It's Still Life

Mum was full of “shhhhh’s” and “quiet you” but my sister and I had a blind spot for him. This distant, and long dead relative that my uncle said was a foul against our blood. Billy was his name. A wind-grazed face, rocky as a landscape. Dusty as death. Those eyes dark and set too deep, as if they swam about in an emptying skull. Thin-lipped. The mouth’s all wrong; an artist would never draw a mouth like that. An artist with a kind a heart wouldn’t. And there’s nothing mysterious about his face, a shade timid and silly, perhaps. A misshapen hat that smells sweaty. Greasy, I suppose, and it keeps his ears folded down, makes his ears look larger than an artist would think flattering. I wonder who wept for him when he died. Shot in the head, that’s what I’ve read. And did faith breathe his last…