Orphan An Orphan
Even without a past the future will keep on snapping at your heels. If there were a cause, you’d be the reason, so we must insist that you not ask for what has not been offered. Keep on watching movies that watch you watching them speak all your lines with voices that sound all too familiar, except in a language we warned you to forget.
A burned-out house is a welcome mat with matching drapes and a sunroom where rain clouds keep each other company. Repentance is a broom closet, without the broom, but stuffed with unending chores with names like “Steven” and “Stephanie,” “Robbie” and “Robin,” and “Aaron” and “Josephine.”
In the backyard you’re forever mowing, an explosion lights up the sky and a terrifying whistle splinters into a hundred all at once, and then you see a plume of smoke far in the distance, over the horizon.
Against our wishes, you run toward the blackened cloud, your grass-stained gloves flopping off, and there is no one but you when you arrive. Burning fuel shoots right up your nose. Armless torsos wriggle away from the crumpled pile of metal and crawl under rocks, so surprised they were to see your face after all these years.
You instinctually look for the tail wing to identify the aircraft, but it’s missing. Apparently, neither of the wings want to show themselves in the wreckage. What is apparent remains hidden. A line of beetles follows you back to the yard, but you pay them no mind. They chat about the names they’ll give their children and whether they could ever love them the way they ought to be loved.