Epilogue
Patrick Kindig
On the Slenderman Stabbing in Waukesha, WI
Two girls drift along the forest’s
edge, the highway a narrow tongue
their bodies follow. They feel here
how small they are, their skin slick with sweat
beneath their backpacks, their bones fragile
as sea glass. They have just learned
a lesson in perspective—the law of mortal
relations. One carries in her bag
the memory of it, a dream of power sharpened
to a point, gunmetal and red. The other carries
its shape beside her heart. Their eyes are turned
to the future, to the shimmering home they imagine
beyond the horizon. (Neither speaks
of the gasping wreckage they left
in the woods, its screams so like
an animal’s, limbs growing sticky and damp
in the shade of a maple tree.) How many men
have killed for less? How many have died
for the same holy promise? The girls
walk on, pilgrims shedding their children’s
skin. Now they are lung and muscle. Now
they are sinew and bone. Now they are nothing
but two silhouettes slouching
slowly toward a castle
of longing, toward the forest’s
black secret, toward the bright
and bloody pearl at the center of their world.
Portrait of Boy in Greyhound Bus Window
We are halfway between Indianapolis and Ann Arbor
when I see his fingers make a decision. Beneath
the blackened television screen, beneath the cover of
an electric blue hoodie, beneath the bus’s bone-shaking
music and its sacral echoes, his zipper opens
like an eyelid. Outside, the world is an indecipherable map
of penises—silos and pylons, the soft curve
of a pine tree rising from uneven ground. Inside
there is just the one. The air conditioner drowns
out all sound and now the only sign of it is
the gentle rocking of his lap, imperceptible
to anyone not looking for such things, the sheer and simple
audacity of this act for him like a colossal pair
of lips. He looks through the rain-wet window
at his own reflection, one corner of his mouth curling
upward like an animal intent on the task
of population. This is misleading: he is here not for business
but pleasure. He finishes in his palm, still
secret beneath the blue hoodie, still silent, and
he handprints the seat beside him sticky. His face shimmers
in the window, soft brown on a field of grey and green,
and he smiles at himself. What contentment! What
intimacy! The white of his teeth flashes a promise
to the glass: You are all I will ever love.
PATRICK KINDIG is a graduate student in Indiana University’s Department of English. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Stream, Fugue, Bloom, Court Green, and elsewhere.