Serapes Nevus
December 26, 2020 3:33 PM
Silent hymn by Serapes Nevus
The room was dark, and night had come. Serapes slowly limped his way to his bed, lowering himself gently to a seated position on the side. He leaned his cane in the small gap between end table and box spring, the sunset home it had grown to know. With meticulous and careful bony hands, he lifted his legs individually onto the mattress, and then allowed his upper body to recline. His shoulder-length hair, still primarily black but flecked with greying patches of age, spread beneath him against the pillow, expanding just as his pupils did as he reached over and shut off the small lamp that had previously provided the only flecks of light beside the moon peeking through his window blinds. Now completely enveloped in the darkness, his grey eyes still could not rest. He stared, unseeing, into the dark above and around him, identifying where the ceiling would be, his mind filling in the gaps of his vision and reminding him of the popcorn patterning that rested in shadow above him.The holiday session breaks of academics were his favorite time of year. They always had been, although not because of any sort of intrinsic festiveness in his nature. Indeed, he had never been a particularly merry man. But during his teaching days, he had enjoyed the time off, and now he simply enjoyed the time the boys came home again, and their family could be whole.
Despite being somewhat forced to reside with Sophie and her family due to his medical disabilities, Serapes did in fact enjoy his residency. He had been angry, having spent his whole life so independent, but in truth, he had now grown accustomed to his goddaughter’s help, and the presence of her husband and children. He loved her daughter, and he loved her sons; Sophie was the closest he had managed to his own children, and thus, hers were now his almost-grandchildren. And Serapes loved being an almost-grandfather, just as much as he loved being Sophie’s almost-father.
Her three children were all unique and wondrous, but Serapes found himself especially attached to young Wallace. The two were bonded, close in a way he had never felt, not even with his Sophie. She was fiery and protective, a shining contrast to Serapes’s own nature, yet somehow blooming in his soil, and he could not help but smile at the flower in his garden. But Wally was quieter, more subdued and perhaps more gentle. Serapes was Wally’s confidant, which was a fact that had always made the man proud, but today, it burdened him slightly.
The boys were young - only twelve years old, they were not even yet fully into their teenage years - so perhaps Serapes was overreacting. He was definitely projecting, reliving his own tragedies and ascribing them to the similarities in Wallace’s. But the young boy’s admiration of his brother’s new girlfriend… the sensation rang familiar, and it stung Serapes’s aged and scabbed wounds. He thought immediately of his lost love, the one his best friend had unwittingly married, the one who had been gone for so long that even Jacob had moved on, and whose daughter Serapes watched, whose grandchildren he now watched. It all came back to the start, and he felt the parallel ache.
This story was sure to have a different ending. Surely, Stanley and this young Valentine girl would not get married, or even if they did, Wallace would find his heart renewed and invested in some other girl somewhere along the way. But Serapes’s own heart had never adjusted, had never stepped forward. Even now, when Sara’s own husband had a second wife of over a decade, Serapes had yet to move on. His heart, like his body, was permanently damaged, and not even magic would ever make him whole.
Before his eyes shut, he murmured a low prayer, despite his usual apathy toward religion. He asked not for himself, but for little Wallace. Serapes asked for the boy to understand and find peace, to gain a strength that he himself had never found. History’s mistakes did not need to be repeated.
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Serapes Nevus
Silent hymn
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