Her Name Was...

I traced the cracks along the wall with my finger tips and tried in vain to ignore that cold, hollow feeling that can well up in the back of my mouth when I've had too little to eat save a few mints--which, of course, do nothing to appease the hunger but merely flavor its gnawing gums when there's naught but cracks in the wall to distract me.

My calloused index finger crashed idly into a picture frame fencing in a dusty rectangle. My breath too ragged for clearing the scene, I leaned in close and used the corner of a torn sleeve, honoring the garment by calling it Rag.

What vision then transported itself no words can quite tell but to say that homesickness can often be more for a person than a place and at times hits you so suddenly like a sock to the gut. As you'll recall my gut was too hollow to take a beating and rang out like a moan, irreversibly escaping from chapped lips. A pounding head swung both ways to look for any eavesdroppers before I realized it was the skull in my position, plastered with a face some describe resembling bewilderment.

That face which had been so tempest tossed in steady consternation to suddenly glimpse in a thin and ageworn glassy reflection its own self breaking into two miraculous occasions. First to see there reflected a smile and what other miracle? Full and briny tears were trickling from the leaky faucet of my bloodshot eyes. For beyond that monstrous complexity of a dim reflection, in poor light just made out, I saw the face of hope again.

Her crooked whimsy grin, a mischievious gleam in her eyes a flutter, and what else, I dare say the glow of laughter about her cheeks--for this was, without a doubt, the voraciously excitable, discontentedly rejoicing wonder of a woman. Her face said more than all the libraries of human thought in that instant. Had it been so long since I had seen such beauty? Since art had fluttered down as the last leaf of autumn and set out upon the lazy stream of my times? Had no gentle hand been there to whisper off my tears that they too had dried into the crusty and forgotten tome of this broken vessel?

And to have it be her of all things, of all people, of all faces, and in all moments? To have her portrait be the last of them? Oh, to be sure, I knew that this frame and what it guarded would be the last of its kind as I knew that I was the last of my kind, and in that, I think, there is a solemn poetry, like the beauty of an afternoon dirge that echoes in the square. Where or wherefore you know not it comes, but the shaking of the timbres of your bones is so truly entuned to its resilient melancholy, well...

A job is a job after all. And with one thought and a nod I did as one does, lifting my hammer to the glass and burning all that would remain.

Soon too, I will be past, and nothing must last when all that was is now ash.