My Father Was a Beastly Tyrant, and His Father Before Him
Flash Fiction Story
by M. Shaw
And when my skin is torn from my body on the gibbet built by the children of the ones we murdered, my name will be enshrined in infamy beneath theirs. A punctuation mark, consigning another beastly dynasty to the past.
That name will be all that remains of me. There will be no grave, no ceremony, no beating of breasts, nor even a corpse to speak of, once the righteous dead have taken their revenge on the blood raging within it now. It will not even really be my name. If it were, then surely it would appear next to yours, joined at the ampersand, the handle we grip tight against the flood rushing over us.
I was named for a saint, but not because my father envisioned me a martyr. You were named for a prophet, but not in hope that you would speak truth to power. If anything, the ones who branded us would have seen me venerated as a god, seated on high, deciding who lives and who dies with stroke of a finger; you, as a pious son gripping the ampersand of a wife with whom to sire more pious sons, in quiet servitude to the survival of your name against mine. They didn’t know, as they pushed us into the world like pieces on a chessboard, what power they cursed us with.
Soon the castle doors, built in the fantasy that mere oak and brass could keep us from each other, will shatter. Soon the ancestral portraits lining the halls will burn up one by one, a fuse leading up to the bedchamber where I await you one last time, the charge whose blast will level this tyrant’s palace until the next one is built. False rumours of my escape will stream like smoke from the rubble, filling the lungs of other beastly tyrants and beastly tyrants’ sons, a noxious hope tarring their lungs into a more peaceful sleep than the one that awaits their martyr.
I beg you, my love, if this note somehow finds you, to let me vanish. Lock my memory behind the doors of your heart, the only place, despite the guards and the gates and the executions, where I was ever safe. You must never vouch for me, never add your name to history’s cold ink. Allow yourself the wife, the pious sons. Give them the names we spoke in the dark. Etch marks on them beyond the reach of saints and prophets, stronger than oak and brass. Let their happiness tower above any castle. Let the ampersands they cling to feel more like a lover’s interlaced fingers. Let them give other names to their forefathers than the ones written here.
And when the soft ravages of time come for your body at last, let the flowers with which we named each other sprout from your grave, and let them never speak the name of the beastly tyrant who planted their seeds.
Yours, faithfully, tearfully, and with bottomless love,
[unsigned]
