How lovely that youhave painted a mask for me
featuring all your favorite
monsters and boogymen,
the ones from the bedtime stories
you grew up on.
told by the frightened madmen of your youth,
to frighten you into submission,
the ones you are so certain
are not you, but the other….
me.
Your imagination is so exquisite
that my mask needs no cloth,
your old slide projector will do, so realistic,
that all the fearsome tales seem to
dance in full technicolor across my forehead.
The demonic red glare
reflecting from my eyeballs
cropped from ancient images
of heathen demons
and better dead than red,
with all that Christian blood
dripping from their fangs,
the source of all your suffering for sure,
so perfectly projected upon my face
and in such incredible detail
that you can no longer distinguish
the deep fake from what’s real.
So then,
because all things need an opposite,
I must also paint a mask on you
with all the colors of my own fears
and all that terrifies me,
because as we both know,
hate must be met with hate,
and vicious violence with vicious violence,
and a tooth for a tooth
for it is written
and has been posted on the internet,
so it must be true.
So now I see you
dressed in jack boots
with a swastika arm band
wearing a white hood
and waving a noose,.
so real I have totally forgotten
that you are you,
my brother and my sister and my friend
and I can no longer recognize you.
And now I find myself
standing before
the screen showing of my life,
in my dragon costume
with all my dragon scales
glistening in the eerie light,
and flames billowing
from my terrible gaping maw,
hoping to defeat the one
that I see coming at me
charging up the Capitol steps
on your white steed
with banners flying
and your holy blade of righteousness
waving high above your head
to save the day.
and it’s all caught on cell phone video!
So real! So real!
until the slide projector crashes to the floor
and bulb goes out
and there I am,
standing in front of you,
with your blade arching towards my throat,
no longer the beast,
no longer a dragon,
but an ordinary person,
yourself. myself, the one you love
wearing a silly mask,
only asking
if you would like to go outside
and play together in the street,
playing pretend,
until we each become
the thing we fear most.
russellrosandershortstoriesandpoetry 