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I.
He's cleared you a path. The air is still smoking. Helping hands guide you and you’re dying with every favor. He’s leading you to the gallows, but you don’t try to run.
He’ll lead you through the mob of familiar faces that cheers for your broken neck, up the shivering steps and onto the platform, and he’ll lead you there and leave you there. It's a slow quest down the path he's made, more smoke in the air and in your chest as he burns and you follow. The noose will rest lighter under your chin than the chains. You think you should run—but when you run you always fall even when nothing’s tripped you, fall and lie with your face pressed stinging to the ground and breathe in the familiar scent of rich dirt, and he’s always there to pick you up, push you forward again.
He’s leading you to the edge of the garden. It is cold. You’re tripping over tree roots, walking into the dark.
II.
He smiles and looking at him is terrible. He smiles too much, doesn’t smile enough, smiles at all the wrong times and he’s usually smiling at you. He never laughs—he chuckles like groaning bones and rolling dice—branches beating against the windows during a storm. He is black, a drop of red and black, and looking at him is like looking into the dark before remembering you are blind. It is like searching for light and knowing it has been lost, knowing that memory will fade and leave you forever.
This is what your left eye sees. You keep your right eye covered, because the world on the other side is even worse.
You see stars out of that eye.
You hold your neck high, try not look to the ground. Become a stiff, brittle thing. Your eyes cannot know what the earth is made of.
III.
He listens intently, remembering, nods and tips his head with the sound as if plucking your every word out of the air and blessing it, giving each a new and special curse. His voice is thin, precise, resonating with larger beasts and pinioned angels battling in the chambers beneath. When everything else is silent, when you are holding your breath because you’re certain your life and soul will slip out if you don’t, already barely contained by your thinning, drying skin, you whisper words under your breath—of what you're not sure.
You hear his teeth. They click together like dulled knives. You hear chains dragging as he follows you.
You try to pull away, but it is like pulling away from thorns before realizing you are caught, you are trapped. So you stay here, because claws make you bleed whether you struggle or not once they're embedded in you, and sometimes when you feel the same pain for long enough it becomes bearable.
The nails suspend your body, holding you, presenting you—a son not given a crown.
You hold up your neck. You can't look down. The thorns tear at you more when you try to speak. You think about the dirt these thorns grew from. You think about the once-living things that became the earth.
You hold your neck stiff and high, because there are brittle thorns at the edge of your skin, teeth at the edge of your throat. You think about ashes from once-living things. You think about the barren.
IV.
He is black. He is black, black, dark and endless and black and he sets fires with red slashing smiles and a wave of his hand, dragging fingers, pale gloves, a spark of hunger behind his eyes—he sets fires when you tell him to and sometimes when you don’t and he never puts them out, not unless you make it an order. He lights candles with nods and you watch the wax drip. You watch the curl of smoke as the flame dies. He always smiles with his teeth. De-winged angels with halos of sable thorn sing you to sleep, tuck in their resting beasts, but they have blood in their eyes. You have no blood in your eyes. You have the memory of words in your head and you feel echoes in your mouth.
You watch the wax drip until the candles burn out. The angels murmur bedtime stories to your sleeping corpse. Your land is barren, built on the ashes of still-restless things.
The path ahead is clouded with smoke, and you feel heavy with cinders and memories in your chest. You look into the black, eyes straining, and you remember that the sun has been lost.
In another time, you used to stay awake all night, watching the shadows and moonlight as the wind threw branches at your arched window. You used to claim you couldn’t sleep in the dark.
"The monsters are outside, in the cold," they told you. "We are watching over you, and they cannot get in."
He pinches out the candles now. You open your uncovered eyes. The dark holds only what you have invited into your home. The heavy drapes never move but you feel the twigs scrape like fingernails along your scalp.
V.
He’s there—always, endless, always by your side and always following you, always guiding you. You run into the dark and he follows and you ask him what he sees, because his eyes are red and yours see only stars where there are not.
Yours see only where there is naught.
You've told him to clear a path, but there is smoke in the air.
You ask him what he sees and he points you down the path.
He catches you when you fall down and sets a fire so you may see—see that you’ve tripped over nothing. He burns the forest and you run through the clinging thorns and dry, snapping branches and the trees, not falling even as you trip over the roots and roses. There is dirt streaked on your knees, caking your shoes. There is dirt under your nails and you want it scrubbed away. You order him to keep you clean, to keep it away. You have built your land on ashes and it cannot be swept away. He twists around everything you dare to touch. Angels sing hopeless lullabies of dying screams and the restless, fanged beasts growl from the shadows; he is the shadow. You are the black and the blue. Bruises bloom beneath your eyes. The trees are made of splinters. The dead forest is spattered with seraphic blood and your ears are ringing with organs and hymns and bedtime stories, prayers and your own curses and tales, and you order him to stop.
VI.
You order him to stop.
He is the serpent, you think, because your mother used to read the good book aloud on Sundays—you in her lap and laughing, your father in his high-backed leather chair, smiling at the sound of her voice. Your father always wore inky gloves, and they were warm when he picked you up. Your mother had a lovely voice, a loving voice. You would watch the fire in its hearth.
It would die, eventually. Your mother recited devotions with her eyes closed, and your father pressed his black fingertips together and agreed. You listened, you copied, you echoed.
There are still tremors in your teeth.
The fire would die and you would be put to bed. You'd claim you couldn't sleep, because that might convince them to stay a little longer. They would kiss your forehead and tuck you in.
"As long as you are strong, nothing can hurt you," they told you. "And we are watching for you when you sleep. We are protecting you when you are weak."
You were not truly afraid of the dark. You did not know to be afraid.
VII.
There is a tree that grows in fertile land. Its fruit are ripe, hanging heavy. Its branches shake in the wind, but they are impossible to see, cloaked in leaves. Its roots run deep through the earth.
Surely, he is the serpent, you think. The serpent with his words, who lured and hissed and promised, and whose flicking tongue told nothing but the truth. And who are you? Eve, who wanted more of life, or Adam, who was convinced by his love? Are you of the snake, the garden, the man who sought sin in paradise, who invited the seed of evil into his home?
You tell yourself that you are the sin. You are the unthinkable deed. You are the trespass that tastes so sweet. The tree should not have been grown where its fruit could be picked. The sin did not belong in the garden.
A tree should not be planted in a garden when it is a world of both soft earth and cold ash, a world where fire spreads as wood burns, a world where the darkness twists branches into claws. It was a cruel thing, for that tree to be planted in a garden, where wanting hands reach for fruit.
You tell yourself these things. There are prayers and curses ringing in your ears, cherub choirs singing, but you do not speak them aloud. Your faith belongs to fire that is not contained within a home, to the restless, unsleeping things that have yet to burn.
finis.
You see stars. He is twisting around your branches, snapping them off under the cover of leaves. You are not Adam and you are not Eve. Not the serpent’s red tongue.
You are not the apple. You know you are the tree. He offers up your fruit to the living. You see him, even in the forest’s dark. You’ll not return to the garden.
He’s set the garden on fire.