Crystalline Cool (8)

   
   "Crystalline Cool (8)"
    
   Duncan labored with invisible intensity, lost in the backwoods, using his trusty, war-torn shovel to unearth Terra's terrain for peanuts, knowing his loving and loyal father had sweetly said:  "It's okay if that's all you can do--just do it well, being the best ditch digger in the world."  Roadkill watched alongside him, as well as other souls from the Otherworld; thus, perhaps his labor was not unnoticed or devalued.
   He remembered his matriarch, and how the family would persuade her to dismiss the fantasy of her beliefs, saying stuff like:  "King David is full of shit.  Psalms 103 is crap.  The Virgin Mary is a witch, and Jesus doesn't save."
   Duncan keep digging, regretting their exile, even though they poured their negative possibilities upon his past and today, which is supposed to be the present, a gift from God.  Now it was just Dad, him, and the Golden Retriever.  Yes, he had read Joyce like a madman at one point, hoping they loved him as did Leopold Bloom, identifying with a wandering Jew, perverted by his own imagination as the culture of the world spread disbelief and spoke with the adversary's forked tongue.
   He put his mind into a state of remembrance, his Dad and him always watching old Westerns on their black and white, Dad saying with a smoky smile:  "Every John Wayne movie--the Duke gets shot in the leg."
   Duncan too remembered Day of the Evil Gun, the androgynous-looking cowboy Glenn Ford quoting Christ in the movie, saying:  "Blessed are the merciful, for they too shall obtain mercy."
   What would he do without his father's wisdom?  Then, Roadkill came close, licked him into the present, that gift from God, and Duncan noticed the aches in his back, his blistered hands, and all the rest that went along with his personal creation.  As tired and worn-out as he was, he knelt down, praising:  "Thank you God--thank You for now."