The Prophets

by Robert Jones Jr.

Water done wore away at her stone, and the next thing she knew, she was a damn river when she could have sworn she was a mountain.

It won’t that people loved the strong. No. The strong were only to be feared, placated, lied to in the hopes of acquiring favor, a comfort, even if for a moment. It was that they despised the weak. They despised weakness because there was none of the pomp and fervor erected to disguise its essential nature like there was with the strong. In the frail mercy that is weakness, deception’s weight cannot be borne. Everything collapses, leaving only the debris, the casualties, and a fine layer of dust coating the air. This becomes trapped in the lungs and chokes all who inhale, and all must rightfully inhale; nature commands it. That is to say that weakness is but a stark reflection of the faces most wish to hide. The sad face, the mourning face, the weeping face that has stared into the abyss and discovered that there is nothing staring back. Empty. There was only us: Empty’s children, every single one a cannibal. Weakness revealing how miserable it be that there ain’t no such a thing as grace.

Given over to this raging war inside, you will not be able to attend to your liberation in the manner that will most certainly set you free. You will make something else, something impossible, the priority. In the interest of preserving your reputation among the children of your conqueror—who are also, oh!, your siblings—you will compromise your living and consider half-life better than death when they are truly the same.

This, he figured, was the way things were. Everyone got a turn, at some point, to be on top or on bottom. It didn’t matter how good you were or how evil you were. All that mattered was that you were alive and, therefore, unsafe. Subject to His will in the here and, likely, the hereafter. And His will was as brutal as it was arbitrary.

Every travesty that had ever been committed had been committed by plain people and every person had it in them, that fetching, bejeweled thing just beneath the breast that could be removed at will and smashed over another’s head before it was returned to its beating place.

you try to make home a paradise instead of a place where life can take root.