Falling Idols

And everyone fell motionless. Waiting.

“Me, I think you do fine work,” said Willy. “But my opinion don’t mean shit. And Bricklord? Cuz, you done pissed him off good.”

Leo at first thought it was an earthquake. But it was too centralized. A low, subsonic rumble emanating from within the four-story building across the street, shock waves vibrating asphalt underfoot. Noise swelling like the approach of a subway train.

The maelstrom of sound reaching zenith, every window in the building blew outward with sudden fury, a rain of glass circling the foundation. Bricks rattled loose, tumbled free, hit ground in puffs of red dust. The entire structure sagged, like a balloon deflating of a few breaths of life. As Leo watched, the side of the building broke out in creeping webs of mold that filled in the cracks between the bricks…

And then the shape began to bleed through the wall.

It was gargantuan, immense. An amorphous, three-dimensional blackness taking form from the building’s structure like fog pouring through a screen. Its head reached midway between the third and fourth floors, featureless except for twin globes of eyes like harvest moons. Its hide reeked of rot, of despair. When its lower face split to reveal rusted metal teeth, its methane breath stank of the sewers.

Bricklord, behold his great and terrible majesty.

“Probably don’t mean much to say I’m sorry,” Willy said. “But you know it ain’t nothing personal.”

Even if Leo had been able to move his feet, it would have done little good. Bricklord crossed over to where he stood with three thunderous steps. As Leo stared aghast, numbly trying to fathom this apparition, its enormity and origins, it reached for him with one tree-trunk arm—

Then closed its hand around him. For something that had materialized through brick, it had gelled into something awfully solid.

He was lifted up, up, legs flailing and arms straining, and Bricklord aimed him at his own creation. Leo’s head was but a yard away from the roses, the only things in his field of vision, and with overwhelming sorrow he knew they would be the last things he ever saw.

Pressure.

The hand tightened around his middle, an encircling vise-grip, tighter, tighter, and Bricklord’s forefinger began to grind down upon his shaggy head. Much as Leo’s own finger had sought the nozzles of countless spray cans. His ribs caved in with a wet splintering.

Just before the huge finger pressed his head down into his shoulders, Leo could feel the unbearable pressure boiling like a volcano, then could feel no more, see no more, hear no more.

As Leo’s mouth and nostrils and eye sockets erupted into a red, unidirectional spray, Bricklord held him before the wall. And with bold, sure strokes, began to create.

*

Another gray day, a day like all the rest. Infinity before, infinity behind.

The status quo maintained.

Out in the street, home away from home, Calvin sat curbside and studied his own feet. Getting too big for his shoes to contain. Such fast feet.

He remembered seeing something on TV once, called the Olympics. Just exactly what they were he didn’t know, but he’d gotten into watching them just the same. Eagerly awaiting the moment when the runners would explode from their marks, looking so fast and free. Unchained.

I can do that, he’d thought at the time. And still believed it. Wondering who you talked to to sign up for the Olympics. Hoping that someday he would find out, get his chance to prove himself. Show them all what he was made of.

Maybe someday. Maybe. Find another kid and do some practice races, and for the relays, instead of a baton they could pass each other this dented can of spray paint that he’d found in the gutter this morning.

And had used once already.

Calvin was a far better runner than artist, but what he’d sprayed on the whitewashed wall, mere feet from where the painter had died, was still easy to discern: a tombstone shape, set in between the bottom of the flower stems.

The wall had become a regular montage of group effort. Calvin’s crude tombstone, the painter’s extraordinary flowers…

And the other thing, added late last night. Now dried, it was shaded in various rusts and reddish-browns. An oval shape, with splayed legs:

A gigantic cockroach, eating the roses.

The Dripping Of Sundered Wineskins

I. Media vita in morte sumus

It’s said that William Blake spent nearly all of his life experiencing visitations by angels, or what he took to be angels, but my first time came when I was only seven, and I’d never heard of William Blake and was unaware that anything miraculous was happening. It may have been that my young age kept me from seeing her as anything other than entirely natural, much as I took for granted the checkpoints and the everpresent British soldiers who tried in vain to enforce peace in the Belfast of my childhood.

Or, more likely, I was in shock from the bomb blast.

It was years before I understood what was known as, with wry understatement, the Troubles: the politics and the hatreds between Protestants and Catholics, amongst Catholics ourselves, loyalists and republicans. As I later came to understand that day, the pub that had been targeted was regarded by the Provo I.R.A. as a nest of opposition, lovers of queen and crown. To those who planted the bomb that should have killed me, a few more dead fellow Irish were but part of the cumulative price of independence. Funny, that.

Belfast is working-class to its core, and made mostly of bricks. They rained from the blast erupting within the pub across the street from where two friends and I were walking home from school, late and chastised for some