𝖊𝖕𝖎𝖑𝖔𝖌𝖚𝖊
✝ It's been a long time.
✝ Hours slide into days, months to years. A decade flits by like a swallow diving for worms, time snatched away just as quickly from the mud. Time. Time. Time. It's all Harlan had ever dreaded—its passage pulled him closer and closer to a pine box. Everything had been an endeavor to slow the inevitable collapse into bones and dust.
✝ He could see how fruitless those efforts were now, gazing into his mirror. His beard, sparse as ever, now mottled with gray. His hair, long and stringy down his back, streaked just the same. He draws his glasses (thicker now, comically so) off to behold the blur instead. He could bear a faint shadow. He could stomach a smear across the wall better than his own dark, tired blue eyes.
✝ The fire left him long ago. It died with everything else. With everyone else. It died choking, screaming, begging God to give him less hours to waste on stoking spent coals. He sets his glasses down on the corner of the sink and draws the same hand to drag down his face. Calloused fingers catch on every scar along the way: the crescent of teeth beneath his eye; a jagged scar from cheek to mouth that cut a stripe through his beard; half a stigmata and signs of a nearly-lost thumb that caught on his chapped lips. Harlan sighs a ruined face into a ruined hand and sinks low on his elbows into the porcelain.
✝ "I'm too old to be your prophet, Lord," he mumbles into still water barely a millimeter from his nose. "I know that's why you're quiet."
✝ The angels stopped shouting at him long ago. They were whispers now, drowned out by the roar of reality which overtook him as his aging joints failed time and time again to do God's work. He could hardly tie a knot. His hands trembled as his mother's once did, braced against the edge of her sink ( HERS !! how he'd have retched at the idea of returning here before, haunted all his life by visions of its wallpaper ) . She was one of many ghosts who lingered around him now, louder than any howling saint which had guided him before.
✝ "I was hopin' I'd deserve to be taken sooner."
✝ It wasn't fair. All he had wanted was to stop time. Now, he was the one doomed to carry the bulk of it. The last soul left at a path lined with coffins. He breathes, and it ripples the water.
✝ "Reckon I got too sidetracked." He drops his face into the cold water. His eyes remain open, gazing at the drain. One, two, three, four, five— He's up again. He paws for a towel and presses it to soaked flesh, the last step in a routine he's committed to memory.
✝ His shadow is striped by the pink and orange hues of morning on his slow walk to the kitchen. He sits down at the same kitchen table, in the same chair he'd been in when Olive died. When everything began. In silence, he draws his hair over his shoulder and begins to braid. Another task he can do blind. It takes longer now, as everything does. It's messier. As the sunrise crept further upward, it illuminated cobwebs and rot and peeling paint. The curtains swayed in the breeze provided by one of many broken windows. It was the only chill early September could provide, so he was thankful for it.
✝ Thankful. What a funny word to use for something so trivial. Suppose all he had was trivial moments, now—solitude gave little else in the way of depth. Of meaning. He struggles to loop a rubber band around the end of his braid and throws it back over his shoulder.
✝ "Maybe I was... wrong 'bout what my atonement was." How many times had he screamed otherwise? How many people did he maim for uttering the same? He steeples his fingers beneath his chin to gaze at the branches swaying gently outside. They used to knock so terribly against the glass at night that he'd sooner perish than go near the fridge. He tucks his boots beneath his chair, streaking a film of dust. "The angels were the path. Not the solution."
✝ Who was he even talking to if God was quiet? He didn't know. Whoever was listening, perhaps. Whichever phantom he wanted to believe was sitting across from him at the table. A dragon. A temptress. Perhaps a preacher, if he dared. Memory slid like a blade between his ribs and in the bleeding, figures seemed to appear. Like those stupid ink blot tests he'd done for psych evals. What do you see, Harlan?
✝ Not much. A body at the bottom of the stairs. A beast splayed on wings of his own blood on stone. Two far-off shadows falling off a cliff. A tall bell tower with a saint swaying in its belfry like a broken windchime. Judges and siren-eyed blondes with collars of bruises on crushed throats. He shuts his eyes, but the visions remain. It's impossible to remember which to be true and which imagined—his memory was only as good as what he chose to recall.
