Mark Mann, illustrated man (image: The Void)

The slave that rules a master always finishes by hating himself. And so I keep a picture of him by my cluttered bed to torture myself. In it he stands erect, his cerulean eyes sharp with determination, his red mittens dangling from his sleeves like apples from the sinewy boughs behind him. In the picture it isn’t clear whether he has landed in the orchard to conquer and subdue it, or if he has just emerged from the foliage itself, a sylvan demigod, glistening with dew.

Once he caught me smoking on the sly, and in his uncomprehending eyes I read the reprobation of every mystic that wanders across empty fields, for whom the only remaining mystery is the impurity they cast off long ago.

It may seem strange for a grown man to say these things about a three-year-old boy, especially about his own son, but I have my own purity: the purity of hatred. At night I hear him breathing down the hall, and his breathing suffocates me.

There isn’t life enough in the world to fill his greedy lungs.

–

Mark Mann is a Montreal writer.