King of Ashes

by S.A. Cosby

But there was a place in his mind, between the shadows of his desire and the sunset of his self-loathing where time slowed and the real world fell away, where the safe word didn’t work. Where Miss Delicate ignored his protestations. Where he was given what he craved in the deepest, darkest caverns of his heart.

Penance. Punishment. Absolution.

blithely

“I used to be afraid the universe was evil. Now I almost wish it was. Because evil can be bargained with, evil has a purpose, no matter how horrible it may be. But what I’ve come to realize is the universe is indifferent, and that is so much more terrifying,” she had said.

The universe was both evil and indifferent. It was both horrific and idiotically apathetic. It was like a god that strode through time and space full of anger and bereft of concern.

he didn’t want to work at the crematory. He didn’t want the scent of burning flesh in his nostrils or ashes in his hair. He wasn’t ungrateful for the life flames had given him and his brother and sister. But he had no desire to be the King of Ashes. That title belonged to his father, and Roman was content to let it live on through him or burn with him.

According to the police, June 6th, 2003, Bonita Carruthers walked out of Jefferson Run Memorial and vanished like a cloud of dust caught in the summer breeze.

Dante was as high as the price of gas.

Money is like acid. It burns through everything. Friendships, family, lovers, husbands and wives. Whatever bond you think you have, money will make that shit dissolve.

“Yeah, but how many of those people got a mama who went missing and a whole town who thinks your daddy burnt her up?” she said, before going back inside, leaving the door open partially.

Now she eats ’em all up. Rome, she got to the bottom of that plate and somebody had taped a page from a book to the plate. It was a page torn from the Quran. They fed that nigga’s guts to the mother of his children. Whatever you thinking about saying to these boys, think about it real long and real hard,” Dante said.

When he and Getty had first gotten that big bag of brown from the BBB, he’d imagined flipping it and making enough money to pay his car off and rub it in his daddy’s face. He didn’t want to be Pablo Escobar, he just wanted to show up his daddy.

“What’s a mad?” Dante asked. “Mutually assured destruction pact.

Who he was as a negotiator. In college he’d learned there were five types of negotiation styles. Compete, Accommodate, Avoid, Compromise, and Collaborate. Torrent was a Compete style. He won and you lost. To this end, he used fear to keep you off your game. Terror was his main lever. And he could pull it anytime.

There’s a thousand ways to die, he thought, but sometimes all it takes is one thing to make you want to live. Like your brother remembering what you like on your pizza.

“Sometimes the man wearing the crown ain’t the man that’s supposed to be the king.”

“Do I have to remind you that all this is because of you? The brand-new teeth I got, you being a finger short, the two hundred thousand dollars I had to pull out of my savings, this real drive-by that almost killed me and Neveah, is because you wanted to play gang-gang. When is it finished? When we can walk down the fucking street and not look over our shoulders, Dante, that’s when it’s fucking finished. Goddamn it. You think I like this shit?” “I think you know you’re really good at it,” Dante said.

There were so many things that he wanted to say to Cassidy that he didn’t want to say over a phone line. The panoply of bad ideas she had just enumerated was making his brain leak out his ears. Going to the police? Telling them he hit a dude in the head with a hammer? That his brother put Getty in a cremation crate, alive, and then set him on fire? That they then put Splodie in a crate and burned him up too? Hiding the fucking car behind her mama’s house with that big-ass ugly spoiler on it?

Us or them.

“So grown people can just be hoes and nobody supposed to say nothing?” Roman says, and instantly realizes he has entered an undiscovered country. A land of fallen idols and deposed emperors. A realm that each child must one day traverse. A journey that takes you from seeing your parents as infallible to recognizing them as all too human. For most, that journey ends with a wistful kind of acceptance.

We love our parents not because they are perfect but because they persevere despite their imperfections. We all fall short of grace, but the beauty lives in the attempt.