The Grindstone And The Garden

…if people who expect nothing come away empty-handed, then there really is no hope.

—William Maxwell, Time Will Darken It

The dead flicker like candles around you. They are burning their memories for warmth.

—Kelly Link, “Flying Lessons”

This world is full of war criminals, many of whom have never fired a weapon in their lives. Most of them don’t commence their truly devastating assaults until the enemy has laid down its arms.

What good are fighting words in a world where there are no longer any fair fights?

At any rate, let me start by thanking you for a few moments of your time. I’m genuinely grateful. I always try to be genuinely grateful.

My fingers have all been broken and my tongue was nearly cut from my face.

Listen: hear that? Yes, that’s right, almost silence. I’ve let the clock go. It was the sound of another time, other nights, a soundtrack of sorts for the strange, confusing, often magical nights behind me.

I’ve moved on.

The pygmy with the long shadow –a sort of giant pygmy, if such a thing is possible, and I’m here to tell you that I believe it is– has gone off to swing its wrecking ball at other targets.

Protege of a Shar-peian witch who had a prodigious and legendary libido and kept a stunted oaf captive in her cellar, the pygmy was a dog killer and a ferocious biter, a sociopathic narcissist trapped in the amber of its own damage, prisoner of its obsessive routines, haunted childhood, and self-created myths; a spectacular creature, really, but one must ultimately be willing to pronounce a monster a monster and leave it at that.

Oh, make no mistake, the pygmy was remarkably gifted so far as monsters and myth-makers go; alas, as an imitation of a human being (which it seemingly aspired to be) considerably less so. Still, yes, no getting around it, a marvel, a chimera, an absolutely indestructible (and destructive) beast who was able to go about the world in a carefully contrived costume of vulnerability.

It’s amazing how many people are charmed out of their shoes –sometimes literally– by the appearance of vulnerability.

I tip my hat, really I do, even as I am somehow both relieved and saddened to be rid of the monster once and for all.