All Creation
Elias pressed his forehead into the dirt and tried not to scream.
There was so much behind his teeth that he could fill this valley with the echo of his grief. But they were hunting him, and he had to stay quiet.
His entirety was an open nerve strummed hard by careless fingers.
That madman had torn into every part of his skin that stretched and moved; even crying silently stung wild like nettles.
And still, with open wounds, flaking burns, and stitches, all: it could not compare in the least to the beast that was his heart.
His brain caressed each step of the heist of himself, and with every facet fresh agony swept him further and further out to sea.
No man alive deserved this.
The terror in his father’s eyes, his mother wailing, the lack of recognition on his sisters’ faces.
He had walked two hours, barefoot, on mud and sticks to reach them.
Ran through town pursued by friends and neighbors, hoping and praying they would see him beyond the devastation of his form.
Watching them turn from him and run to join the mob hurt perhaps more than fire.
And then the faces. They seared themselves into his mind. The fair, hard-voiced beauty who stole him. The scholars standing to bear witness.
He had never hurt anyone in his entire life. He had only ever used his hands to make and build and serve. To mend clothes and wash plates and bake bread and hold babies.
Was the crime of looking at that boy so terrible as this? Was the stirring in his heart fit to be punished so cruelly?
Elias whimpered and curled tighter beneath the shade of the fallen oak. At once his stitches tugged, and a sharp pain struck him once again. He gasped, blinded in his agony.
The voices were getting farther away. Perhaps, he hoped, the townspeople were heading to the woods leading away from the village.
Even frightened and hiding, Elias could not be angry at them.
He hadn’t the time to look at his reflection, but he could not fault them for their reaction.
A thing as tall as a man walking naked through the streets, trembling in shock, burns bubbling with puss, hunched over, muscles still weak from electrocution.
A nightmarish specter arriving in the dark of night. Incapable of speech, baying like an animal, dripping with foul liquid in the light of the streetlamps.
Were it not him, he would have joined in their shrieking. Grabbed something with which to defend himself. Pushed the thing he had become from his own door and set upon himself like a stranger.
So Elias could not fault them.
Naked and cold and forsaken, he still could not fault them.