God and Soup and Brick dust

K. Ryan, 2006

Do not expect this to make sense. It’s the ramblings of a new character of mine who suddenly won’t shut up. That is all.

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Thyme is always small and peppery, tight with curled up leaves and faint purple flowers. It lives with chipped mortar of bricks; it can grow anywhere, and it’s good in soups, too.

That’s why a thin-faced child with a gap between her front teeth chooses to use it as name, even though she has a piece of paper that calls her something else in flourished, faded ink. Of course, the likeness ends when it comes to the bit about the soups, but that doesn’t matter. It’s an easy name to say when you have a lisp.

The lisp fades in time; the gap in her teeth is smaller. In time, many things diminish around her. There’s money, for one, and memories—the gulf of difference between herself and the older, harder sister she has always despised. Now the sister is dead, shrunk away, and that’s the only thing which separates them.

The girl diminishes as she grows. She is hung up on a hook by a window, becoming brittle and tired and dry like all cut things.

Thyme is bundled up and torn, picked apart, eaten. All those things fit somehow—she didn’t bother remembering she had a piece of paper with another name. She is what she is, stuck fast between her rock and her hard place, small but still growing, drinking up what she can until she is as exhausted as the metaphor. And she talks.

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There’s a few that always want to talk, first.

I’m used to shy ones, new things full of heaviness they can’t swallow and can’t express, silent with their secrets, afraid to touch.

So, they talk—or they run away shaking, or they throw up. But a lot of them talk and I smile like I pity them because that works, but I hate them, because before long they stop talking. They work things out.

Why do they start out like that? Nervous and polite and talking about the world like I should care? Why do they have to end up how they end up instead of just starting out the way they’re going to die? It’d be simpler, but the child-mortality rate of syphilis would probably be a bit overwhelming.

Are you listening to me, God? I hope you are, because I’m bloody-well more interesting than anyone else to talks to you—and don’t you deny it and call me vain.

It you’re not listening it doesn’t matter. I never listen when they try and talk to me, so…well; it makes sense if you don’t. Just smile and nod, right—maybe smite someone for me, just to get me to shut up?

I’m sick of the nervous ones. They talk and say thank you and then it’s all back to money and fluids. Even the ones that say thank you.

Even the one who….

Oh, fuck it.

If I can be rude to you, God, why do they have to try and be polite to me?