Perhaps a story of courage, as a story provides a pleasant outlet for otherwise uncomfortable language.




Worn down pavement, fading grey with use, fronts an indistinct wall of houses, battered by listless care, dulled by age, no house the same but all one. Empty ghosts, people once upon a lifetime ago, step into the grey wall, merging and vanishing, or step away, becoming faceless pieces of a whole. However, one house, darker and crooked and bent, as if crouching, hunching its back from an unseen light, ugly and menacing, differed. Cries, of pain and fear and Despair, spew from the squatting building, like diseased blood from a dying corpse. Shapeless ghosts turn ever so slightly, common reactions to commonly occurring actions.

Alas, a disturbance rips the ugly monument from the weary wall, as a wraithlike woman, hurting and scared and scarred and Hopeless, tumbles under the hungry glare of the menacing structure. Leaning over, a wicked glee flashing from window eyes, the dark statue crookedly smiles as a man appears. Equally Hopeless, but full of anger from pain and fear and the faded soul he can’t face staring back at him relentlessly day after day after day after day, crushing and squeezing and smothering life till anger, at failures and regrets, and self-loathing fuels a fury towering and towering and towering like the hungry creature framing his back as he stands in the doorway.

Pulsing, pulsing, pulsing, the fury beats with each step down the stairs, pain and fear and loathing and Despair swirling until black Hate roars like a flood, shattering his faded soul, seeping through his mind and creating a desperate animal, lashing blindly at all near. The man snarls, the woman sobs, the gargoyle darkens in anticipation and a child appears, pain and fear flickering in his eyes as he holds a tool of desperation, a final solution. The man, black with hate, the woman, white with fear, both oblivious as the child steps, steps, and stops. Turning, his eyes flash and shine forth, pain and fear still lurking, yet revealing a brilliant, glowing red light smoldering deep inside. The gargoyle creaks and groans, recoiling as if struck by a never-seen light. Stepping forward, the child strikes calmly, ending the panic and Despair. Reeling, black beating Hatred disrupted, the man’s fury returns, and spinning, he releases his own Desperation upon the child while the woman whimpers in terror.

Finishing, the man drags the woman to their self-made cage, leaving the child lying alone at the bottom of the steps. Fluttering open, the child’s eyes fill with brilliant red flames, as if tempering a glowing metal. Unafraid, his eye’s close again and the child breathes out……