Love Grates

They set up a wail as they howled the fate of their birth. Where was Papa? Lugubrious, he held the razor to his white cheeks and decanted whiskey into a tumbler. The children screamed for the loss of him even as they found him. There was a melancholy tinge to his reddish fingers that gripped the glass in rigidity – and perhaps in perpetuity. He had no fear of the children newly crowned and anointed, the fire of his loins but no feast for the senses. Howling internally he raised a glass and rubbed a grater against the skin of his calves with an uprolled tan trouser leg. Skin peeled off and flaked onto the carpet. He mourned the loss of his physical form and sought to obfuscate the damage as he wept blood-red tears of bourbon into the cracked mirror. If this was jealousy, he could live with it. It was better this way. Better to feel that than her new emptiness. Better that than the lady newly disgorged of child.

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