How to get Beaten to Death by a Mob,
By Tobin Johnston, in Dedication to My Sister Wendi Johnston Noon for her Twenty-Eighth Birthday on Jan 18th, 2008.
The thing you worry about and fear as the most difficult, even impossible,
turns out is simple. Done for you. The distance, the you and them, closes like a
slammed door, faster than you could have imagined, could flinch or yell.
But you held your tongue. Your ciphered breath resigned, a plea to the storm
Pass over me.
Accommodatingly. You don’t have to raise a finger, they will bring it
to you. Like a cup of water, a glass of wine, they ask you to drink.
Suddenly, adrift within inescapable raving clatter. Murderous, murderous, murderous,
howls spit and vomit from out of every face. Shattered voices become
Voice. The harnessed horses of their rage.
Gradually. They test your standing with God. Step closer only to retreat
until the proof demonstrated, confident you are without favor. Forsaken.
Inevitably. One steps up to you as a lover. Almost intimately. You feel
nothing but the impact, like a gust of solid wind. And suddenly asleep and then
awaking again, on the ground, the sun burns colorlessly, tattoos it’s brilliant
heat into your eyes and brow, as heads wearing hate-insane masks, open-mouths
scarlet, grimacing and toothy, close over you like laced fingers. You’re being
swallowed whole. Eaten alive…
Once you hit the ground it is a matter of blows and seconds, the cadence of clenched fists
like a carpenter’s hammer. Stony knuckles split skin as glass might, loosen teeth.
Feet, now eyelevel, take effort to connect. Painting the inside of your
skull a nova white. Someone has a rod or stick or cane or broom handle.
It bites the hardest. Wraps your body in fire. Your bones to eggshells become.
Your forearms ache. Splinter beneath impacts. And still you place your broken
limbs in the path of the brutal trajectory. Your mouth thirsts for breath.
Tastes bloody and dusty air, smells sweat and piss. Rusty adrenaline sits on your
tongue like a copper penny. And body forgets the blow of a moment ago
to ready itself for the next.
You disappear into agony. It becomes your very identity. Your cursed name.
Your sightless mind, the only witness, it contemplates the violence best it can.
While every thought you have or once possessed is stuck and struck again
from your brain. Everything lost to abstractions. of… God or father, mother,
spouse, or child. Their grieving visage or your forgiveness. Even death.
As unimaginable as the absence of pain. Even death! Even here as it kisses.
Wets your silent lips. You understand it no better.
These strangers once, now as family. All you know of the whole world.
A boy, perhaps your son, struggles against the surge of larger bodies
to get a punch in. But you don’t recognize him, his gleeful look beyond
this new blindness. Nor do you notice the excited faces straining
with the effort of killing you.
The new mantra you didn’t know you were offering, the prayer you didn't, until
now even know how to declare, is lastly granted. It is finished. Ended.
Unnoticed by the delirious crowd or even you. Without portent or blast of trumpet.
Gone. The dreadful miracle. The unassuming magic. disappeared. absent. vanished.
Into the air.
For a time after, they will continue to beat the husk of you and after will sing
with the same voices, dance with the same feet, clap with the same hands…
A celebration will commence. They will call forth family and loved ones
from their homes, each will step into the street, into your grave and make merry.
Rejoice. And you will witness all. this- your funeral. Be spectator to the
circumstance. Present. Accounted for, but in flesh only, a sting-cut marionette.
as your clouded marble eyes burn back at the sun. Unblinking.
