Creative Writing: The Assassination

And the war, well, she is Roger’s mother, she’s leached at all the soft, the vulnerable inclusions of hope and praise scattered, beneath the mica-dazzle, through Roger’s mineral, grave-marker self, washed it all moaning away on her gray tide. Six years now, always just in sight, just where he can see her. He’s forgotten his first corpse, or when he first saw someone living die. That’s how long it’s been going on. Most of his life, it seems. The city he visits nowadays is Death’s antechamber: where all the paperwork’s done, the contracts signed, the days numbered. Nothing of the grand, garden, adventurous capital his childhood knew. He’s become the Dour Young Man of “The White Visitation,” the spider hitching together his web of numbers. It’s