theonceandfuture
My voice is a whisper, barely heard above the voices around me. Barely heard, period. I'm quiet- too quiet, or so my parents say. I tell them i'm sorry, and they might appreciate it, if only they heard it. But they can't, never have been able to, really. They always joke that they should get me a megaphone and attach it to my mouth. And that might be alright. If I were positive that the words tumbling from my lips would be heard, I might let them truss me up and make a spectacle of me. Might, if there weren't always the same doubt lingering in the back of my mind. The same question.
Even if I was given a megaphone, would they not still be deaf to the words?
It was agony. Red hot fire that ripped through my bones and ate at my muscles and filled my eyes until I couldn't see. I bit my tongue- anything to distract from the pain. Another rock was thrown, heavy and cumbersome, and I silently wondered how someone so small could heft something so large. Not a second later and it had landed with a sickening crack on my femur (the non-broken one) and snapped the bone in two. I screamed, my throat tearing from the pressure.
When i said sticks and stones may break my bones... i didn't mean it literally.
The cigarette slipped from his cracked lips and bounced against the wet concrete, spewing red hot ember and disease until nothing was left of it but burnt black tobacco husk and fumes of nicotine that curled noiselessly into the night sky. The man sputtered and coughed, yellowed fingers working to rip wrinkled hands from the death grip they had around his throat, a yellow tongue hanging out of a yellow mouth making yellow noises. And then... he was gone, body crumpling to the ground, a heap of yellowed, stretched skin, faceless but for the eyes that reflected the cigarette across from him.
The farmers eyes soared over the field, hard and steely, a hawk's eyes, ran and leapt and shimmied through forests of corn and ocre, tumbled through watermelons and tomatos, tripped and tugged and hunted until his eyes snagged like yellowed-barb on his black-berry prey. Giving a hard suck to the straw hanging from his sun-cracked lips- the dullness of aged teeth peeking through the gap- he let out a low grumble, one that started deep in his belly and reverberated around his body until his sunken skin shook with it. Tired, weary, he climbed on his horse... and rode in the opposite direction.
Little boy blue go blow your horn, the cows in the meadow, the sheep in the corn...
he spoke. she spoke. the words were different and yet the same. at the core... they would never change, could never change. though it wasn't always like this. at one point it had been all smiles and dandelions. he said, she said, i love yous and i want yous and never leave mes. and now they wondered, screaming and crying and hating all the while...
where did the happiness go?