The Alternate Truth (Part 2?)

To @DanPhantom123 challenge post: https://www.theprose.com/post/764252/the-alternate-truth

I never lied.

Woman: "He's behind the curtain."

She shook her head. It wasn't time. There had to be that part where they go on and cut you open, check for probable cause or unnatural motives. What's the word? ...autopsies.

But they never see the inner drive.

I could see both sides now, disparate. Me prostrate. Jimmy perpendicular. The blue curtain rippling like parting waters in a reverse birth. The fourth floor holding us both, and all of Meadow Shade as shadow. It's well past morning. I expect it happened many times before. For namesake, because in following our footpath we come into our own. And I was a wizard. The big brother.

"Rebecca Braum?" and she answers promptly to the intercom, walking expediently on command. A pawn, she'll take her check on Friday, and another case on Monday.

It's just us now.

I mean Jimmy.

Would he throw something at me? I still felt I deserved it no less than since our nearing the end of days when he'd hurled metal. Yeah, in what do they call that, that backwards curiosity-- "Re tro spect?" It wasn't at me then. But I still felt it should have been.

It was my primal memory in tick-tallying my calendar. After the nightmare, the undertaker's dream I'd had, I had morphed the image of the candies and the seat into one blackened opening. Hate's last breath vomiting out the toxins of us. Me. Peddling arms and legs through nothing. The self hate had to go. Through Jimmy's innocent and silent gaping. It was shit.

Maybe he at least could be purged now. That was my thinking in carrying on with this new forever, in a closure. For all of us. I had weighed the injustice. When I think of scales now, and the blindfold, it came down to this possibility.

At your doorstep, of life, there's a basket. It isn't exactly empty. You're carrying it up that winding path passed flying monkeys, and little people and big oafs as Dad used to say. Before he cut the ties. Jimmy would listen captivated. Growing into his own understanding. You think you know the non-contents. I mean it's like there's this hole in your heart, or your head, or in your pride or something.

And you're asking for it back. Groveling from behind the curtain, to the unknown.

Something tells you it's a potty not a basket. That whatever is missing has to go through you. Be processed. I want Jimmy to walk from that drape. Look if he has to, see it's just a body, decrepit matter.

But walk away, and leave the basket.

Alternate truth.