Winter Rampant

Ah, it’s a winter day and the breathing of the year is slowing down, agonal, soon to stop. The endless circling of the stars and the thin shafts of sunlight spear down into the earth and bring a certain gladness, it seems to me, to the birds who go about their business above me.

The frost retreats from the heat of my thumb, pressed against the grainy glass of the windshield in passing, a reminder that I still have within me the heat of the life-force, the soul-ember that can melt the deep cold that exists between the planets, that exists between men of the same bloodline who should be brothers but do not know how. Or why.

I look up into the nearby country cemetery, and my heart feels as frosty as the gravestones marching up the slope of this fenced-off holy place. These are my people, and yet they are not. I live in an alien world, a world in which people can safely claim that Christ the Lord was transgender, and they do this because they do not fear for their lives in speaking such filth. They would never say such a thing in the presence of a mosque-boy, but such creatures do not fear my people any longer. We despair, but we won’t admit it. We like to think that we’re the last age of men, that the warheads with their Julienned atoms will rain down and erase it all, or that a meteor will blaze across Orion’s belt and make a quick turn towards Planet Earth and speed up to a point of flash and silence, or that a brass trumpet will blast from the blue sky above us and a bearded and sandalled and gently-smiling Jesus will descend towards Iowa or Montana while evildoers tumble into a Cecil B. DeMille chasm of flame and sulfur near San Francisco, and the faithful church-attenders will rise with no-longer-feigned piety and mount the saddled cirrus clouds upon which they will trot and canter for ages to come. But I believe we may be deceived by our own preferences, our wish-shackles, and that the stars may continue to whirl above the heads of men for some time yet, and that the unimaginable may well come to pass, that the graves of our loved ones, in their grassy beds, behind the rusted fences, tucked into isolated fields or lined up in regimented rows in manicured plots next to the interstate will be dug up and looted, that the broken remains will be looked upon with narrowed eyes just as we gazed at the longships in Norway’s antiseptic museums, just as we did to the infant mummies in the glass display cases while we filed past with bored eyes and schemed of lunches and liquors and ballgames. It may be that the relics of those who guarded our bloodlines may be defiled and scattered, or perhaps sold for profit in some future flea market, or maybe ground up and used for fertilizer when the once-healthy soil is played out and in need of assistance in growing the scraggly corn and beets that will wave in the dank breezes to come, the breezes moving sluggishly beneath a smudged sun.

And we will deserve all of it, down to the last astringent dregs.

The cold sun sits just above the gravestones now, over there in the West. The birds swoop down and sit in the brittle needles of browned grass, and they are content. They are fulfilling their roles. They will welcome sundown.

~ S.K. Orr