The Man in the Back of Your Brain / Ian Goodale
The lullaby was sacred in the house of the Cherepoviches: the ultimate art to encapsulate the joys and frustrations of the earth into a compact expression of simple song. One tune in particular, though, bore special importance within their home, its jaunty rhythms and unrhymed couplets singing the edges of holy tradition and hinting at another realm of singsong expression.
The first two lines were burned in the soft tissue of their brains, the prayer-like lyrics etched with dark charcoal into the interior of their skulls. Their words spilled like lingual fluid from the brandished gapes of their singing mouths, tongues wrung by the outpoured blood of the oddly lilting melody:
Beware of the man in the back of your brain,
His eyes like fire, his lips like steel
This simple declaration was repeated both morning and night within the family’s domicile, parents and children reciting the limpid duo of lines and smiling—eyes meeting in nervous understanding—as their tongues clucked away like headless hens. They believed that the song was a remnant of a primordial past long since forgotten, but which was worthy of a reverence almost akin to worship in its habitual intensity; they chirped the mysterious harmonies like parakeets united in an instinctive, cult-like praise, their beaks burning with the fires of the divine.
The details of the Cherepoviches’ beliefs remained occulted even to the closest of their friends, but the general fascination they held with this eldest of hymns was clearly central to their worldview; they would sometimes speak, in passing, of the old gentlemen who had taken up residence in the anterior portion of their cerebellums, and one of the children even mentioned, with eyes aghast and glowing, that he had seen, in the middle of the night, the hand of the little man reach out across his retina and tug mischievously at his iris, sending his eye fluttering into a torrent of tears that sputtered and sank like wingless butterflies down his cheek. They steadfastly refused to perform the song in public, and a full copy of the text was only made available after their house was destroyed, along with their bodies, in an unfortunate fire thought to have originated from a candle set up to aid in an all-night vigil of lullaby-laced psalmory.
The paper of the mystical text is a quagmire of time and authorship: apparently impossible to accurately date, its predicted era of creation has varied widely across successive trials and examinations in various laboratories and universities; no match for a document of similar make has been located in any archive, and its handwriting seems almost to shift, barely perceptibly, with each successive reading.
The last two lines of the lullaby are the same as the first, a last exhortation towards understanding, towards a new life lived in sympathetic harmony with the song’s indecipherable meaning. The man mentioned therein has not been sighted since the death of his elegy’s reclusive protectors, despite all efforts to conjure him into being. There is a legend that he was buried along with the family who safeguarded his song for so long, and that he is still underground, living quietly behind a decomposing eyelid that was miraculously spared from the flames, biding his time for when he will once again birth his music upon the earth.
Ian Goodale's work has appeared in Web Conjunctions, Drunken Boat, Maudlin House, and The Gravity of the Thing, in addition to other journals. He works as an academic librarian in Austin, TX, where he lives with his wife and children. His website can be found at www.iangoodale.com.
