The void and the crown

He stood in the dust of the market road and looked at the blood drying on his knuckles. The crowd had drawn back from him in a wide and silent ring. He could see it in their eyes. They did not see the boy he was but a thing of violence and rust. They had built a useless crown out of their own cowardice and set it upon his head and now they shrank from the very king they had made. He thought of the old man. A man of the law standing helpless in the yard of his childhood. His father’s sorrow was a solar heat that baked the earth cracked and dead. He had reached out with a thousand desperate hands to haul him back from the edge but you cannot catch a falling thing once gravity has made its claim. There was an ocean of milk in the mother’s breast meant to keep him from the harshness of the world but the earth cares nothing for the milk of mothers. All their quiet years and measured hopes were just lines drawn on black water, swallowed by the tide before they ever set. A dragonfly hovered…