Morgan Moonscar by Tom Snarsky

Morgan Moonscar
Tom Snarsky

“…he is mostly skin and bones, his clothes are tattered and his rapier is rusty in
​numerous places.”

                                          —Villains Wiki

The tyranny of beauty continues
to disappoint because beauty isn’t
justice. Sometimes it isn’t even
beauty, in which case we call it fear.

The window of time between now
and universal heat death is enough
for one real apology, so we’d better
make it a good one—maybe
​
the kind that sings or pops out
when you open the card. We are all
just fractions of death, right? So why
is it you’re looking at me like that?

MARGINALIA

1.
I’ve started thinking about apologies the same way I think about time: limited, often squandered, and more meaningful in theory than in practice. The idea that we only get one real one in the entire arc of the universe—just a single shot at saying I’m sorry and meaning it—feels both absurd and honest in the same breath.

2.
The more I’m aware of being seen, the less real I feel in my own body, as if I’m just a badly drawn version of myself, all bones and rust. I know I have to unlearn this.

3.
It’s a strange kind of comfort to know that the universe is ending, slowly and indifferently.

4.
We are fractions of death, yes, but maybe that also means we get to decide how we hold the fraction that is still alive.