Once upon a time, his mother wrote stories. Among them, a myth, drawn upon the foundation of older folklore, where a prince was born and all the birds and beasts of the world attended his creation. Songbirds flew in with clippings of roses in their mouths, blessed his skin with the softness of petals, his ears with the sharpness of thorns, and a heart as open as a full-blown rose. The stallions pranced in place and drummed to him their pride, the apes patted his cheeks and applied their dexterity, the lions licked his wrists and flooded his body with the strength of their sinews. Rams ducked their horned heads to his and bestowed a lush crop of black ringlets to adorn his skull. Wolves arrived to nip in him the seed of cunning, tempered by the peaceful kiss of doves’ wings. But a human could not contain this all, could not live up to so many gifts and so many glory. He was doomed as he was blessed, and the next few chapters outlined a life full of the darkest ordeals and heartaches, until his eventual relief from retribution.
Months of expectation, seconds of the most uplifting joy—then a spiral of dismay.
A year and a day after its publication, his mother found the story in a drawer. Her hands shook so violently that she turned them over to search for strings. Attached to the palms, jerked by a puppeteer unhappy with the mindset of his marionette. No strings. She seized the pages in her unstill hands, and ripped the words into a maelstrom of raining paper and bleeding ink.
That was only the beginning. After he was born, she gathered all her manuscripts, her ink, her paint. She cleared the bookshelves from their hard-edged burdens and carried them outside to a cleared area of the field where the family burned rotten branches in the spring. She set a mound of memories on fire. The crackling scared the songbirds from their nests, the spurts of flame chased the sheep to a corner of the yard. Inside the farmhouse, away from the smoke and the crackling, her baby’s wails shattered the quiet. Almost as if he knew. Almost as if he could feel it, from the tips of his curl black ringlets to the tips of his rose-petal soft skin.
There was too much danger. Self-fulfilled prophecies, slightly skewed. Fairy tales tumbled on their heads and dismembered by reality’s jaws. Hers, her sole son, hers alone, her very own, her disfigured beautiful boy.
She never wrote again.
"Angreek87"
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