Blackston "Blac" Hope, d8 [done]

He doesn’t remember much about his brother Gentian. Maybe it was better that way – that he had less to say goodbye to – so he didn’t feel his heart hurt quite as much.

They’d tied up some twine over his bed when he’d died. His mother spoke, her voice tired. She said that it was tradition: the cords tied across the bedposts in an ‘x’, to signify that where he’d once slept, the spirit, would be kept safe until his body was put to rest.

He looked at the way the sunlight came in through the window, how the it reflected through the dust, illuminating the last place Gentian had slept. He thought how beautiful it all was, the thought that even as awful his brother’s death had been, he could remember him. He could see through the dust, in the tiny white room, with no more than a bed and Gentian’s old wooden school desk, what looked like the light of the world shining on for Gentian.

He spent too much time thinking about death for a child.

Not the sort of morose, dark thoughts that weigh one down to the earth, but the curious sort. Where he’d sit in his bed late at night and wondered, if it were the last time for him to close his eyes, what would it mean?

He asked his mother what she believed on their walk to the laundry. She worked with the big, bubbling vats of hot water and soaps, stirring the clothing before it was hauled out to be thrown against the washboards and then run through the press. She’d started there some twenty years before as a girl. What had been white hands were weathered, calloused, but still careful. Blackston liked how worn they were; he thought that anyone that worked hard knew what it meant to struggle. That maybe compassion could grow where worry and fear had taken up space.

She said they weren’t supposed to talk about it – loosely enforced as it was – but admitted that she didn’t have an answer all the same. ‘Maybe there’s something we get to rest, when it’s over.’ She offered up to him bits and pieces of what her mother had taught. That there was a man with a white beard, who watched over the world with a big pocket watch. He could snap his fingers and start all of it over, but he preferred just to sit and watch them all.

‘But if there’s a man that can see all the good and the bad,’ Blackston huffed along the cobble stoned streets, hand in hers, ‘Then why wouldn’t he just make all of the things good again?’

‘Maybe he’s not perfect,’ She said, and quiet passed between him that settled into his bones like arsenic. He felt heavy when they walked into the laundry, heavier still when she put the apron over him and sent him on his way to the press.

His father would tell him that there wasn’t just one old man watching. No – there were a great many men and women, all manner of folks overhead – that they fought and argued, played tricks and could be entirely cruel.

He sat at the end of the long wooden table, cigar chewing in his mouth, bushy brown eyebrows and salt and pepper hair buzzed short. A man that had his wife get him a beer out of the fridge when he came through the door, and grumbled through the first three pages of the newspaper before any of his brothers were allowed to speak to him. Blackston had been seven when he’d worked up the courage to ask his father about life after death.

‘They lock us all up.’ He told him, matter-of-fact, newpaper flipping between his fingers. ‘After they’ve had their fun, we all get shut back away and out of this shithole. Won’t feel a thing. Won’t remember it. Dark, and black. Just sitting there until they bring us back again, you see? Because if there’s anyone that’s controlling any of what we have then they sure as shit are treating us like toys that ain’t in on the joke.’

Wigan Imberline once told him that he thought they got to walk the earth after they died. ‘Until we help other people be who they’re supposed to be. Like, they walk around, and keep us on the right path, like guarding us,” He’d said, the two of them sitting atop the jungle gym. It was a cool November afternoon, the metal bars like ice against his hands. It was after Gilly had died. Blackston thought he looked like a raccoon, always dark circles under his eyes, face pale. Her death had torn right through him, and a boy that’d been the first to cause a ruckus in class came back from his weeks of grieving to disappear as quick as his own shadow.

‘I hope that’s true,’ Blackston admitted, as much as he didn’t believe it to be so. He was struck by how much he didn’t know, or what should’ve been real for any of them.

It wasn’t just the existential threat of having his name called that hovered overhead. It was the fact that the presses at the laundry had crushed a boy’s skull last year. That his father had had three jobs in the last two years, bringing in less each time. To say any of them was ignorant how close they came to death was foolish; they knew well enough that the world was just waiting to take away the last thing they had.

When the capitol brought back the boys and girls from the dead, he wept.

