thoughts are the shadows of our feelings -
always darker, easier, simpler
always darker, easier, simpler
I
ra, once nothing, now parts the crowd with deft precision. He does not mean to. The gesture is far from practiced; and he even glances back over his shoulder, a little awkwardly, at those who moved to give him access to the medic. King Ira, Luvena greets him. Ira, his eyes wide and dancing with something that is not quite delight, says: “I appreciate the formality, but I come to you only as Ira, in this instance.” He cannot help the smile, then, that emerges foxlike and sudden only to flash away just as abruptly.There is a moment, brief and gone so quickly Ira wonders if he imagined it, that she looks as uncomfortable as he feels. He wonders if, perhaps, being in the Court sits upon her shoulders as strangely as it does his own.
(This, this, the crowd and the noises and the way they whisper, Sovereign, King, Ira, Ira, Sovereign, Lord, King in a chaotic symphony seems nearly nightmarish to a man who longs only for the mystic spaces that stretch between pines—)
“I would be very grateful,” he says, with that there-then-gone, incredibly boyish smile. He follows her curiously, curious and full of admiration for a skill he has no talent in. Ira can dissect flesh cleverly, with very practiced cuts of a knife. He can describe the anatomy of wolf, bear, elk, squirrel, mongoose, wolverine, deer and—though he will not admit it—horse. That is all, however. The taking apart. The tactless unthreading of a living creature into the un-living, into the dead; the deft understanding not of how to repair the parts, but how to separate the parts from a whole.
Now then. Let’s see this gash.
So lost was Ira in his own thoughts, he had nearly forgotten why he was there. The lie, now that it is to the forefront of his mind, feels bitter again. A nasty gash from the woods— he had said. (And what was it you were hunting today, Ira? His father would have asked. And when Ira would have said, ‘Deer,’ his father would not have believed him because sometimes, sometimes, Ira hunted men instead).
What Ira asks instead is: “Why collect the cobwebs? Most of us are eager to be rid of them. You aren't going to stitch me together with them, are you?”
Flash. Smile. Flash. Gone.
“Here,” Ira offers, his eyes alight. He turns to present his shoulder which has a large, jagged incision. He had been running and a broken branch had caught the shoulder, leaving an inelegant flap of skin and a bloody torrent from his side. “I was careless,” he admits, with a halfhearted grimace.