✝ "Give me the strength t'face salvation, Lord." Harlan bows his head. He can smell the soap on his hands, the cheap cologne clinging to his wrists. All dressed up with nowhere to go. Nowhere but the last place he wanted to be, of course. The place he was destined to go all along. "It's clear to me now what I must do t'deserve your embrace. S' why you took everythin' else I had to lose, ain't it?"
✝ Death, like time, was a thief. It was only now, nearing the end ( the end!! Hardly over fifty and already broken down like a lame racehorse ) that he could reflect on what it had stolen. Now, as the last man standing in a timeline doomed from the start, only the curse was to be the fool bearing witness to the aftermath of his sins. To be someone who begged all his life for solitude only to now be crushed by its weight. All those burned bridges had made an island of his life with no boats off.
✝ How wretched to feel all his life an unloved thing to only now stare back at all the times he'd squandered it. Over and over and over again to the dark hand of a vengeful, bloodthirsty God he served to his own collapse. And from every loss, no lesson. Not one.
✝ Not until now.
✝ "I see it. The only path to get t'where they're waitin'. But Lord, it stands over the valley I've dreaded—" His voice cracks. He swallows hard and drags his elbows closer to himself. "And if I'm wrong again, I'm castin' myself down it instead."
✝ He hears a fluttering. The sound of wings, the gentle tap of two taloned feet on old wood. Harlan lifts his head by degrees and opens his eyes barely a sliver, afraid to behold an angel or worse, a soft-eyed ghost.
✝ A dove stares back. An old one, by the looks of it, oblivious or careless of how close it was to his grasp. It quirks its head to the side, in that curious way a bird would, and hops to the back of the opposite chair. His eyes tightly shut at once, then open again, doubting. The dove remains. He blinks again. It's still there.
✝ "What the fuck?"
✝ Elegant as always in the face of reality. Harlan sits up straight ( ignoring the groan, the creak of bones overspent on violence and vengeance ) in his seat, bewildered and silent once more. The dove seems content to sit just as still across from him, resting on chipped wood. The sight, as all things did, reminds him of scripture.
✝ And, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him: And lo a voice from Heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.
✝ Suppose that was answer enough. The barest of smiles twitched the corner of his lip, a flickering that was the closest to mirth he'd been in months. He extends one hand towards it, slow as molasses. Cautious as prey.
✝ The dove startles and flies away, out the broken window. His hand falls back to the table with a hollow thud. It may not have touched him, but a sign was a sign. The dove at the end of the flood. The wings that carried off dreaming kings. Harlan taps his knuckles against the wood a few times anyways, lips pursed, glued to his seat in the lingering glimmers of his hesitation. His terror of the unknown. This was a journey there was no return from. Once he got up, it began.
✝ Times like these made him wish he still had his Mama's Bible. In a flash of memory, he can still see the pages scattering on the highway like a burst of confetti. He can feel that old rage bubbling in his throat and cuts his eyes to the doorway, as if to toss that contempt at someone behind him.
✝ There's no one there. Not anymore. The source of that rage, like all who had stirred his black heart, was long gone. It had nowhere to go.
✝ "Bastard." He speaks anyway. "Fuckin'... selfish, delusional asshole." The hand once knocking now slams against the table, hard enough to splinter. It shocks pain from palm to shoulder and he swears again, louder. "Fuck! Fuck! FUCK!"
✝ He's up on his feet. The chair falls loudly behind him, but he can't hear it, forced upright and out the door in a sudden burst of determination. It was like ripping a bandage; if he went slow, it would just hurt longer.
✝ He was glad to have packed the truck the night before. It had been a rough evening of private reckoning—of weeping, and shouting, and praying for answers which refused to come until the wee hours of the morning. Another failure to make even his most basic angelic tie, the very last test of if he could bring back the Tied Piper for a chance at Heaven after ages semi-retired. Finally, he was at the end of his own rope.
✝ Funny, how devastating it could be to learn that the end was life instead of death. He’d thought his mission done at his final breath, that it would all close with a bang and a blaze of glory, and yet every morning he woke up to smell the goddamn roses. Or whatever horrible, ancient potpourri he’d broken out from the attic to cover the stench of a decaying house.
✝ A house now shrinking in his rearview mirror for the last time.
