All Images, Text & All related characters © Geovanni Flores
‘A Man is Born’ & ‘Theory of a Sunset’ © George Panayotou
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A Man is Born
He looked down from that hill at the sea of faces and it struck him. Not all of them were sad to see him leave. Some were of course, for they knew they would not see his face for a long time, but others didn’t see this as such a great tragedy.
Naturally, for to them he was never really there so there would be nothing to miss except the possible nuisance he may have caused them because he was so ‘different’. He may as well have been dead, though nobody likes a tap on the shoulder every once in a while from a dead man. His leaving was consolation, (if not, at least in a symbolic sense), that meant peace and restoration of some type of order once again. But, to those friends, there would never be an acknowledgment of that order ever again, for in their hearts his face would burn and tint everything with a sentimental glow; sad in a sense but warm.
It was then that he feared he would only be a memory to his friends, not the resonance of a warm hand on the flesh, but a memory without context, like a true love talked about reminiscently while drunk in the company of whores. Who was HE though, to care what other people thought? [The sinking fear in his stomach subsided and the bat wings withdrew from his eyes]—he was comforted by this thought and picked up his resolve, in spite of the critical jeering that seemed to peck at his forehead. He knew either way that he had to go and do just as everybody else had done in history, undertake the journey that would change him; the brat-punk loudmouth that had all the answers would finally have to go and see if those answers were all true… “All kinds of boys become all kinds of men,” he thought. The sun glittered to him, and he knew as he turned towards it; that the first of his doubts would be proved wrong.
Theory of a Sunset
“The two felines sat silhouetted on the grassy hill. Azure and Daisy; the wind brushing back those familiar tufts on Azure’s ears. Daisy smiled to herself and, filled with the joy of what was to come, said ‘I love you, Azure’. Azure smiled a magnificent response in that orange curtain-call of day.” Keyne wrote the last line down furiously, the pride and emotion welling up inside his chest bursting like a dam as he leapt from his desk and sauntered to and fro in maniacal elation. Each breath drawing in fresh new energy into his body as he whirled about the quiet room like a freed slave who regains the world and thanks God with his every cell. The autumn streets beckoned him outside—he had worked all through the night like a troll crafting the finest strain of pearls and gold only to look out and see trees as if he had never seen a tree before in his life.
Keyne cast his gaze on the manuscript piled neatly in the centre of his desk. His ‘Oak Throne’ he called it, fancying it as the anvil on which all of his stories were hammered out until they were ‘hot’ as the New Yorkers like to say. Manhattan was just outside his window too and Keyne stood there breathing easily as if there were no space at all between him and the manuscript—the flow of images, the reality was there, it was him, it was that stack. IT was the stack. Manhattan in the palm of your hand.
Hurriedly, he stuffed the stack in his leather satchel-bag, a relic he still carried from his university days, that to him bore the weight of many years of toil through his imaginative life, his life of words and ideas. In fact, he believed that each book from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot to Where the Wild Things Are, had left its magical imprint of knowledge in the very grains of leather and threads that held it together. After all, something had to be holding this damn thing together after all he had put it through…
Suddenly, something tugged at his chest, his heart sunk and that black memory returned. He kept walking normally, his legs at their same determined pace; walking towards his publisher’s office, while thinking how years of experience from living in a big city had taught him how to lie with his body language to avoid the embarrassment of being seen crying in public like a ridiculous heap racked with sobs while others looked on nervously or not at all. She was in all his stories, and he couldn’t help it. How can you help a thought?
Thoughts just happen don’t they? His eyes flitted to the trees, his face was set; but had you been the sky he was pretending to look at, you would have seen the pain dancing in and possessing his eyes, “Baby Blues” his mother would call them; funny how mothers are right without even knowing it sometimes. His mother would have liked HER, if he could grant her 5 more years of life, like he could with his pen in his stories… his mother would have liked her. Keyne clutched the leather satchel-bag so tightly that he felt one of the stitches snap adding yet another potential fray to the pattern that existed all over his bag. “Come on regain composure, Keyne” he thought, but he knew he was a murderer.
There and then he stopped. The fall street seemed to grow silent and he was that little boy again with the ‘baby-blues’. He had wasted his time.
“You’re a liar”
“People are dying”
“Go ahead and write about cats, you fucking lowlife”
“I can’t get a bowl to eat”
“The government is ripping me off”
“Celebrities are screwing each other on mattresses of Benjamin Franklins”
“Rapes and fires and snaggle-toothed liars”
“No, you really ARE a murderer”
She looked into those baby blues. Sometimes with the look that always melted them. She lied into those eyes too—with the same melting look. Her expressions had ways of finding their way back to him eventually, like a cat coming home.
Suddenly, it seized him. The urge to fling the manuscript into the street and hop onto a plane for Africa; where he would embrace all of the children of a poor, famished village. Gathering them all into his arms to stare into their upturned and grateful faces, telling them how sorry he was in forgetting about them and that if they died, then he would die with them. He yearned for those shiny black eyes sadly perched atop the jaundiced orbs set into their gaunt little faces. He would tell them the story of Azure and Daisy, two cats that could talk, who survived the mean streets of the Big City to learn about loving nature and each other and to realize that they are part of a big world and how important it was to do the best we can no matter how big things get, because, we are always the same size. Keyne was reminded of a story of a man that was captured by police and claimed that he was a super-hero crime fighter called ‘Fayth’ and that they were hindering his work for the Lord by detaining him. The article in the New York Times told of how the police laughed and asked him why then didn’t he just break out of his handcuffs and fly away or better yet, get the Lord to do it.
He said he was a pacifist when it came to other law-enforcement organizations and that they were on the same side so it would be working against what he believed in anyway. The officers were intrigued by the confidence in this man’s beliefs and at the end of a discussion that lasted many hours, ended up having all of the officers turn into ‘Christian-believers’, turning in their badges, not before letting their captive go. The Times also mused that crime had indeed significantly dropped after what the Mayor called a ‘fiasco’ and ‘anomalous glitch in the system’. Keyne stuttered a laugh and his heart eased up a little. He looked down at his leather-satchel bag, with its fraying and bursting stitches; the bottom crumpled in one place from his grip, but he could see the distinct edge of the block of papers of the story of Azure and Daisy almost as if he was looking right through the brown leather. Keyne held the bag to his chest still looking through the leather, through the pages, through the concrete, through New York, through space, until he came to the grassy hill where Azure and Daisy stood reverently watching the sun set in a golden-orange fire that licked the blades of the slope and silhouetted the city so that it seemed that the slope of the huge hill was cupping the city in its palm while the hot eye of the sun scrutinized the dark shapes while moving slowly downward.
The breeze was slight and warm. Daisy, with her neck slightly bowed looked up at Azure, his yellow eyes staring calmly ahead; his magnificent mane of dark hair wreathed his neck like auburn fire. Keyne stood with them, knowing that there was no difference between him and his cats, the city, that man Fayth, the glowing sun and the newest children of Africa. He held it all in his hand then and knew the next thing that followed would be a conversation with his publisher that would go something like this:
“I have this manuscript for you here, but before I give it to you I have one question.”
“What’s that?”
“What languages do they speak in Africa?”
“Many, I think. Why?”
