This is the beginning of a fictional biography about Nietzsche. “This will pass,” Franzsika whispered into Carl Ludwig’s ear, thinking of the blackouts he used to have when Fritz was so much younger. She placed a washcloth over his head and the water dripped past his eye. What is going on in there? She wanted to pull out his brain and place it on her open palm but like a scientist she feared knowing. Nothing could be worse than the truth. It killed humanity in its wake by stepping on creatures that were still fluttering with hope to fly. She soothed her hands over his head. No one needed to tell her, she knew he was going to die. It was just a matter of time. Two doctors had been by that afternoon, saying the same thing his brain was probably softening. His beautiful soft mind was one of the things she loved about him. She thought fondly of his absentmindedness, his eye for detail and his love of life. The things not even an illness could change. She was pulled in every direction except the one direction she wanted to go into. They sat in silence until she found herself again. +++ Fritz stared up at the ceiling. He was only five and yet he felt old. Perhaps he was born old, but he didn’t have the words to really ask himself, so he never did. Staring into another outline, he searched for a white window that he could jump down from and escape the fire. He knew the monsters lived in his father’s room. “All by myself,” he said out loud and he felt an open mouth with jagged teeth and a hot breath on his ear. He turned his head and wished his mother was there. Then he heard it. It was a scream that rattled the cupboards of the kitchen and the glass in his window. It was his father’s spirit rattling to get free. Fritz cried softly to himself, as he imagined his father trapped in open eyes and slumped down in his chair. “Please God,” Fritz whispered hopeless to himself. “If you make my dad better, I swear I will be good and never ever do a bad thing ever again. If you can just do this one little thing. Pleeeeasse!” He placed his little fingers together and got down on his knees. “Please make my dad better.” He said it over and over again, until he fell asleep in his crusted up tears. +++ Franzsika kneeled down to be close to her husband’s ear. Her voice was warm. Carl Ludwig imagined her dark thick hair like black stripes on the side of her face and her dark sensitive eyes. He was reaching for her, but his fingers didn’t move. “Carl Ludwig,” she whispered, “the doctor came again today. He had some bad news. Don’t try to open your eyes. He said your loss of vision is permanent and your brain condition is beyond curable. I know, I know, I can’t believe it. How can God do this to us? We have always been such good Christians and we have three young children. You of all God’s men have served him so well. Why must he punish our family? What is it that I have done?” Carl Ludwig’s lips did not move. He wished more than anything that he could look up and see the cross again. If he could only see it one more time and feel the unconditional love that rains down from Jesus’ eyes. “This is just God’s way,” he whispered, but the words didn’t come out right and Franzsika didn’t hear him. She was listening to her heart, ripping itself apart. It left her chest wandered down her veins, across her mind and out her eyes to where her husband was dying right before her. “Fredrick,” she said, shooing the door closed. Fritz walked over to hold his mother’s hand. “Fritz,” she said again, but all the other words were chocked up in her throat and she couldn’t pick the rest of them out. She sighed. “Why don’t you give your father a kiss?” Fritz leaned forward, touching the cold wrinkled cheek and the coarse beard against his lips. “I love you daddy,” he whispered, looking at his sister crawling into the room. “I love you soooo much.” Carl Ludwig smiled to his favorite son’s smile. He never needed to see it to know it was there. He thought of his other son, a newborn in his mother’s arm. He tried to reach for Fritz hand, but instead he began to cry. Small tears filled up the wrinkles and cracks and fell down towards his pale lips. The room took on a small quaint feeling, despite impossible problems that filled up the air. The problems and their objectivity had become trespassers into his house and they changed what was once filled with magic into doctor’s offices. Carl Ludwig wanted to plead with God for his life and explain all his worth to the creator who inherently knew the importance of life. He was in the best position out of everyone to plead his case but he didn’t. The last few moments of his life, he spent asleep. +++ Franzsika screamed in sobs when she touched her husband’s cold clammy hand. “On my God, my good Carl Ludwig is dead. My good Carl Ludwig, oh why!” Fritz poked his head