King of Ashes

by S.A. Cosby

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.

the woods waited, ever encroaching, waiting, perhaps, for the day men flipped a switch or dropped a beaker and snuffed out the light of human existence like a child blowing out a candle. Waited to reclaim the land, the sky, and the night.

brick. It was now at this moment, with a mouth full of blood, that he recognized his mistake. He’d gotten so accustomed to the larger-than-life cartoon characters that passed themselves off as tough guys in sound booths in Atlanta, spinning tales of a life they had only observed from the edges, taking that bystander’s knowledge and creating tales of imagined street cred that got downloaded millions of times by similarly false thugs who wanted to believe they were about that life, that he’d forgotten there were real gangsters out there. Men for whom murder was just another part of the job. Business as usual. What had Dante called them? Monsters. They were monsters, and they were eating him and his brother alive.

Roman thought when folks talked about a food desert, what they really meant was that the food available wasn’t any good. Instead of a desert, he thought of it like an ocean. All that water, but if you drank from it you would die. Little stores like this were the flotsam and jetsam in an ocean of junk.

Memory is a powerful thing. It’s a spirit we willingly call upon to whisper lies or help us punish ourselves.

The morning sun baptizes both sinner and saint alike. Before the day is done, they will encounter both.

The Kingdom was four floors of hedonism in the midst of a city on the brink of moral and financial collapse. A Circus Maximus in the middle of a fallen empire of glass and steel.

No one was shedding tears for Splodie except maybe a mother who lied to herself about who and what her son was, or a father who pretended he didn’t know his son was an orphan-maker and a widow-creator.

Roman was beginning to think the only difference between a tragedy and an opportunity was how much what was lost mattered.

Roman knew what “put in work” meant. How old was Eddie? Maybe fifteen? A fifteen-year-old murderer with bodies on him, who didn’t know one of the most infamous gangsters in history. Roman didn’t know what was a worse indictment of society, the bodies or the ignorance.

Roman thought pit bulls had gotten a bad rap, ever since he was a child watching them be stigmatized on a local news station. They were strong, yes, but not in a markedly different way from dogs of similar size. Roman knew the dogs themselves weren’t inherently violent or aggressive. They behaved the way they were treated. If they belonged to Torrent, Roman could only imagine what ethos they absorbed from him and Tranquil.

Later, as he drove back across the bridge and headed for the crematory, Roman thought about one of the lines from The Art of War that did ring true: “The opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.” “You just handed me the shovel to bury you with,” Roman said out loud.

His father used to say how in the Bible it says that God destroyed the earth with water but the next time it’ll be fire.

Saving his family was the end, and the means were justified. But after all this was over, could it end in anything other than ashes?

Kept his hands clean, for the most part, but behind every great empire was an even greater crime.

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

“Tear it down to build it back up.” Roman didn’t know how much he believed in that old axiom. In his experience, things rarely were the same after the tear-down part of that proverb. Most of them came back as a Ship of Theseus. Fundamentally the same, but different in ways that were imperceptible.

Children should be protected from the lives of adults. Especially from the private lives of their parents. Children should be allowed to exist in a state of constant unawareness when it comes to what their parents do inside or outside the bonds of marriage. That sacred covenant is between God and man, but Mother and Father are gods in a way, and they have a sacred covenant with their children. To keep them safe, to do no harm, and to allow them to be children as long as they can.

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.

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.

Lucifer, who thought it was better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.