To Kill a King

Prelude & Excerpt From My Novel, *Name Pending*

Lucky Strike ad, George Jones record, Banner from Ghostparachutes blog, city skyline by Joana Avillez - etc from Pinterest

Closure.

Oh, closure.

You don’t think about it until it’s time — till time’s all you’ve got left, when you start slicing away the hours of your life into minutes, those minutes into seconds.

How long did I get to see you? How long were you really there?

You count the days on your hands. Mark the lines in your palms like dates on a calendar and suddenly, time is flat.

Time is Texas, dry and unfair, never-ending until you get to the end.

Immanuel Kant once said, “To be is to do”.

I always wondered what he meant by that. If he’d ever seen two of his brothers’ bodies piled up against one another like furniture on a curb. How quickly people living in your blood become ideas and then those ideas pull apart. Like cotton. You pull the fibers each time you start to forget — what he talked like, acted like — what songs he liked to listen to.

and then you start to realize it was all made up. You and him. You and them. Everything and everyone. You’re the ringleader and here’s your circus. Everyone’s playing a part you told them to play and they’re playing it so well, you don’t even catch on in time. You never catch on. Only after the ring of fire has burned out and the wind howls, do you see their bodies. You see their black-marble eyes.

And who was watching? No one. No one but you.

---

Cary killed his dad with a dirty dish towel and monkey wrench in their backyard on a sunny afternoon in the town of *REDACTED*. It was the middle of summer. The ground was so dry, it cracked, scouring deep lines down into the Earth — mirroring veins.

presenting a theatrical interpretation of what a mirror might look like after God’s drunken reprieve. A fist to a wall. A fist to himself.

Cary understood that that day. He understood God and his anger and the illusion of constant benevolence. In their double-wide trailer, the tap to the faucet was still dripping. An empty glass laid on its side. The door to Emily’s room was open. Her bed was unmade. The scuffed dresser full of all her clothes was flipped over onto its side.

There was blood on the door frame, collecting in the form of fingerprints. The shitty, 80 cent wallpaper from the local hardware store was torn. In the kitchen, blood pooled on the peel-away tile.

It only took Cary five minutes to kill his father. At the time, he was a bit shocked how quickly it’d gone. Just two whacks, and his father had cracked open like a ball of paint. Like the ground outside.

like the mirror facing god.

and Cary had wiped his hands with the dish towel. When he opened his eyes, the world spun around him, effortlessly endless. Expansive like a dream. It was quiet and so hot. Overhead, a vulture began to circle. He stood to his feet and drug his father back toward the trailer, closing his eyes to the sound of dry, rolling dirt.

With greasy hands, he called the police. He’d expected something else, anything else, but instead — this. A dead body under an eternal sun. Chapped lips. The inability to cry. How easy life used to be when God was above me, he’d thought.

When the police finally arrived, Cary’s good eye was a perfect pinpoint. His skin was sunburned, beat red and peeling from his refusal to go inside. He was shaking despite the heat. Beside him, the vulture had found his father’s body. It’d already begun to peck away his face, stealing the tip of his nose.

The sheriff’s truck pulled up. Cary rose to his feet.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

|A/N: The nervousness I had toward sharing this is so strange because writing stories is WHAT I DO. These short-form entries that I routinely post are so new to me — yet, I suddenly prefer them over sharing any of my fictional writing. I guess the fictional stories feel more real to me? Strange.

Some facts if you’re curious:

• Your eyes are not deceiving you! That IS Harris Dickinson AND Dominic Sessa. I like to “cast” my characters. I think it’s a tumblr thing that carried over. Who knows.

• This novel is a WIP. I started it this year and have the rough draft of Part 1 done, but stopped writing it when I left the technical writing world.

• Cary is heavily inspired by two Bills. Bill from “A Murder at the End of the World” and Bill from “Kill Bill”. (THE Bill, in my opinion).

• I have a playlist made for each character and then one for the overall novel.

• This is a slow-burn lgbtq romance

• I was/am inspired by a multitude of things for this novel. Richard Siken’s, “You Are Jeff” remains at the forefront of my mind, though.