Epilogue

Today was brutal.

After spending two hours of mutilation and humiliation at the hands of my chem final, my fried brain had to face another two hours of 4th Period CP Physics. I fell asleep partway. I'm sure that that does not bode well for my borderline grades.

I made up for it by coming home and doing absolutely nothing for four hours but hacking away at another depressing addition to what appears to be a series of stories I'm writing about nothing in particular. I believe I can title this part an epilogue. And I've been listening to too much David Bowie lately.

to the Songs of Sound and Vision


Once, a very long time ago, there lived a young man who was an old man.

He rarely, if ever, left the security of his little cottage on the cliffs by the sea, and then only if he was in danger of starvation. His neighbors never commented on his eccentricities for he had no neighbors to speak of. Nobody ever noticed his infrequent comings and goings, and the most the checkout girl at the 7-11 could recall of him was a vague image of "stormy brows" and "wild hair."

He did not want to be noticed, and in this, he succeeded.

So well, in fact, that it took several months for anyone in the city below to realize that the storm clouds had not gathered over the cobblestone path to the 7-11 in several months, and that the checkout girl had come to woo another mysterious stranger who was by no means as mysterious and handsome as the young old man from the cottage by the sea but much more susceptible to her attentions.

What had happened to the young old man? Nobody particularly cared because nobody in particular knew. The cobblestone path to the cottage on the cliffs was treacherous at best and murderous at worst, so nobody ever ventured to the lonely cottage with its sagging shutters and caving walls.

Time passed, and the shutters sagged still lower and the walls caved still more until one very mild autumn day, a chimney brick slipped from its place and landed with a plink on the grey roof tiles.

The next day, the gutter sprang from its housing, showering bits of sand and dust onto the front stoop, which had come to represent more a moldy hamburger bun than the sturdy cinder-blocks it had once been.

A passing gull absently pecked at a scraggly bit of seaweed that hung from a shutter and departed amidst great fluttering and squawking when said shutter dropped into the overgrown rose bush beneath the window it had been guarding.

And so, piece by piece, the cottage on the cliffs slowly became one with the sea, walls creaking and crumbling, proud chimney falling brick by dying brick into the brackish water far below, leaving only the weathering front stoop behind.

It came to be, then, that nothing remained of the cottage on the cliffs by the sea where the young old man had once been but a little grassy knoll, hardly noticeable from beyond the cobblestone path. Nobody ever wondered how tender young grass could grow from the bare rocks facing the sea. Nobody ever thought to climb the cobblestone path to the place where the cottage had been, where if one had ever looked, ever truly looked, one would have found a Revolutionare's revolver, a child's small poppet, and an old man's polished walking stick lying among the remains of several crumbled cinder-blocks, untouched by the age that weathered away all else.

Sometimes, though, a lonely child from the city will sit on the curb outside the 7-11 and gaze at the cliffs silhouetted against the sun. Sometimes, the child will see the face of a young man, the delicate arch of the brow somehow familiar; sometimes there will be a house hidden in the trees, a forgotten refuge for others just like him; and sometimes the bristling whiskers of a man hardened by a life of solitude; but most often, the child will see a grave, and the faces and the houses will be lost in the glare of the sun, which will leave the child blinking away the spots in his visions, wondering, distantly, if what he had seen had been more real than the bland 7-11 at his back and the asphalt under his feet.

He will, however, scoff and pretend to yawn when he finds his classmates eyeing him from the end of the cul-de-sac where a game of stickball has begun and one of the teams is a player short. He will join them, as is the course of things, and the faces and the houses will be forgotten, blind spots in a world of vision.

But the grave will remain.