A MAN AMONG THORNS

by Kyla Donnelly

The Son stands at the motel window, nude to the waist, and feels the new nature of his sorrow roll out before him like a desert highway. Somewhere east of here the snow is leveling the variable earth, but his soul is now already flat and barren and new as the last touch of The Father spirals now down the shower drain in scarlet whorls. It had been a knife. Dark night in black and grey hair in the pillow. Here was a great man. The Father had been so beloved that The Son had slipped into a benevolent oblivion not unlike death. As a boy, he'd often spent his nights atop the pool house yelling out to the property's various animals—peafowl and foxes and a kangaroo loosed and lost in the hedge maze—yelling out that that this was his life don't you understand my life this is my life we're talking about and the lazy whir of the night that rose in response was also not unlike death. He took to drugs. Eighteen stints in rehab. Photos of him dancing and shouting on street corners that made him look like marginalia in a medieval grotesquerie. Acts of public embarrassment that less scandalized The Father than sanctified him. As The Son grew uglier, The Father grew more handsome and bright. Even The Son's sorrow when laid bare to the world served only to darken his umbra beneath The Father. He tried disappearing. Another skitter-shadow on the streets. But such shadows are self-fashioned, unlike him, and he was always sent spiraling back into the orbit of The Father who in characteristic good grace accepted him wholly, again and again, as he is—a turn of phrase both foreign and poisonous to The Son. Some time like this. His sorrow grew palsied for its dependence yet no less potent. He tried the pool house again. His man's voice could cast itself out further and deeper than that of the little boy's but still drew no response but the proud chitter of the peafowl and the ignorance of the kangaroo. He could not take it. The bedroom had a skylight and when the The Son entered the room the moon drew a great obelisk of pure pale light that might have been rising up out of The Father as he dreamed. Handsome. Unbothered. The Son approached the obelisk and felt himself disappear. Red and blue down the desert highway. The shower drain quiet and dry. The Son cannot know that nothing has changed—that even this new sorrow was cast in the mold of The Father who now watches from a point overhead with not even a hint of judgement. Such is the nature of love.