Haruspex

She says the distinction between good & bad lies somewhere in the rib cage, the torn open carcass in the wild -- No, the distinction between Good & Bad is God. It is always God -- but no, the distinction between the two is the thick, black line drawn in the middle of the Earth’s core, scribbled on the bones of the rib cage. Trick question. I want to tell her some kind of truth, like good people have never seen 

the inside of a dead thing. But there are so many reasons that this isn’t the full truth, so—

Let’s talk about it. I cough the illness out of my mouth and we, for once, have a conversation without the lights sparking dark, without the omnipotence of the silver future being pushed into our dermis. I know -- we’ll talk about God today. Your version of God, which is red. If, as you say, I am truly loved, why did 

midnight personify itself underneath my preschool cot? Midnight - which is, at this point of the story, now red and tall - taught me the determined force of humanity, along with the first few letters of the English alphabet. I can be feral, I can be wild and primitive. Don’t get me wrong. Most of the time I’m simply mourning the smallness of my hands, most of the time I’m 

a bright statistic in bold numerals, bleeding out into what lies underneath your typical Arizona house gravel. It’s safe to say that I deserved it, that I continued 

to deserve it, and they should have killed me underneath the Mesquite tree when I confessed my unnaturally human desire to shed the scratch marks and grow a new, thicker skin. I didn’t know it back then but I was just being selfish. We’re all living behind the eyes of the men who hurt us, and if you haven’t been tainted, get off the goddamn train. We’re going to Heaven. We’re riding into the ultimate untouchable fantasy, in which we eat their brains like the savage monsters we were were supposed to be until we missed the big, bold X. So what? 

When are we going to be human? Was God really watching me? I like to think that God sent me guardian angels, but they didn’t make it past the ferocity of the human race. It’s better than the truth, which is: he sent me down to Earth alone, trapped in the glass of a mirror.