through the door and watched his mother’s red streaked face bending down and kissing his father’s eyes. His aunt took him by his stomach and pulled him into the living room. “Let her be. Fritz, go outside,” she said, throwing him into the kitchen, where the smell of breakfast awoke him. The world flowed across Fritz’s eyes in bright colors and he saw what moments before was, was no longer. Life was nothing more than a picture display, with names and labels. He hadn’t even learned how to spell his own name and he was learning how to lose life’s meaning. He heard his sister crying in the background. He knew what she wanted. He knew what everyone wanted, and he quietly closed his eyes in the black chaos. He was praying that everyone who died would just re-appear. But even at five, he knew that God did not listen to every prayer. His head spun endless in his darkness. He felt himself forget everything that was, and it remained still in what he never thought possible. Fritz’s eyes shifted as fish eyes did roaming over the bottom that held everything in a firm grasp. He was not sure exactly what it meant to be grieving. Even the definition of the word was too big to be explained to him, but after nodding to every feeling they gave him, he felt he was somehow grieving successfully. His world no longer contained life, but yet it circled the same sun as earth did, and people with big minds claimed the two planets were the same. Fritz knew that everyone was lying to him. He feared that what was behind their false smiles and happy tones was much worse than the lies. Horror broke free from every possibility and it evaded all the tomorrows that followed. He had thought he was safe from the cold rain and death. He was loved by God. How could God abandon him? His father separated into the horizon line of miracles. Who could he trust if not life, if not the bright blue behind cloudy days? Now, there was nothing but the stone ground of the graveyard, where his fingers had once crawled. Everything he needed was now out of his reach. Like a child, he was not tall enough to see above the table that held his meal. The table’s shadows hung over his mother’s lap, spreading monsters on the ground. +++ Fritz was wide awake. The night extended across his bedroom window. It was a long road and it pressed its belly against the glass. With its long sharp red tongue, it licked the glass’s cold surface. Fritz stared up into the black sky. It was his last night at home. Because of his father’s death, the Church was taking back his house for the next preacher’s family. He, his mother, sister, grandmother, two aunts and a maid servant were moving to Naumburg. Fritz wanted to feel the dirt under his bare feet and he kicked off his covers to touch that which would soon forget him. He wanted to feel the moon beams. He wanted to hear the bells going across the land one more time. He wanted to see his father’s eyes again. Will my father be able to find me if I live somewhere else? He felt a heaviness in his soul. It wasn’t the same heaviness as death; it was a heaviness that couldn’t touch anything else. He was a white sheet being drowned by a rock. Fritz felt suffocated. There was a strange feeling when time stopped ticking. Like a clock it just continued to wind itself, until it broke. A boy watched grief run backwards to stay in the moment. He could feel his mother’s broken heart as his fingers reached inside his jarred perception of a woman. He was staring through the walls to see the end of time. She would be alone with him, and his father would be forgotten. A passenger moved, who knew only the trees. He would cut the forest down to find Father Time again and in the spiraling ring, hidden within, would be a lost heart. He felt its crushing metal doors, locking him within. +++ The scariest part of his fear was in how much time stood between his childhood eyes that gazed at the moon’s changing face and the old eyes that would hang on to those same shadows when the seconds ran out and everything faded. Fritz waited for his heart to stop yearning. +++ Fritz peered his sleepy eyes out the carriage. Elizabeth looked over to her brother. She tugged his arm and let the drool slide down her cheeks. It made her sticky hands slimy. She knew who he was. She knew who she was and she knew where they were, but she was only three and the faces of life had just been introduced to her. She, like many people who were concerned with only life’s appearances, was not yet ready to make acquaintances with that stern handshake of authority, so she turned away from her mother and hung on to the small five fingers of her older wiser brother, whose life for the first time was guiding hers. Together they watched their new world close all around them. In the distance were the clanging gates surrounding the city. “Fritz,” she