Lament and Prayer: My Brothers Killed For a Dead Empire

by: E.M. Burlingame

At this bar, fit in a track and pull out cabinet built for the purpose in my Rover, out in the mud of the midlands of my memories, where ghosts clink living like half-empty bottles, I remember my brothers, James and Brian. Royally fucked by life, by obligation and duty they weren't prepared for, same as the rest of us. Primed and conditioned for a world ended before they were born. Only no one knew it till today. A world was old and dead, yet which dragged them down with it, ended our mother living, leaving me alone to sift through a mountain of centuries old shit responsibilities.

James: The Trust Fund That Crashed - James got a fat stack of cash and assets when the old Lady Vera who adopted him at birth kicked it. Great Grandfather's love, his daughter's age, the one he'd found late in life. A proper and kind lady, with a heart my grandmother lacked. But James, he had a face like a smashed statue, soul impenetrable as a deep sea shark, all of it wrapped in our dusty bloodlines like a once high fashion only now but a threadbare thrift-store coat. He was just a kid, early twenties, didn’t know shit, big fan of Kiss, thought he could be an actual bloodborne prince with all that dough. Threw parties wilder than a Victorian orgy on a bender—coke, booze, broads and world famous assholes snorting lines off oblivion’s ass. Money poured out like piss in a gutter, without an ounce of love or connection to find. Drugs sang him to sleep, and he didn’t wake up. They found him at twenty-four, needle in his arm, stiff as a board. Another powerless trust-fund corpse for the ancient vultures to pick clean.

Brian: The Little Brawler Who Broke - Brian, my little shadow, dark of hair and heart, started soft and ended hard. We had it comfortable till Mum’s fancy blood that hated the good turned her life to the lowest levels of Dante's hell. That house of her mother's, ate her alive upon her father's untimely and yet unexplained early death. While I, just a wee blond haired and blue eyed lad, I tried to hold it together for us two boys, despite early on Brian said fuck this, fuck that, fuck you! He threw punches before he could shave, hooked on speed and rotgut by eleven, already punching cops way above his weight. Dropping burning bullets at my feet just to hear the bang, maybe, just maybe, one might get me. At seventeen, they tossed him in a cage, isolation, maximum security, broke him down to nothing. Maybe obligations he couldn't live up to had done the doing long before. Don't matter the distinction. He got out with dead eyes, owing demons more than they'd patience for. Wanted to go straight, but the Devil's Lot don’t let go. Took a bullet to the skull before he could buy a beer legal, bled out in the dirt. Just a little more food fed to the worms and the world's avarice for fallen nobles.

The Weight of It All - Their ghosts, my only biological brothers, stick around like a bad stink, heavy as hell, pulling me through this shit-stained life every damn day. A weight I'll never put down. What could I do? I was a kid too, choking on the same filth, the same obligations, more, trying to raise Brian as I grew myself, body too weak and ignorant to do more than survive. Shit, I was trying hard to stay alive myself, selfish as that is. Crazy mother trying to take my life, while at the same time praising her "brilliant" and only balanced son. That family curse, ours—old as the Normans, heavy as guilt—strangled us all, mother and sons alike, before we could walk. The weight of it all, came with the power to do nothing, it'd broken ours for a few centuries. Grew me up quick, though, tore the pretty stories out of my head, early on, left me raw and unfettered. I've always known, life’s no fairy tale—it’s a fist smashing your face in a dark night, taking everything you’ve got. It's young Bruce Wayne having it all and losing it in a gutter of an alley, smelling of piss and vomit and who knows what decay, as his family and their legacy is ripped from him by a shooter.

The Old World’s Done - The illusions of Mum’s fancy days died in the span of her life—velvet thrones and iron crowns turned to ash while she watched. No chance of recovery. No big-shot uber elite schools, no indulgences and fancy events in crumbling palaces could save it. Nobility? Bullshit. Now it’s just greedy little pricks with calculators, stomping over the bones. Weak arrogant fucks afraid of their own security. And rightfully so. My brothers got burned up in that mess, their blood scribbling the end. Mum’s mind cracked like a stick, as her kind were erased though not removed. The world don’t care—it just shits on the rubble, never mind it were our houses stood between them and slavery. She was taught to hate her class, while never being able to escape it, while never being able to teach her sons to flee. How many just like her have I seen in my life since, in the years since surviving and escaping? In their hollowed shells of lives and castles looking marvelous, but just beneath the surface, barely more than a mud hut of a wreck. Nobles and Royals maintained as kept pets to provide legitimacy to the slavers, the Merchant Princes the people traded us for.

Standing in the Wreckage - So here I am, last one upright, my brother's ghosts breathing failure and obligation down my neck. Carrying the debts of centuries were never mine but that I'll forever seek to pay. Do I drown in this sewer, let it eat what’s left? Let their lives mean fuck all? Or do I claw at the walls, fight like a trapped bastard prince for something that ain’t dead yet? Do I prove the family right, where they failed. I don’t got shit, but I swear—to the old blood, to their screams in the dark—I won’t let them be dishonored. A mere stain on the history of man. Fuck that! Our people and civilization, our families, our houses, mattered, yet matter. I'll not let my brothers memories die, not while I’m still kicking. Fuck it, tomorrow’s coming. Maybe it’s good, probably not. Who really cares anymore but us few remaining. Doesn't fucking matter! My brothers didn't die for nothing. They didn't rob our mother of her sanity for nothing. And if I have to carry the weight of all the dead alone, back five hundred years, I'll carry that weight and you'll not hear much more from me than this. No matter the outcome or cost. Come on Praetorians, you cheap whores, don't believe for a moment, I won't go down swinging!