Destiny

My son pressed the revolver between my eyes.

With the ice of the barrel my shoulders relaxed. Finally, finally — it looks like everything was a success. This is merely a handoff. You understand, don’t you?

Because though there’s an inclination to chop up civilization by economic class… it’s not what I saw at the shy age of thirteen. Setting everything in motion.

We had a field trip remote in the forest. Some simulacra of a town demonstrating forgone living. Churning butter, simple farming, and the route cut through the districts you had no excuse to visit. No excuse other than an invitation, seeing as the plots of land jutted into the horizon, intermittently sliced by fencing and bleating with sizable manors. Up until this point I followed the rails set so certainly. Secured in sardine formation next to classmates, distinctions diminished.

And then we rolled up to the intersection. We had a minute or so until green, and amidst the back the bus laughing as was customary I absently searched about the window. Absently, and for nothing.

An intersection nestled in hills so I looked at the grass-cloud edge. Gray skies and butterscotch frays. Hoisted at the center so I witnessed: the stillness of another teenage boy. A tossler’s cap, with some field notes wrapped under his arm and finished by a scarf obscuring the lower half of face. Another thirteen year old, at least it seemed.

But it wasn’t thirteen. The thick-set eyebrows and weathered cheeks suggested something different. He quickly singled out my puzzlement and, as though tethered into a temporal share, gave a glimpse of his world. There was no way for me to resist.

Currencies printed, bankers whispered, and our forms grew to giants, until all of humanity’s history busied about on seeming ant hills. How the rise and fall of nations animated ahead and, as though gently waving his hand over his domain, we surveyed the constructors and rubble in the stretch of land between. Ant wars, and however much blood spilled it was a mere puddle, the same with loves, the same with the void widening above. Unable to handle the view I shrunk back to form.

And with each second his shadow grew larger, swallowed the bus, and though I couldn’t confirm it, it knew. His eyes creased to match the smirk obscured; there was no need for words. The bus started moving again, the laughing continued, though muffled, and ahead all I could see was a cliff. I realized, then, as I was: I was already dead. I looked back toward the hill and he was gone.

We arrived to the open field interactive museum, with all the employees in sure act, but such acts felt like taunting. Shuffling between barns and other posts, simple fencing, and when you learn that you are a mere ant in another’s farm, or perhaps raised as a pig while the angels above crochet, and that you slobber between schooling and sniffing about for the next meal, so staring at the horse and cow and chicken you wonder if they’re smarter than you. They at least knew they were being taken care of. They at least see the fence.

When I try to approach that tethering memory, with the voids expanding and nebulas bubbling between, it still leaves me trembling. Trembling to where, reflexively, I return to those prior songs of belonging and love, only to see his hand flick in all of the grey and deadness.

It was as though I dipped into a ravine between consciousness, of each strata humanity may hike between, and all prior lights must extinguish before the wisps grant the next flame. But I was a mere wanderer then, obliviously peering over the edge while rather comfortable, unprepared. Suddenly kicked in. Now I see the ground crumbling if I bring my face close enough. Ensconced in a purgatory darkness.

Returning home that evening so everything, in its greyness, played out as Nature’s prophecy: aspirations and love were uncomfortably plastered to the march of the ants, and I knew the queen would devour me if I strayed. Hugs felt cold and childish, the same as the blanket and texts, and the only solace I could find in those days was staring up at the stars. Because if I looked downward I saw cliffs everywhere, in whatever place I’d have to roam. Each suspended in a cliff-isle, slowly chipped by the chaos winds, and all of us pretended the stability would go on forever. But we had to grow wings.

From that day onward I committed to destroying everything I apparently stood for. Because whether about the town or trying to bridge the conversations I knew, for certain, that I was stillborn, of some chimera, and even spite couldn’t simmer. How could one begin to reiterate that everything you believe in and live for was piggish? There wasn’t room for disgust.

There was a slaughterhouse toward the northern east of the cliff town I’d reside, and so I committed every week, convincing the few switch of workers each day, to let me stand witness. And I watched the pigs in cramped formation, cows too, or the conveyer of chickens, and mentally placed myself in the center. While the blades whirred and the spray about the walls no disinfectant could deter I let it seep in. I knew I was in a larger slaughterhouse, of an intricate construction, confirmed by those creased eyes. There was no pity between these walls. Certainly the same in the larger ones hidden.

I stood before my Bible and contemplated the Old Testament. Since it felt the closest to that day. And I sought for everything, indeed, on how to escape, but it dawned on me that my inner machinery was stone. You can’t dip yourself in chrome if your innards are cracked and moss-filled.

So I began to mimic these manor-dwellers and let the puzzle click: he grew in an environment curtailed for archangels. Staring at my veins I imagine the ethereal needle along the soul and wondered how many trials and voids he had to roam before school — or, no, there wasn’t school. There was only reality.

To be a chimera, or a half-conscious slug, the only thing I could secure was leaning as much as one could into that inner darkness and maybe then the wisps pass the torch to my next of kin. As expected, as smitten as I could’ve been: I could abandon my current form, but at least toss a strand toward the wind and let it curl into the cobra, to falcon. The Sun blared as trumpets, and I took the first step toward the hidden courts of humanity. Letting the skin molt off me, however disfigured I could feel.

Everyday I grabbed the needle and had to design this incubator, my body and soul as the blueprint, however rickety and tattered, though if I hoped to press down on this Anubian trial of eternity I had to still my heart the same as God’s helpers, henchmen. Executioners.

It was twenty years of these hidden trials. I rewrote in a cloaked personality when necessary, when conversing, but my insides were slaughtered fifteen prior. There was nothing for me to wish for, other than the slim light seemingly lime and fraying: the exit from this ant farm and securing a lift, however I dead and long gone I may be.

I knew everyone close to me would hate me, but maybe they’ll learn there’s no room for hate in the next iteration of humanity. Don’t you want to join the steering?

My son would carry me up that hill that day, whether he wanted to or not. We’d animate our own nations to the delight of nothing, and I’d watch through the incorporeal link of persisted filial connection. He would become the first of our family’s archangel. Even though his mother wasn’t privy I figure it best as another trial to overcome: understanding the emptiness of those prior delusions his ancestors took so much comfort in.

Cultivate the colder inner light, while the material world glimmers as reflection; and to my surprise I was able to weave his path, however foreign to the typical childhood. From day one he was ushered into the darkness, silence, lack of love and other delusions and he began to take delight in it. All of those trials I forced myself through began to pay off: children learn by imitating their parents after all. Nothing less would work.

Twenty more years since then. It finally worked, though the evidence wasn’t in the revolver you must understand.

When I searched for his eyes at once I saw the same weathered cheeks. The eyes creased, and the smirk to follow. He put the gun down realizing that I was still, after all, a chimera compared to his chrome form. We nodded as he saw through everything I was. He soon left for the city to begin the climb.

Now as I sit here, after all these years, I couldn’t figure out what the smirk meant. It always seemed like an admonishment, of witnessing a child trying to match the pace of giants.

But after much thought, I realized the smirk was of nothing.

It was merely so.