Read Online Fell of Dark by Patrick Downes - Free Book Online Page B

have to say why they make me cry. They just do. Music. Beauty. My headaches. Poverty. The hungry. The sick and crippled. The bullied. The grieving. The raped and murdered. My mother’s loneliness. The impossibility of you. Haven’t I made you up?
    These things beat me up. They make me bleed, and they bruise me. My body hurts. Some days, because of all the pain, I beg my mother to let me stay in bed. I won’t go to school. I won’t get up until after noon. My body hurts. I know my legs will break if I try to stand. So I stay in bed, thinking, not even reading. I write poems. I cry. I sleep. I become one with the bed, rooted. I’m a sort of mushroom.
    I’ve wanted to kill myself.
    I can hear the crying, soothing Belphegor who lies down next to me and holds my eyes shut.

    I want to confess to the things that make me angry. The men who stare at my mother like she’s a steak dinner. Car horns. Sirens. Crowds. Going to school, even though I can basically do what I want when I’m there. The fact I cry so easily. Physical pain. My bleeding and my hidden purpose.
    I get angry if I have to stand in line for any reason. Angry at people who leave their dogs tied up outside no matter what the weather is. Angry in the heat. Angry when people litter. Angry if I have to answer the phone while my cereal gets soggy in milk.
    I get mad at babies who cry, but I also get mad at babies who laugh. Barking dogs. Lawn mowers. Leaf blowers. Current events. Past events. Future events, like the end of the world when our sun finally gets tired of it all and explodes.
    It’s bad enough I get angry at so much. I’m sure it’s more. It’s how big my anger gets. Sometimes, it takes up all of me. My bones are made of anger, my veins and arteries, my eyes, my brain, my organs. Am I made from anger? It seems bigger than me, twice as big as me, and I want to crumple everything into a little ball, including myself, and throw it away. Satan commands it.

    I’ve been known to eat until I make myself sick. I drink a gallon of milk every two days. I eat cereal by the bushel. I eat and eat and drink and drink. The whole time, Beelzebub snorts and burps.

    Lucifer stands behind me. I have more intelligence, talent, physical strength, height, and speed than any other boy my age. You will know me as a king, a kind of god, able to do anything, think anything. Erik.

    I can do anything except ask a girl out. So, Asmodeus, constantly licking his lips, and I have to watch Gemma Burns from far away. Her beauty and body make me dark, almost angry, and she stands under the arm of a false king, Sam McHugh.

    Gemma isn’t you. I know it. But I want Gemma to be mine, and for Sam to turn to sand. Green Leviathan roars.

Salve
    THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS have their answer in the Seven Heavenly Virtues.

    The woman dropped her wallet. I shouted, Ma’am, Ma’am, even though I could see the bills in their slot, feel the weight of the change, and I returned it, even though I wanted to run with it. The woman who dropped the wallet was old. She walked with a cane in one hand, and she might have lost the wallet from her other, trembling hand, or from her pocket. Her eyes were watery, and her mouth was folded in on itself. If I’d known at the beginning where this wallet came from, I would never have thought to run with it, to steal it for myself.
    â€œOh, how stupid,” she said. “Careless.”
    I wanted to help her walk, but she limped off on her own, talking to herself.
    I thought,
It shouldn’t matter. I shouldn’t steal from anyone, young or old, or pray for easy money.

    I can’t claim all the credit for it, but I didn’t hang myself or cut myself open in a tub. No matter how sad I get, or agitated, or storm-driven, I always do get up. I walk. I remember my mother. I remember you are in this world for me, and I am in this world for you. I remember whatever God might be, and I think about what