Dearly Beloved, or some thoughts on Toni Morrison’s Beloved in the themes and style of Beloved

These stopped being the stories to pass on. They whispered once in our ears, too close to hear words — only the rustling of leaves and feathers like wing-beats in the sky.

We never came.

They sit in 124, and they rock their own loneliness until it flies away. We live just outside 124 when the world remembers their story but not their stories, their name but not their names. We live with our fingers smoothing over the silky thread of a scar, expecting it to lead us out of our labyrinths while we leave the stones of their walls unturned.

Pink chip like a fingernail, the crashing of old tides on new sand. Life shaped out of fire, vultures picking at open seams until they numb. Until the men without skin and without breath numb.

Our eyes clutch for purchase on the portside of a ship. We walk in curtains of sun and wind, and the footsteps of children and mothers and men fit together when we watch the wood ripple. Their names blur and crash and burn when we look towards the west and our shadows fall east.

We have never come for the men without skin and without breath and without life and without hope and without harm and without guilt and with scars and with innocence and with family and with loss and with pleas. Their pages laid out on new shores to dry old salt until new tides rip at them again. Their candlelit flames with dripping wax, lined inside those churches and labyrinths to guide us again until we bury them in shallow graves and erode the smoke scent that still lines these stones. We have never entered 124 again because we think we have found our way out after we give a hollowed-out mother another six letters on her beloved’s pink chip headstone. We see the tides recede and light shine on the deck, and we forget the 124’s who see the vultures circling at the seams of their stories.

Just shadows filling in the rest.

Dearly Beloved.