Contradictions

And because he never loved, the man never hated, even as the firing squad stood impassive before him and prepared to propel him to another life after another death, although, as skeptical believer, he never endorsed any books of resurrection, and saw instead at the end of the nimble light a barrenness that stretched into an endless discolored dream. In confession of his multiple contradictions, another existence would clearly see his actions improvident but not rewardable with the punishment of salvos and slugs as his deeds had been in this life when he passed the boy’s house for the last time.

The boy’s cries through the cracks of the neighbor’s door leapt intolerable into his concern, or it might have been a pervasive fear of living a predictable life gripped, as sometimes he could be, by tales of imaginary heroes he had read about in books when as a child he ruled the world from under bedcovers in an hour that according to custom lay cataloged for sleep.

As man who never loved, he might have ignored the boy’s cries, but his hesitation declared itself ready to act after several days in which the cries that leaked from the neighbor’s door grew more upsetting as he walked past on his way to the market for biscuits or meat.

The firing squad took aim from the shoulder of their duty and shuddered as one breath in the autumn morning of auburn leaves only three weeks after he knocked the neighbor’s door with a questioning rap, and it hinged itself unfastened inward and the cries of the boy grew louder. Justice ran rapid for the killing wall in a time of prolific distrust.

The neighbor’s house smelled of yesterday’s joys tarnished to sorrow. September lay in ruins as it ran out of days. A floorboard complained of joints from wooden years of disrepair, and he entered deeper into his painful desire to release the boy from his suffering.

Who is there? he asked, but the boy stayed hidden in some alcove or out in the open in the larger light of blind sight, and an echo scampered around the room until it slurred itself exhausted into the room’s sallow cladding.

Up would be down if the stairway descended to the higher floor, and bottom would be top if the rugs turned the tables on the ceiling, but the judge named him blackened and guilty just two weeks after he tried the first step to the second floor of the neighbor’s house as the cries of the boy ripened their distress. Justice vaulted angry from the bench in a time of triumphant wrath.

In a second floor bedroom a young woman with a timeworn face sat on a bed and stroked the boy’s hair with a brush of rusty barbed wire that tainted the boy’s expression with pain and threaded his voice with the cries the man had heard from the street. And when the man reached to stay the hand of the brush, the woman snarled, as teacher she said, of all those lessons that fall to the wayside untaught in a world of perpetual readiness to embrace indolence in the confrontation of good.

The man grabbed the boy and turned to the door, and the woman cried out that justice plunged from on high with deadly claws for kindness in a time of ethical cleansing, and that a hunted man would never evade the wagon of marshals that came for him just two hours after he raised his voice to the rafters of the second floor of a neighbor’s house with a boy in pain and fled down to the street again.

From his scalp the boy bled distress and from his mouth he consummated his gasping of the early autumn air with his wish to breathe easy again. The man carried him to a park where they sat on a bench. He pulled a cloth from his coat to wipe the boy back to uninjured.

From the east a team of lawmen approached just one hour after the boy calmed and removed the tears from his eyes with balls of fists. A pack of six, the team scrambled close and demanded the man’s support for his arrest with handcuffs and whispered shouts that innocence would not be tolerated. Justice slept in a cavern of darkness in a time of despicable virtue.

The entire family of contradictions piled into an official vehicle and sped slowly toward the station with the boy in back with the man, and the executioner up front with a serious smile, only thirty minutes after the man kissed the boy on the cheek and prepared himself for the inevitable caress of clubs, and the impermanent death that came with the ratified punishment they would pledge upon a unread book in a time when justice marched in riotous harmony.

Bars and bailiffs threw the man down on the floor of a cell in the courthouse only moments after he pleaded they care for boy in his enduring absence, but they promised no word for the boy’s bloodied head as the man stumbled over his feet, and justice thrust him with stony hands into a labyrinth of accusations.

And three seconds after the Captain raised his hand to signal the firing squad to clasp their triggers in a time of beloved unreason, the man who had never loved still never hated, and wished the world well as it tumbled down around his sight and the autumn morning of auburn leaves turned to spring. He sighed and fell in anxious relief as the wind in the trees slowed its passage and began to call forth in the February voices of birds a lyrical but imperfect impersonation of God.