-Apologies-

      He was screaming when I found him: feral, raw, with a paint can clutched in each hand and an empty container lying in a pool of red at his feet. Lunging—splattering—lunging—splattering red, black, red, white paint across the wall, across the ocean.

    “Benjamin—Benjamin, please stop!” I called to him.

            But he didn’t—couldn’t. He splashed the white onto the red, then the black. Angry, crooked epitaphs, like broken fingers.

            “Stop it, Benjamin!”

    Finally, he did, and reeled about to face me—a jerky, abrupt movement that made me flinch away.

    “You want me to stop?” he croaked, and then his voice rose. “You want me to stop? What if I can’t? ‘Cause there—there’s so much hate all over, all around me, and I just—I just can’t…I just-” with a clatter, the paint cans fell from his hands, and tears gushed over his eyelids and slid down his paint-smeared cheeks. “Why? Why do we do such ugly things to each other? We’re destroying everything and God, it hurts so much! –Every bomb and war and death—it’s like I feel it in my Goddamn head and it’s killing me! It’s killing me, Sara, and I’ve got no-one left!”

    He wrapped his arms around his stomach and let out another violent sob. “I’ve kept all this inside me for so long, and everything is fucked up and there’s nothing I can do about it,” he shouted. “I’m not allowed to cry, I can’t fight back: I’m just supposed to crawl into a hole like the obedient dirt I am and take it. But I can’t do this forever!”

    I reached towards him but he pulled away from my touch. He then shouted once more and began striking the wall with his fists. The attic seemed to resound and shudder with each blow as the skin of his knuckles tore against the hard wood wall. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he howled in cadence to his punches. “I’m so sorry, it should have been me!”

    He staggered and hit the wall once more, pressing his forehead into the wet paint, screaming—screaming—and without thinking, I lurched forward and embraced him. At first he writhed in my grip, but still I clutched him and pinned his arms to his side with the ardent force of my own. His whole body quaked and struggled against mine: we were tectonic plates, kinetic energy, vicious friction as our earth split down the centre and swallowed us whole. Still I held his great height and strength close, close to my own small self: if I held him tight enough, perhaps we would break and the pain would spill out and drain away.

    And then, just like that, our cataclysm ended. At last, Benjamin stopped fighting: he fell to his knees and crumpled into himself, sobbing against the floorboards. I sunk with him, and we crouched there for a very long time. I held him tight, tight, tightly, my face pressing into the ellipses of his spine. He stared at his bleeding knuckles and fought to breathe again.

     “Sara, Sara—Oh God, I can’t do this forever, I can’t do this forever, I can’t-” He was choking on his own voice. The words tripped over and over themselves into my sweater, into my lap, into me. I can’t do this forever just kept on going forever until I couldn’t take it anymore, and I pulled him up into my arms. And with that, he poured himself out like water—he was leaking between my fingers, and I was afraid he would drown. The poor boy buried his face in my shoulder, desperately clinging to my jumper as though I was all he had. I let him, because I needed him to know he was not alone.           

    When his retching breaths finally slowed, he pulled back slightly and took in the paint-splattered wall and the red smeared all across my clothes, his clothes. With blurry eyes, we beheld the ruins of a kingdom where nobody died.

    “I’m sorry,” he whispered, reaching up and wiping paint from my cheek with his sleeve. “God, I’m sorry.”

*  *  *

 Decided to partially illustrate the scene after which Benjamin discovers the murder of his mentor and the probable death of his younger brother. Was inspired by the score from the film Prince of Egypt: a gorgeous soundtrack.

art, writing, characters (c) me