A b e l
I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK
TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY
Abel had learned early on there was little point to hating the gods.
What good would it do?- if your prayers at night weren’t praise at all but curses, the best that might happen is the gods would laugh. And the worst, oh the worst was a smiting, not just you (never so simple) but your mother, your father, your best friend of a year. They would turn your house to rubble and turn away with a shrug, forgetting it all in the next moment of their never-ending existence.
Easier, safer, wiser, to not think of them at all. To be as indifferent, as agnostic as they were.
He does not care for her gaze on him. Abel does not like any eyes on him, not now that there is no one left to look on him with pride but only with distrust and with pity and with irritation, as though it were the great wish of his heart to be a gutter-rat. The boy shifts under her gaze, which pricks at him like her horn might. He is coming not to care for unicorns.
There is nothing he can say to her words, her Mother always said. Talk is a game he has fallen out of practice of. And so Abel only smiles tightly as if to say yes, I remember Mothers, too, and I agree with yours.
(Only a beat later does the question rise up to tap on the back of his teeth, to sit like a hot stone on his tongue, is your Mother here? is she alive? If so you should wish her away, and quickly!)
It is so dry here. Soon Abel will have to fight to swallow. But for now he only stares at her and snaps his tail against the buzzing flies. He wonders how she doesn’t know, doesn’t guess - can’t she see he’s marked with sin? He is darker than his own shadow and he has come to be made blacker still. At first there had been a why of it but now he isn’t even sure of that. He wants to lie to her and he wants to tell her he is here to do the work of a new god, or maybe an old devil. “Because I have to be,” he says, a disappointment for both of them. And then he tilts his head, just a little, and there is something in his eyes more than smooth cold stones. “If you are told so much then why don’t you listen?”
If he had listened to his Mother more, would she be alive? Or would he be dead?
x | x
