Glorious Exploits

by Ferdia Lennon

It’s hard to imagine that there are hundreds of them, perhaps a thousand sleeping down there. You know it’s true. That somewhere in the black they exist, but where and who, and what are they thinking, feeling? It makes my head spin and gives a kind of swirling beauty to the dark.

“You don’t rob a man of his suffering,” says Gelon quietly. “That’s his.”

They look too weak for violence, but anything can happen; that’s why we covered the food. All they see is a ragged cloth, and it seems odd to me that as they cradle their funeral rocks, life wheels past them, weeks or even months of life rolling past, but they don’t know. Sometimes it’s better, I think, not to know.

Hunger, what an odd thing it is. Is the source of all love a lacking? Is that what creates emotion? Not a presence but an absence. Do you need to be emptied to be filled?

Sometimes I feel like crying, but I reckon that’s ’cause at last things are happening, and I care how they unfold.

Nothing here is alive yet, but it throbs with expectation; the robes and crowns, twitching almost like spring flowers just before the bees rock up.

Only a couple of birds have started to sing, and their frail song gets drowned out by the wind, the snorting of the horse. I can’t see well in the back of the wagon, and it’s a curious thing. Not so much seeing the dawn but hearing it. The birds are tentative to start, like nervous performers before a tough crowd.

and it strikes me that they’ve returned to a second childhood. That suffering has stripped away the years in the way carpenters can uncover the youth of a tree by scraping the plane against the old bark. Yes, I think they’ve found a sort of innocence in their ruin.

I play, though of course you couldn’t really call what I’m doing playing, but it clashes with the scurrying of rats, their awful screeching, and in my mind, those rats aren’t just rats, they’re everything in the world that’s broken. They’re things falling apart, and the part of you that wants them to.

Those rats are the worst of everything under an indifferent sky, but the sound coming from the aulos, frail as it might be in comparison, well, that’s us, I say to myself, that’s us giving it a go, it’s us building shit, and singing songs, and cooking food, it’s kisses, and stories told over a winter fire, it’s decency, and all we’ll ever have to give, I say to myself, as my lungs burn and my eyes water, ’cause I don’t have much left, but I keep blowing away at the aulos, playing my song, but the rats are as loud as ever, and this is madness,

Yet, he reasoned, perhaps in the end it was fitting, for his master was ever in love with misfortune and believed the world a wounded thing that can only be healed by story.