees had been dead for a long time.

    In mornings we would condemn our own foolishness and wet our heads with cloth. By evening we would have forgotten all, slowly making our seperate ways back to the place in our minds that claimed our every night as we searched for grace. We dimly recognized that grace could only be found by accident, and that was why we never troubled to avoid the things we would run into on our roundabout walks in the graveyard, were they stone crosses with faintly engraved letters or little creatures whose bulbous eyes didn't comprehend what they took in as we surged forward to trample them. The urge would take us to fall to the earth, sinking our knees into the loam of rotted leaves and crematory ashes, and dig with our spindly fingers into the homes of the soil worms, who we would stuff in our mouths and hold to our genitals, enjoying their squirming as evidence of life. It may have been said then that all we sought was the evidence of life as something sustainable, something with a future, something with a past, but we had not heeded the words if they were spoken.

    We sought grace as seperate from knowledge, which had only confused our heads and so polluted them. We wanted grace to be clarity, and clarity to be definition, and definition to be understanding, a punctuation of the endless course of time spent without reason in a dim haze of moonlight and blurred images. A putty of dullness crept and grew through our minds, steadily obscuring our thoughts more and more until we could no longer see the reasons for what we were doing, only the dire need to continue. We could no longer identify consequence as a result of action, because the connections from minute to minute had been dissolved. We lived only for the current moment, and no past or future did we ever have or think of, for every night was the same. We never aged, we never felt any younger. We never learned, we never gained experience. We just existed, hanging from the stars and the moon, stumbling without initiative through the endless burial ground where there was no time.

No one but I had plucked the leaf, and I alone deserved to bask in its presence. But it would bring me trouble. I tried to shelter it in the cage of my chest, but its pulsing vitality could be seen from all directions. The bush from which it had come had again ceased to glow, disguising itself from the horde of filthy corpses which now encircled me, their teeth dangling pieces of soilworms and dead leaves. "Give it to us, love," they hissed, so menacing and yet so weak. "Let us handle it now."

"Give me a nail, you son of a bitch." I said. The one who had not spoken pulled air into his skull through his nasal cavity, as if he were thinking about what I had said.

"Give it to me first." he said. I handed him the leaf as the last of its life force drained out into him. He pulled a coffin nail out of his mouth and took his hammer from where he kept it on his hip. With a kick to my ribs he put me on the ground, and then he kneeled. He set the nail to one of my kneecaps, and pounded it in with one swift blow.







I looked around me and all I could see were bones, just bones.







Copyright 2007, Gabriel S. New and $ilky $mooth $tories, www.gabrielsnew.tk