Reshii

When Vought got Homelander’s body back they undress him first from the clothes they owned. The heart went straight into a drawer-it holds all the bad men’s secrets after all. The rib cage is now sitting in a glass cabinet. Soon, just like God’s, a hand will reach for one rib and another child will fall from grace.

They took the remains of his brain and put it in a jar. Is here where God hides? Or at least something similar, beautiful? Does it curl in the corner? Does it mind the bad smell, or will the saviour thrive in more suffering?

Then, they pumped his blood away into vails. Light, empty. Virgin to murder. Newborn human. Each vial for each day of an experiment. Isn’t that exciting? They took each eye apart to see where the lasers went. All they found were unshed tears.

Snakes shed their skins to be free. Does this snake know freedom? Now you only see muscles. They once moved at pace no other child could survive, now are stretched under a lamp, he really did go everywhere in the world but somehow ended up here. Chased a ball where they fetched it. “Run, the past is behind you, catching up. Give Gods a good show.”

The blue-gloved hands can’t do anything to him anymore. Not grab, not caress, not even hold, not like they ever did. Oh. But they keep on touching. This one’s eyes aren’t even in his skull anymore. They see this assault from the other side of the room. But body remembers and the mind awakes. This is his punishment.

All flesh rots, but not here. That is his punishment. A witnessing of his own destruction.

2.

The brain in the jar is a facade. His mind lives across many. There was once a woman who saw him in a newspaper. Back when he was a dreamboat, and she wondered how is it to fuck him. She overdosed on a fantasy. He goes as deep as his sorrow is. Who is he, if not what he has been through. The purest illness of them all. Makes his eyes look soft and wet. And she is a consumer of big pearly smiles. A man idealized him so much he died his hair blonde. He followed into the footsteps of camouflage experts. Like a lost dog with a yielding throat, willing to be terrible. And to lose himself in devotion, like salt in boiling water. Will he meet a similar fate? Is it better to be loud or not exist at all?

There’s a child who doesn’t understand death, there is a boy who wanted to be like him. Loud and beautiful and seen. There was once an elderly man who rubbed his forehead and sighted deeply in silence, for he read the history books but tells no one. Wolves and a lamb. Lambs and a wolf. No one likes a wolf. Wolves don’t like lambs either.

3.

He used to fly high. The slightest throbbing in his temples as he reaches up, screaming for God. Sore throat too. Where is he hiding? If not here among the stars, God must be dead. Why didn’t they tell him his father was gone? Jesus was there when Joseph died, right before he turned 30. John was only 17 when he swore he would keep trying to find dad.

John’s penthouse was always quiet. Just like he liked. No hums, no shuffling underneath, no rain falling over the windows. No planes-which he considered to be weak imitations of him-flying over his roof. He used to lay on bed and x-ray the ceiling watching them, then the birds. Wondering-if birds can inspire machines, what inspired the doctors to make him. Was it God? Was it a tiger? Or was it a vision of an animal that turned into an obedient soldier who doesn’t just growl, they bite. He wants to know. But this beast is a shapeshifter. A vessel. A vessel knows no reality. A vessel knows no reason, nor death, only loneliness. A vessel can’t even speak, when there’s blood staining its mouth and fighting its way out. How does it even ask the right questions?

Now, there is no rain, no planes, or birds, or God. They never came back, there was no ascending. Heaven is having fun. With gospels he knows so well, with prayers they engraved in his flesh. He knows this story, why wasn’t he invited? Even if Heaven is as low as the planes flew, at this pathetic level above the sea, he could drown in pleasure of seeing the semi-small world below him. Just for one more starved minute.

4.

Frustrated dogs get paralyzed. They are loaded guns. They don’t move, don’t eat, don’t bite. Unless you tell them you love them. They will choke on the bullet.

Angry dogs get killed. They are loaded guns. They shoot. Why? We fed them. We talked to them. So why is the dog angry?

Dead strays are a lesson. Their bodies decayed, bones found dissolved in water, wolves’ teeth worn on lamb’s necks.

Dead dogs have no gravestones.

They live a beautiful afterlife, running where there’s no cold rains. While their body turns into corpse. Until their owner forgets how their dog’s bark sounded like. Then, the soul is brought back into the body, ripped by the ultimate forces of nature-love and control. Just like a stray’s body, one they always were.

Ownership isn’t a bond. It will always leave you in pieces.

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

4 year old me: why must we do this

Fantastic old woman in the leopard print coat: "Why yes, my tooth IS real silver! Nobody ever asks me that. Do you like cats?"