The Cries of Laocoön

There stood the statue of Laocoön; serpents wrapped around his body; serpents wrapped around the necks of his two young sons. His face, bearded with agony, and betrayal, and the torture of preventable horror; his mouth, agape, relentlessly mourning since the fall of Troy.

“Whatever it is,” he had warned, “I fear the Argives, even those bearing gifts.” But a treacherous horse was welcomed into the city despite his cries, and by sundown, all he had loved had atoned for the mistakes of others with their blood.

And beneath the statue, millennia after Athena took her revenge, lay the chalk outlines of two small boys. And another father grieves; not dressed in the vestiges of an Apollonian priest, but in the humble blues of an evening security guard.

“I told my supervisor I didn’t recognize those guys. They wasn’t the normal cleaners. But he don’t listen,” the father said, “he don’t listen.”

Detective Lorenzo laid a hand on the man’s shoulder. He knew the eyes of a criminal—of an inside man—and these were the tears of senseless loss.

“My wife leaves the boys with me some nights—when she go to work. Only for an hour. I put them to bed on my break. Why couldn’t he just listen?”

Shattered glass sprinkled the museum floor. A bust of Minerva smiled down on them, naked without her incandescent necklace of lapis lazuli and pearl, but smiling all the same.

Relishing in the cruel fate of the gods. 

Taunting another broken man.