Sun Comes Sidewise

I am my own god and when on the eighth day I wake to survey the universe I have wrought and baited to snare the helpless unsuspecting and extract from them their thanks, I find it sprung by circumstance. This offspring I have fashioned is falling short. This offspring I have fashioned from little more than a drop of viscous inauspicious stuff, collected with care and warmed in my own body then flung in my panic in what must have been the right direction, and set upon his track toward a future brighter than his faculties dare behold, this same offspring has inexplicably deviated if only by degrees from the destiny which is his birthright and my gift. I am watching him sleep. He is not hirable. Even awake he doesn’t seem fully upright, but asleep he is deplorable. Tenuous rays of dawn through the blinds cast pale stripes of color across his eyelids and his downy cheek. Brown curls streaked with threads of sunlight frame his face. The day will catch him unawares. His slouchy posture cuts a sorry figure. How I love him. I will hire him myself, of course, to keep him always near me. He has his mother’s snore, or is that her I hear? What prospects he will squander! In the acrid final moments of his long day of striving to surpass the limitations of his ill-conceived engendering, when the sun comes once again sidewise into this room and he can smell his way to his own bed, the memory of these hours of fragrant sleep will seem so unattainable. Let him sleep now. Let him gather his strength for the challenges which will better him. In another minute the machinery of his elders’ making will tip the spring and grind out its alarm.

Copyright ©Today, November 20, 2006 David Hodges