#moralsofajackal

THE WORDS RESONATE something within him and the seed burrows, lodging between his rib-cage, to the soft tendons and tissues between. It’s a blossom that will germinate, words forming on his mouth to retort.

But he finds that he can’t dismiss nor disagree.

“I never trusted them. The beautiful ones. They always have something to hide. They always mock those who they believe are lesser than they.”

He turns his head and he sees a coil of red and he finds himself a bit lost in the shape.

“Tell me, what brought this melancholy on?”

Lex considers the man beside him.  The Penguin, people call him, in this part of town.  He can see it, too -- the pointed, hooked nose, the limp as he’d entered the room, the immaculate suit and tie.  It makes sense.  Doesn’t add up to a beautiful man, by conventional standards.

He glances down at the magazine on the bartop before him.  The cover story, a trans man giving an interview to the magazine; the cover photo, him shirtless, surgery scars displayed with that elusive concept, pride.

“Well,” he says, rolling the word in his mouth.  “Just a thought.”

Don’t talk to Roger Nashton about his boy, Ed.

Don’t tell him you saw him in town today, popping quarters into arcade machines instead of making something out of himself. Don’t call him up on the phone to tell him the kid got beat to shit after school again. Don’t tell him he won some stupid prize for solving a riddle.

Nashton had patience for the boy. Once. 

But he’s always been off. Doesn’t look you in the eye when he talks to you, goes between being mute and shrieking, at times, for no real goddamn reason. You’d be tired, too. You’d be sick of constantly having to look after him, of driving him to school and every single morning dealing with the same bullshit excuses for why he doesn’t want to go. For why he’s sick, why he’s scared, his teachers are mean to him, he gets bullied, whatever. 

Anyone with half a pound of meat in their skull could see that it’s all just in his head. It’s some unfathomable choice he’s made to be different. For some reason, old man Nashton has been selected by God himself to be the recipient of some cruel fucking joke.

And he’d try again for an offspring – preferably a son, but at his point, he’s not as picky as he used to be – but the old lady at home hasn’t moved off the armchair except to eat and shit since she gave birth. Sometimes, it feels to him like when she pushed that screaming, red face out from between her legs, she was purging the part of her that gave a damn about living along with the gore and placenta. It was a far less magical moment than media had promised him. More nightmarish than anything – and when she gave up on life as anything more than a mindless robot, their marriage crumbled.Now, old Roger frequents the red light district after work. A man’s gotta cope somehow.

They’ll tell you that liquor impairs judgement. Nashton doesn’t see the appeal of the cliche. Sure, he can feel his liver slowly hardening into a slab of dried up, blackened jerky. But when he’s drunk is probably the only time he’s not bothered by the fact that he’s married to a shell of a woman and his only progeny should probably be in special-ed. 

When he started beating the crap out of the boy, he didn’t remember it at first. Maybe he didn’t want to – maybe he felt guilty. But after the third incident, he started to notice a difference in the boy’s behavior. He’d get easier to manage. He’d at least shut up if he was scared of getting hit.

The missus looks the other way. As she does with all things in life. So can you really blame him for it? He’s so tired. He works so hard – all day, every day, trying to feed the mouths of people he doesn’t even want to know. Sometimes, it feels like he’d do anything just to get a goddamn break.

So, yeah. Don’t talk to Roger Nashton the full-time, underpaid, underachieving auto-mechanic, about his boy, Ed.

✉ 2 A.M TEXT: Whatever you do, please, do not fret when you see me. This happens often, especially when I am not careful. Rest assured the man that delivered a black eye on my person will suffer for it.