They say that the true character of a human being is only revealed in the wake of death, in the hours that follow the termination of their lifetime, when the ripples are spreading fresh over the River Styx as the ferryman drives his dead soul to the afterlife. What is said about him, what is known of him, what is shown for everything he worked for and accomplished, that is what they say a man’s character can be derived from, not rumours and falsehoods or facades of social status and well-to-do tidings, but the words spoken in secret between two of his acquaintances at his funeral. Human beings, undeniably, are repulsive creatures in their treatment of each other.
Not in life, but in death, can only truth appear? The tragedy of loss sheds the first light on a man’s face, his features illuminated just then, in his coffin, for all to see and admire? Could not his value been asserted minutes preceding his departure from the living world, not while he walked along the living could his accoutrements to his self been acknowledged? They march forward in time, as a race, striving for victory in struggle and greatness in living, but glory comes only in the black march to the grave, afterward, for mankind? Can not it be for humans to experience the celebration of their own life?
They walk, their burden upon their shoulders like a hollowed cross within the confines of which lies their dead kin, primped in black suits and stark, white shirts, legs stiff in the winter snow, as solemn as grieving soldiers after a lost battle or mournful wives over sain children, their minds not on their lost one but on everything else . . . In their eyes swirls the contemplative thoughts of ones pondering their own death and wondering over their own significance, how shall their funeral fair — droves in attendance or sparse company to cry over their corpse? Selfish, selfish, unjustifiable mongrels, these humans with their worries of notoriety, their lives ticked away every instant closer to inevitable doom and yet not do they award their kind with love or celebration until it is their still, lifeless bodies they must bury in their backyards.
In their flesh rushes the rejuvenating force of their blood, flushing their faces in agitation of the chill wind that blows westward into their peeled eyes that drip not for sorrow but for cold; not a tear shed for the wretched dead but for their own inconvenience and how they were put out for this occasion, how their schedules were interrupted in the name of this hollow funerary procession. They drove up rapt in chittering over the gracious event that was the death of Marcus Redford O’Briarfield and the relief it was to the family to lay him to rest in the green earth, quiet and forgotten to rot to dust and be nibbled by the worms. How they breathed a collective sigh of thankfulness when the news reached their ears, followed promptly by an exasperated sigh of displeasure over the unavoidable circumstance of his burial, in unison they mourned the lost time — time that could be spent golfing or perhaps dining with businessmen in Armani suits trimmed with diamond cufflinks and other symbols of their superior nature and existence. Sooner they would lap the thrown-away scraps of leftovers from the plates of the well-to-do rich and famous than spend the afternoon gathered together to care for the final rites of a fellow kinfolk shot and murdered. Surely they would go to church on the next Sunday and mime their prayers, emulate perfectly the practice of worship to a God they gave no more thought to than the dead boy they carried upon their shoulders now. They were, after all, proper, God-fearing Christian Protestants.
The women, in their dress not even respectfully black or somber, carried their purses by their side like they hefted their indignation upon their backs every morning over the insult of the reality of where they resided in a socioeconomic sense; shoulders high, arms crooked, hands clutching the straps tightly and knuckles white from the grip they gave their purses in the thought of their not being recognized as famous wives of millionaire husbands. The wrinkles around their eyes told of the strain upon their bodies they went through each day, carrying with them the weight of denial of opportunity and rightful justice, the corners of their mouths taut and drawn as was the result of mouthing so many unhappy smiles. The makeup they wore to protect their true identities as aging mortals instead of Olympian goddesses eternally young was economical, the cheaper brand on the second shelf at the supermarket, it was tainted with the filth of middle-class, coated with the smell of coupons and credit cards. Everything about them from their hair to their toes was painted with the effort of living by means impossibly high and realistically unachievable; today, they thought as one mind, would better be spent in a beauty salon — one that charged seventy dollars for the latest style of haircut.
After the ceremony, they’ll swarm out of the grounds and pile into their sports utility vehicles, the ones with four-by-four, off-road capability that never saw anything harsher than highway pavement and with forty gallon gas tanks that allowed nigh fifty miles of travel. The black, white, green, yellow, blue, orange machinations of waste and pollution that trucks their families from place to place, their kids to school and their wives to parent-teacher meetings, their husbands to the sky-rise office buildings and then to hotels where the husbands consort with their mistresses. It was a piteous servitude to be the vehicle of these despicable families, but the human beings created and therefore ruled them as they saw fit, of course.
I hate them. I hate them all: every single, individual one of them, each of them in their toupees and wigs, in their pointlessly high-priced jackets and shoes, in their bust-enhancing bras and silly sock-suspenders. Each and every single human being in this place, on this planet, in this world, deserves nothing but contempt. I hate them with the fiery passion of one thousand Hells and with the force of a million demon wings beating in the red skies of the deepest Abyss. There are no words in any language, human or otherwise, that convey my true hatred for them.
I will watch them die, I will see them burn. I will smile as the façade of their comfortable, coddled lives are peeled away from them like the skin off their bones with pain and devastation, deaths they can not ignore with no funeral marches to make for there shall be no one remaining to hold them. They shall make light of this death at this time, because they have never seen what it means to die at the merciless hand of Fate.
I am their Fate, and I damn them all.