I'll Pray For You + mercurys

When Lestia had knocked on Ezra's door that morning, telling him it was time to go, he'd been waiting for her. His hands had rested in his lap, only twitching in a small way. His fingers were building a new type of rocking horse that might move side to side as well. He had been wearing a clean shirt, and there hadn't even been one speck of paint on them. He had been working on an equation in his head, for a way to make a castle only shaped with circles. He was ready to go already, had been for the last three hours as he'd watched the sun rise through his attic window. He knew what day it was, he could smell the blood, hear it dripping. He'd heard the ghost of a gunshot this morning and it had made the floorboards rattle. He knew what day it was.

He'd let them take him away, down to the grave yard. Quiet. He had not said a word the whole way, and none of them had either. It was a quiet time for them, for all of them. Salt and water wanted to leak from his eyes, but it didn't know how today. He didn't want it to today, he was the eldest. He was the one in charge of the company they lived off of. He was afraid that if they saw his tears, they would be angry with him, and he didn't want that. He hated their rage. It scared him. He tasted blood on his lip from where he bit it last night. It reminded him of the iron smell below his room. He had some weird sort of fix on it, he couldn't let it go. He didn't know if he wanted to.

Now they all sat in a ring, mother on Otis' grave. He was probably the one who could remember him best. He was almost five years old when he'd killed himself. His father had always been this tall thing that smelled of leather and expensive aftershave. Sometimes, most times, he also smelled of whisky and sour grapes. Ezra had been his pupil since the young age of three. His father had thought it best to get him trained as soon as possible. He had also been rather proud of the way Ezra's genius seemed to come so natural. When he was proud and sober, things were great. hen Ezra made mistakes, as even a genius will, things were not so great. Things became wiggly, and his father's face would turn red with the exertion from shouting. Ezra's face would become red from the impact of an open hand.

Ezra's father kept a gun in his desk drawer, and sometimes when Ezra was doing equations at the desk, he would take the gun out of the drawer and pretend he was shooting at his father's head. It would make a pop sound in his head, and as a four year old, he had a vague idea that there would be blood and maybe brain bits on the wall. His father would have his work spread out in front of the little coffee table in front of him and wouldn't notice, he was immersed in his work. Otis Mercury seemed to either love Ezra's ability to do a complex equation as if it was simply one and one, or it made him so frustrated that he'd fly into some sort of rage. It scared Ezra a lot when he was little but he didn't ever know what to do except stay so still that he barely even breathed.

Every year on the anniversary of Otis' death, Ezra remembered the way his suit had been just a bit too long for him. He was a growing boy at five, and it was practical. It had been a black suit. It was the suit he had worn to his father's funeral, and the suit he had worn on the day the company was legally handed over to a five year old. Of course he was just there to be seen, not heard. Nowadays he was very much heard, and he was very much seen. He had new suits, not black. One of them was grey. Right now the company was marketing a barking dog toy that Ezra had made.

He watched, only ever half there as his siblings interacted. He wasn't as comfortable here as he was in his room, a screwdriver, or a paintbrush in one hand. Sometimes one in each. Still, with his siblings it wasn't as bad. He had always been quietly there, noticing things about them. Lestia was wild and people called her crazy, but for all Ezra knew she was right. He never slept otherwise so maybe this was a big dream. Teresa and I were both at our most comfortable indoors. I watched her sometimes, claiming that I was studying movements of the body. As a protective older brother I had come to know what she did and did not like. Situated beside her, I reached over and carefully pulled the flower crown off of her head, strands of her long hair seemed to follow it away. They fell soft, like rain onto her shoulders. I had read the tension in her shoulders, the shaking begin in her hands. She didn't like dirt, never had.

Ponderously, he shapes the strand into a ball and tosses it to one of his siblings. By rights, he should be banging his fists onto the slab of stone that is Otis, but his eldest son doesn't miss him. Ezra's shoulders slump in response to this knowledge. He doesn't have any fond memories of him. He holds no hero complex. I feel a bit like a pretender. Standing, he brushes himself off and announces, "I'm going for a walk. I can't listen to that all day." With that, Ezra sets of, long legs claiming the earth. He want to see where the dead tributes lay. He wants to know what the mothers wrote on the murderer's gravestones. He want to find the gravestone that says his name on it.