✝ “Goodbye, Mama.” He’d never said that before. Even at her funeral. Never dared. But as the sagging porch and crooked blue shutters faded into oblivion, it felt as if her shadow at last went with it. It was…. Peaceful.
✝ The drive to the city was, too. It gave him time to reminisce, though he was loathe to—memory being all he had of anyone, it did him more harm than good. Then again, what didn’t? His legacy was graves and altars. The tales his journals tell are of loss after loss, most at least partly his fault.
✝ Why is he always the one who lives? What was the divine plan to make him stay above the dirt, but take his atonement?
✝ “I figured it all out. Why I had to make all them angels.” He doesn’t want to remember anyone, so he pretends he doesn’t have to. He’s alone in the truck but it feels full. If he just doesn’t turn his head, his addled mind can slip into the fantasy that someone is there to fill the passenger seat like they used to. “Weren’t to… to keep it a secret. Weren’t to display, neither. More like to… to create something unforgivable.” Another dove flies past the windshield and into the trees. “And then be forgiven.” He keeps his foot on the gas. “I weren’t meant for no titles, no… no final fuckin’ sacrifice taken from no more weepin’ mothers to earn my grand endin’.” The only sound is the whistling of wind by a cracked window slammed too often to close correctly. For a moment, he forgets why.
✝ “You’re bein’ awful quiet. Thought you’d have somethin’ smart to say about my—” Harlan reaches for a hand that isn’t there. The illusion shatters as soon as it’s begun. He glances at the empty space and sternly blinks away the mist already clouding his eyes. “—revelation.”
✝ Back to reminiscing, then. He had no choice. Thinking was off the table with no captive audience and a cowardly nature which begged to turn around. To change his mind.
✝ The memories all blend together. No order, no sense. Laying in a field with a gangly, dark-eyed boy. WRITHING IN HIS OWN BLOOD ON A DINING ROOM FLOOR WITH A BLADE IN HIS JAW. Pulling the rope tighter across a barn beam in the twinkling light of dusk. SCREAMING THROUGH GRITTED TEETH BENEATH A DRAGON’S CLAWS. Kneeling at the bedside of a fallen saint and pleading for peace. BEING BAPTIZED BY FORCE IN A HOTEL BATHTUB, OVER AND OVER UNTIL REPENTANCE. Joy and suffering. Bliss and agony.
✝ Despite his best efforts, he weeps. Again. Loudly. An ugly, wailing, distinctly undignified cry as if ripped from his very soul. He wails the whole way to the end. To the gravel parking lot and the gray, cement box of a building that would seal his fate. He chokes back spit, wipes his face on his sleeve, and vainly tucks stray hairs behind his ears as if it were the time to save face. He even checks himself in the mirror, like it matters. Like it ever mattered.
✝ “I can do this. I can repent.”
✝ Somehow, this stellar pep talk does not afford him any speed. He takes his time getting out of the truck. He takes even longer to drag a sturdy chest from its bed. Longer, still, to trace his fingers slowly over its surface, over the crooked lock and rusted hinges, the well-worn latches on its face that he’d flipped open thousands of times. Against reason, he opens it again, under the plain view of the open sky. In the stillness of the lot, he thumbs through old photos and locks of hair tied in ribbons. Trophies of newspaper clippings and bags of baby teeth.
✝ “You all got your peace, I think.” He shuts it carefully, as if it would shatter at any cruelty. What a change, so many years too late. “Reckon it’s time everyone else did, too.”
✝ The police station was poorly lit. It’s the first thought that enters his mind as he walks in, beholding flickering fluorescents in a too-low, tiled ceiling. His lips curl into his typical scowl. His hands flex in that nervous way they always do. With a deep breath that shakes every bone, he heaves the chest onto the desk of the first cop he sees. A dark-haired girl with curious blue eyes, an echo of another spectre from his past. Maybe what Jezebel would have been if he hadn't locked her in time. How ironic.
✝ “My name is…” He chokes. At last, he can hear the angels again. Say it. Say it! SAY IT!!! “My name is Daniel Coy.” Harlan turns the chest to face her and flips it open at the seam to display its grisly contents. As the girl’s eyes scanned and widened in horror, he raises both of his holy hands in surrender. At last. At last, real surrender.
✝ “I’m the Tied Piper.”
