Headed to the Press

 

It's headed to the press. Childhood’s bittersweet memory finds its resting place within the obituary. Not by its own doing, but by those who squandered its time and auctioned its innocence. The church pews will creak beneath the weight of its death which so nonchalantly intertwines through the clouds of gossip hovering above. With the morning coffee still on their breath, the town folk will come forth one at a time with empty sorrows and claims of cluelessness. Childhood is left with no option but to wonder if those who say these things once heard the echoing cries of the stolen pomegranates or the shrieking of the sourgrass. Or in this pondering, Childhood considers if its killer was perhaps just that immensely persuasive, an attribute it wishes not to bestow. Either of the two, willing blindness or manipulation, seem equally frightening possibilities. Worse of all, Childhood will know nothing of this until it is staring at its own portrait within a newspaper that was hastily thrown upon a vacant doorstep.

 

Rhys Morrow