Not because he was happy that each of them would get a second chance at life. But at the thought, how could willfully tear them between worlds so easily, without regard for the men and women that died every day? Or the children that fell, that broke apart? He’d never been one for anger but he couldn’t help but spend nights walking the streets, fuming at the thought that they desecrated the dead. That whatever they were, whoever they were – was nothing but stories on the television to them.

He wanted an answer.

A reason for why, in the great expanse of the universe, there could be horror, and terror, and all the bad things for so many years, even if their lives were lived the way they were supposed to?

His father gave the same answer, that there was no rhyme or reason, only that he’d been born into the wrong family, with the wrong brother. ‘Life’s not got to have an answer, Blac. Just that you live as good as you can, and have the fun you should, until you get put up in a box.’ He didn’t talk about Gentian. He couldn’t mention all the anger he’d had at his son stepping forward to throw his life away.

It doesn’t come easily.

Blackston spent long hours searching through books in the pitiful library, thumbing past dog eared, yellowed pages for any mention of an afterlife. His brothers would mention he smelled of moth balls and stale wood chips; he’d tell them he was looking for something important.

It was far better than school, where the children either paid no attention to Blac or too much. He’d rather not have to spend another instant with the boys that found his thirst for knowledge akin to weakness, or the girls that thought his crooked teeth and high pitched voice should mark him as invisible. But there was some power in that, at least – being invisible to do the things that he wanted. He could learn to enjoy himself, even if it meant being alone. And if he could enjoy himself, it meant he would never be lonely.

He was shy of twelve when it all seemed to come about. His mother was hardly at home by then, two jobs, and a side of extracurriculars – his father failing in the same gracious way, working to put food on the table for all the mouths to feed but spending more time away than ever a part of them.

Perhaps Blackston couldn’t blame all the bad on the eightieth. When the markets opened up, his curiosity allowed him to find the old booksellers, the women that seemed to know exactly what he was looking for.

‘An answer?’ He remembers one saying, and whispering to another. Blackston had asked about myths and heroes, of gods and ancient things. The woman with grayed hair tucked back tight into a bun narrowed her eyes. They’d pressed him; they’d heard him say his name was Hope. They knew too well what their family had been through. ‘Come back tomorrow.’ The older one said, wrapped in her purple shawls.

He came to learn the name of Yahweh, of old stories where men butchered one another and lived by codes of law. He ate up the Vedas, and all the stories of beings great and small born again and again. He heard old words spoken, found meaning through more questions, and above all came to find that there could be many answers to the same question.

To him, there was no good answer for this life – disappointing as it was – but that they were the answer, for one another.

He couldn’t rightly say if living his life the way he did would get him a special afterlife, or let him be reborn. But he could make sure that he was good, and helpful, and happy. That sometimes things would be hard, and hurt, but hope in the spirit of others was far more gratifying than hope in himself alone.

So he tries to practice what he preaches. Collecting tesserae for the less fortunate. Helping his siblings with their studies. Offering to take extra shifts for those that need time away, and giving them the pay. Keeping chaste until he finds his true love.

‘I want to live a good life, and be a good person,’ He’s told his Aunt Birdie. He likes her because she needs so much help all the time, especially nowadays. It gives him enough to do that he stays in her spare bedroom, making sure to clean up the kitchen and feed pistachio. He doesn’t tell her about the bills that pile up or that he’s started using all the money he can to pay them. It’s his own reward, helping someone as desperate as she is. ‘Birdie needs time to be sad,’ He’s told his mother, who’d been all too happy to have her moon-eyed child out of her home.

He likes to pray in the morning and at night. All the time, really – little made up versions of things he’s read. He’ll make a ‘t’ across his chest and spin around in a circle. When he finishes he’ll sometimes kneel and put his forehead to the ground.

It gives him peace, and he tells others it sends positive vibes into the universe. They could all be a bit more positive. And one day, he hopes to get others to prayer with him. He’s always asking his Aunt, but he can count the dozen or so times she’s flatly refused.

‘We’re children of the universe, which means we ought to be good to one another,’ He says, washing dishes in the sink while Birdie lingers. ‘I like to think living the right way will help show others how to as well.’

He just wishes his brother Gentian could see him now. Perhaps he did – somewhere, somehow.

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