******
His broken body lies on the rocks for carrion. The vultures have already captured the rotten scent of him on the wind. They wheel in and out of a cauldron of heavy clouds that promise with their petrichor, a downpour lasting hours or days. The first drops are falling, and the first scavengers perch on the man’s chest.
The fishermen have found him on their way down to the boats. In sour consternation, they speculate he had been murdered or had fallen from the precipitous height of the church that towered over the cove. They cross themselves and whisper a prayer, then a fight breaks out, as they split into two factions, those who want to tend to his dignity, and the others, who curse the stranger’s fate and care not. Their own children depend on them for bread, they argue. One of them searches the pockets for any means of identification and find a small notebook with pencil scrawls no one can make out. On the inside of the back cover, they find a name: Jefferson Carpenter. Now it is no longer just a cadaver, but a dead man. The most intransigent among them take this as the moment for fractious, self-righteous outbursts to storm off, leaving the other fishermen looking at one another and resigning themselves in glum monotone voices, to going for a wagon.
Jefferson Carpenter was not from the village. Even with his face only half legible, they all could attest that this man had come from far off to meet his death. Whether he had lost his way as a traveler or as a person, they could not fathom. Indeed, no one would ever know how poorly he thought of himself, and how vehemently he toiled to convince all who knew him, just how irredeemable he was. When the last of them cast him off, he began his long wandering until the night he found the black tower.
Mind untethered, he'd climbed the crooked stair, which to his eyes, cracked and bled as he stepped. Alone at the top of the spire, he greeted the sum of his poor thoughts, his sorrow, the void below, and he sobbed. Then unseen hands pushed him over the edge, the same hands that later untwisted his shattered limbs and wound him in a phantom shroud.
Unsettling,
Four paragraphs that bring me to query was this man, this Jefferson Carpenter, a man whose body and mind had both reached the end of their tenuous tethering of a lost soul wandered to his long sought place of suicide or was this a man long marked out for murder who had been patiently tracked to just the right place and just the right time to effect his demise? A query just as unanswerable as the questions as to whether Jefferson Carpenter's perception of himself as 'irredeemable" is to be relied upon.
Enigmatic.
Here lies Jefferson Carpenter - an enigma wrapped in a phantom shroud. Gorgeously ghouly - just right for this time of year. Love the artwork as well - very evocative. Brava!