The mark of Cain

The mark of Cain

Genesis 4:1-16

For my Dad who carries the mark.

The sweat blinds my eyes,

I must watch.

The sun pins me down,

I cannot move.

My brothers toil in the dust,

cursing the earth as they dig.

Across the dirty road a row of houses

kneel silently, waiting.

A door opens and a shadow spills out into the light.

As she moves a boy and his father follow,

almost hidden in her oily black shadow.

Their dark, doll-like eyes stare past me,

through me

to my brothers working in the field.

The workers stop and look over,

resting.

The dark trio stop,

looking.

I stand,

watching.

The smooth, oily barrel of a gun rises from the man’s shadow,

a black snake pointing towards my brothers.

As the shotgun levels I am crouching,

weapon ready.

He falls as my bullet punches his chest.

Now there is screaming and I am turning.

The boy is also armed and yells at me as he shoots from the hip.

For a second time my weapon fires, a body falls.

The tears blind my eyes,

I must watch.

The sun pins me down,

I cannot move.

My brothers pull me away,

I am driven from the ground,

driven from the ground which opened its mouth

to receive my brother’s blood

from my hand.

Hitchhiking with Peter Sutcliffe

When I was about 5 I went for a walk with a friend. We went beyond the fence at the back of the park and up the hill to the tower. The tower was an old folly I think, goodness knows who built it because it overlooked Glenrothes, Leslie and Kinglassie, none of which are exactly what you might call pretty. We were walking up the hill from Kinglassie where I lived on Main street.
The tower was a let down, no ghosts or dead bodies as we were told we would find, only an empty husk of a building with no obvious reason for ever being. Bored, we walked along the ridge of the hill towards Glenrothes and there, like a couple of special forces observers, seal crawled to a position which allowed us to look down onto an airport. Rather than walk back the way we had come, we wandered down the hill to the main road and started walking home. It was here we were offered a lift.
Before I knew it I was back home and having to deal with the angry relief of my mum. it was clear she was upset and fretful so being a good boy who likes to make his mum happy I needed to come up with a way of easing her stress. The idea came into my head, as I ate my tomato soup, to suggest to my mum that we knew the guy in the car, he was a friend of my friend's dad. Simple. "What's his name?" asked my mum, "A dinna ken" I replyed between slurps. "Where diz he live?" she said. "A dinna ken". "Well wit diz he look like?" she pleaded. "A bit like him" I mumbled, thrusting my spoon at the TV. My mum stood horrified as she looked towards the TV and saw an picture of the Yorkshire ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, staring at us from the box in the corner of the living room.