said, between soft tears that were falling in a mixture of attachment and hate, “where did daddy go?” “Daddy is with God.” His voice was flat and the meaning ran in the water underneath them. “Is he coming back?” Her innocence spoke like yellow flowers in spring. “No.” He swallowed the rest of his heart in one bite. “Okay, well will he be in our new house?” She was picking the flowers; unknowingly, they were going to die inside her vase. Fritz turned his head away from his sister’s trust in him. He had survived past wrinkles and crackling bones and was waiting to die on a rocking chair. His sister remained the same age, as two years younger, but was now too young to understand what he had become. He sighed to her unanswerable questions and questioned the meaning of such questions. They plagued him like scorpions in the night, which crawl and scatter into the cracks before they lurch. His five year old mind changed. The bright sunshiny place that held his most treasured belongings had been looted. By becoming a boy without a father, he was raped of his reputation. He placed his hands under his chin, as the carriage’s wheels passed over rocks. Why? And that one simple question, the least complex of all others that his intellect will doubtfully conspire, will be the one question that will matter the most. +++ Franzsika wore her black dress. It matched her dark black hair and it made her pale skin seem transparent. Her thin blue veins sprawled across her forearm as an attempt to reach her crooked elbow. Her mother sat beside her. “Beautiful evening isn’t it?” her mother said. She stared at the setting sun that was turning the sky a dirty orange. “I assume so,” Franzsika said. Her voice was a bit drawn out, as if it the words were miles long and ended at a wall that she could not see past. They tried to wedge themselves between the cracks, but like most words they were unsuccessful to mean more than the surface. “My room is set up,” her mother said out loud. “I would assume this will be a nice place for us. Your pension will cover things for a while.” “He died so young. I would never have expected to be a widow at 25.” One mouse was alive within her. He was quivering. His wet black fur, tiny claws and long narrow tail seized around the bones, as if they were handles holding it in place. “God has a plan for everyone.” Her mother said, with little sympathy in her voice. If a problem wasn’t fixable with sleep and food, it fell out of a mother’s arms. The problems of pain were like ghosts; they were supposed to disappear by magic, soft words, and lastly a cold shoulder. “You are implying that Carl Ludwig wasn’t meant to live.” Her broken heart covered up her tone. She was as flat as the ocean on a clear day. “Well everything happens for a reason.” Love can not love the unloved. “Some things happen for no reason at all,” Franzsika said to the air hoping it would grow arms and hold her but like air often did, it blew away and she was left with nothing but the outline of who she used to be. “It will get better. Just give it time.” Her mother said putting her hand on her arm. “Everything happens in its own time.” In the lies we were stronger, better, and weaker, lies made the drama believable; we place the blame on the randomness of an every revolving door, but who is to say that the pattern won’t repeat again? Franzsika got up and left her mother alone. Her sister would attend to her before the night was over, she always did. She ran into the back of the house and peered into the two little rooms, where her children were. She saw the only thing left of her husband, two corners of heaven that were slumbering inside of broken hearts. Her pulse ran through her narrow arteries. Her fingers were stacked over her eyes in rows like a broken gate, and her tears flowed under them. Her world was right there folded before her, and she couldn’t reach deep enough to dig them out from the ground where they slumbered. She wanted to replant so badly. She wanted to take what she loved and place it in higher ground, but she couldn’t move. She couldn’t undue what was already done, the weeds that had begun to sprout around her protected arms, the beaks that were pecking at the seeds that they so deeply planted. She couldn’t scare away the crows that will eventually perch on them. She sighed to herself and her breath said all the aching words that made her lips tremble. Her tears slipped down the geography of her features: over mountain tops, under her eyes, past crevices of her lips, and into her life. She tasted the salt. “Everything is going to be alright because we have each other.” She put her arms around herself and walked out of Elizabeth’s room. She left nothing behind but the scratching sound of her footsteps.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 03:56:58 +0000