insult to injury

By Kate LaDew

almond-shaped leaden sling-bullets
aren't just for defeating giants
they kill without mangling the body
their effective range further than a spear or bow and arrow
resulting in little loss of blood, so things don't get too slippery.
sometime during the upper paleolithic
at the beginning of the holocene 12,000 years ago
almond-shaped leaden sling-bullets were created
to really get your point across,
with symbols and phrases moulded into their faces:
lightning bolts, snakes, scorpions, anything that strikes out of the blue,
take this! ouch! for pompey's backside!
and the devastatingly short and sarcastic catch!
these are helpful so that, if by chance, somebody doesn't die all at once,
and keeps living for a little while
they can look up, at the almond-shaped leaden sling-bullet
that just smashed into their breakable body
and hear a long range action-movie-death-quip in their ears
the ones you need when killing somebody just isn't enough
when it's crucial their final moment on earth is just as painful mentally as physically.
their eyes open and close, every single breath of their life flashing,
every thing and every person and every place they love
moving and melding and mixing with each other
until it all makes sense, all the bewilderment transformed
into a long line of linked hands, all etched with the same fingerprints,
a heart pumping love instead of blood, slowing, slowing,
until, just as it's about to join the infinite, another human reaches down,
snaps the sternum in two, shards digging into the flesh that once housed it,
rips the heart from its cradle and crushes it in hate suffused hands
whispering words created by other humans to pulverize, savage, demolish and destroy,
to blot out any thing this person believed themselves to be
replacing it all, every thing and every person and every place they love
with vicious malice, enmity, resentment and writhing degradation.
sometime during the upper paleolithic
at the beginning of the holocene 12,000 years ago,
when somebody created a weapon to extend the length and reach of a human arm
did they create the words to go along with it?
did they know, 12,000 years later, a man would track another man like an animal,
shoot him in the chest and stand over his dying heart,
shouting hate distilled down to one word,
a word so evil it's written only using its initial sound
a sound made by placing the front of a tongue against the roof of a mouth, behind the teeth,
the tip and sides of the tongue touching the roof of the mouth, and vibrating the vocal cords
did those people from the holocene know,
just to make sure, future people would scrawl the word everywhere they could,
on any surface that can hold paint, and eventually make it a part of the atmosphere?
sure they did, they had their own words, why should anything change in 12,000 years?
why should it be any different now than then?
today, when a dying man breathes in, he does not choke on the evil word,
the shout as his soul leaves his body is just another whisper in his ear
a sound he's come to expect, echoing till it touches even the edges of heaven.

Kate LaDew is a graduate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a BA in Studio Art.  She resides in Graham, NC with her cats, Charlie Chaplin and Janis Joplin.