flash: The Gargoyle’s Lament

Day 6

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Might I have been a buddha in another life? Crouched here like a frog, like the frog I am, I weep frozen tears upon barren soil. Children climb upon me and slide down my back, shrieking like little demons. Perhaps I am meant to lean like this forever, gathering their petty sins into myself and leaking them back into this dead packed ground.

Perhaps I myself am the sinner. Perhaps in that other life I have committed an act so heinous that it was not enough to return me to a lower form. Perhaps it was necessary that I should be frozen here, aware and unspeaking, to contemplate my evil. But I remember no such evil.

Perhaps that is my sin: that my heart is frozen and I refused to see.

Might I have been a frog who refused to become a prince? Might I have been the unenchanted frog who watched the princess with her prince and in jealousy became this frozen monster weeping tears that destroy all that would grow?

The children are not demons, despite their shrieks. Demons fear me in my ugliness and grief. But that does nothing for the evil that comes here. Human demons with guns and bottles, using my head as a table to measure out their transactions. Their hearts are as frozen as mine, and yet they go on living.

What have I done? What have I done?

I remember nothing. Nothing before this moment. I weep ice and I remember nothing.