I'm standing with Anne in the kitchen. The windows are flung wide open. It's a beautiful evening. We're sipping wine and we're staring at the gate buzzer.
Right on cue, the little white speaker crackles.
“We're here!”
Anne presses the reply button and returns a tinny “Coolbeans.” She looks at me and says, “It's going to be so classy” and I grin at her. Tongue sticks out the corner of her mouth, she’s digging in her pockets for her gate remote. I beat her to it. A gaggle of students duck under the gate as it’s rolling upwards. One of them turns back and waves. A mom in a white Toyota says Be Good and pulls out of the driveway.
Smell of warm cheese. In the lounge it's me and Carry and her guy friends of friends from Durban and Jill Rhodes and Anne and Darren Waters the housemate and also copious amounts of bubbling cheddar.
I feel like an adult. Usually when we host a gathering it involves beer spills, broken glass, and at least one chunder in the garden. But not…
I am the wolf that fetches the bones of truth. I am the wolf. I am he who brings back bones of Truth, Truth dug from the
void of my imaginings. Or torn from the marrow of my emotions, from the living
heart of lived experience. Hackles raised, I rise up in howling defiance, tearing
into everything the eternal Enemy throws at me. Seldom am I faced with more than paper tigers. Sometimes, though, sometimes the threat is real. Sometimes we must go to war, willingly, and suffer the
stings and arrows of our Enemy. But even this I will bend to my advantage. Even these bitter barbs can be plucked free and chewed on
as sustenance. Food for thought, to feed the life of the mind. Given Time,
every wound of war will hurt only as memory, will callous into yet another scar
across my snout. And I'm cool with that. She-wolves dig scars. It's taken a lifetime, but I've learned to laugh. Even in
the reeking jaws of death, even here, learned it the hard way. I know now to dance beside the grave of eve…
A woman picked her way across the reeking ruin, gagging, stumbling over flesh and metal, until she sank down beside the armless remains of a young man. His face was somehow spotless amid the filth, and twisted into a rigid degree of agony no poet or painting could ever fully convey. The woman cradled him. She began rocking back and forth, staring transfixed into that death mask. Blood seeped into her robes. The pure horror of his glassy eyes stained her soul more deeply than blood ever could. He stood apart, looking down on it all from the commander’s hill, and he could so easily tell what her dumbstruck face was speaking: why, why, why...her question came to him clearly, for it echoed the one trapped within himself. For I – I caused her love's death, he knew. Once he could, yet now he could not answer any more the why which made this happen. To what end? he thought. But does it even matter, the ends, can any end stand up to the horror of such means? He wanted to weep, but like her he c…
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