You
By Noo
- 697 reads
At the side of the road, you see the bike. It’s small, white, a child’s. Less an actual bike, but a representation of a bike. A ghost bike, if you like. It’s surrounded by flowers.
Some of them are supermarket fresh, still in their plastic sheath and you wonder why, if strangers go to the trouble of buying the flowers for someone they don’t know, they don’t bother to take them out of the plastic and arrange them beautifully.
You walk on, wondering whose pain the flowers are easing anyway.
By the pub on the corner, there’s another shrine; an older one. You remember reading in the local paper about the man who got killed in a street fight outside the pub about six months ago. This shrine marks where he fell. X marks the spot.
The flowers here are raggedy brown, and a faint, but distinct smell of decay emanates from them. There are a fair few cards and notes still pinned to the tree where the shrine has grown up.
Most have faded into unreadable, watery blue, but when you crouch down to look more closely, there are still some messages you can make out. Love you Steve, always will. Heaven has another angel tonight. And the age old unanswerable question, Why?
You’re done with shrines for today and your mind is turning towards home, but just past the park, you come across a Police Line Do Not Cross tape. It’s in front of one of the semis sitting high off the road. You slow down and take in the house. Its bins to the left of the front door. Its badly tended hanging basket. The vertical blinds blocking the view into the front room.
The shrine here is already being created. Its beginning is two silver, birthday balloons, tied to the police tape. On one balloon is a picture of a teddy bear. The writing on the other says, Five Today.
While you’re looking, a woman walks past. She looks over her shoulder and tosses one word back at you. “Ghoul.” As you cross the road, you’re thinking she’s probably right.
You walk up the path to our house, carefully wiping your feet on the mat in the porch. Through the hall, you swipe the wind chimes by the bannister and they jingle discordantly. In the living room, the green hurricane lamp catches the low sun and glitters. “Hello, love” you say. “How’ve you been?”
You look at the shrine, the one you’ve built to your wife. The magazines, all in easy reach. The coffee machine. The laptop and the TV remote to ward off boredom. You say you worship at this shrine, but your wife just sits in her wheelchair, waiting for you to come home and talk to her.
In her head, she imagines the walk you take every day and she also wonders something she wishes she wouldn’t. That is, whether a shrine can also be a prison.
Even if she can’t move her legs, she can move her hands and she presses the youtube play button for the old Nine Inch Nails’ video, The Hand that Feeds. She’s been watching it repeatedly all morning. End and back to the beginning. End and back to the beginning.
The lyrics sear. “Will you bite the hand that feeds you? Will you stay down on your knees?” Questions for you. Questions for…
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Comments
I love the introversion of
I love the introversion of shrines/prisons care and abuse that takes place over such short, picked clean prose. Also very happy to see Reznor's lyrics given some kudos!
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Some interesting thoughts in
Some interesting thoughts in this story.
Jenny.
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Well, that made me teary. I
Well, that made me teary. I can see that walk and feel the feelings.
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