For where there is one of me, always there will be another. Either at the next stanchion or post, or following soon after, while I lay dropped and drooling over my existence, in the dark grip of a dizzying blue gas, or cold-cocked by the weak-jawed clear-browed hero of sensitivity.

For while not always strong, we are the silent type. Born we are for epaulets and chin straps and monochrome jumpers, for frayed tunics and rusty chain mail, for bulky suits bulging with implication and lead-pumping danger, for the ability to rush headlong into an order, carrying it out with feckless determination, knowing well the disposability of our movements, our trigger fingers (ever itchy), the very things we see.

For what we see is always first, and never fully known. We are told later, in rooms before scrolls or beside slide projectors, over tables dusted in cocaine and dirt, how to distrust our very eyes, how little we truly understand. How even the child that comes to us is never what it seems.

For our uniforms never truly fit, capacious, sized to fit all who may strike us down and then require those uniforms for skulking unnoticed about the mountain lair, the inner sanctum, the palace halls.

For a fist is our currency.

For once I thought of a girl, my recollection of her smooth in the predictable parts, the taste of a faint moustache above her lip, how she would shudder when my tongue swept over the hairs, how she told me her nose would tingle and she would nearly sneeze, arching her neck away from me, a short giggle, a turn of her head. Days can dwell on that single image as I look to move as little as I can.

For an axe in the hand burdens and grows heavier with the minutes marching, dithering their way through a day.

For we endure the parody of inspection—how once a month or week or fortnight they come and stand before us and assess the angle of our weapons, the cut of our capacious shirts, the degrees of impassiveness in our thrust chins, the anonymity of our foreheads. The solitude of what, beyond their sight, must be the rest of our lives.

For I can listen with every part of me. My arm thrums like the tympanic membrane. You and your heroes have no sense of what I can hear.

For if among you ever there is a child—

For how we are ready to do bidding, to enter furious battle with all manner of sidekickery, ready to threaten and deliver somber word, to please, to bare our teeth to the bullet we dive toward, to take with grit the beating, to tear our capacious shirts to ribbons of bandage.

For we once were those who cared for the horse, and now we die astride one or, worse, at the feet of one oncoming, or by the coward behind the window of a passing car, or by the sweeping fire and clouds of gas that will arrive in the rooms, through the very doors at which we stand.

For once, I knew a home, a chair that rocked, matted but soft carpet, a dingy gas fireplace, a radio, a tall glass of ice, a book or two, a remote with the words thumb-rubbed away. A dog lived there, birds at the window sometimes, a scabbed lawn mown in the limbo of a Saturday, when the sun still made things grow, when the paint faded and the sidewalk cracked but the roof held. In the chair, the tall glass, the rain against the window, soft as a lie. Or I knew a cottage and the warmth of thatch, or the pleasure of women in a room dark with squalor but warmer and drier than the street. I knew a castle room with crusts a–plenty and flagons unflaggingly full.

For we who stand at the openings between worlds know two sides of every reality. We who can peer back toward the voice in the darkness, or look to the bright street, the jaunty walk of the passers-by, the rest of the world passing without care.

For if ever a child arrives at the threshold under my foot, for if ever a child—let the blade of the glaive raise, the action smooth to quiet in the gun barrel, the eyes of the child avert and bow the crown of a head to where light obeys its maker and etches a halo in the sheen of the hair.

For I once knew God did things just for me, that in the supreme eye I held my own spot, a place I could rest, an arm I could trust.

For in the dry thick sound of fists landing we hear commerce. For in the metallic hiss of a drawn sword we know diplomacy. For in the engineered slide of a pistol action we know the order of a great chain of being. We are the original transactioneers, the ur-middle men, the über sales force.

For we are the men who held the nails, who held down the man with the temerity to declare himself a deity, who nailed him where he lay. We are also those who made a man a god: someone moved the stone of the cave so he might emerge without help. We kept watch on the lotus tree, know the only door into the monolith at the center of the continents. Only he who has no need of others knows power.

For once we held a child, wet, hungry, cold. For once that child clung to our capacious shirts or in the folds of our coats, and in the shadowed alleys, the ticking fields, we fled from the river, from the stoop, and fed the child of our own reserves, cleaned its face and changed its soiled clothes. Then did we know power.

– Gabriel Welsch

Author’s Note: “Song of the Henchmen, the Expendable Holders of Weapons” came from a riff I wrote offhandedly one morning. I’ve always wondered about the expendables, the grunts, the foot soldiers, the people doing the dirty work, about whatever complexity they possess. I know the writing turned into something else when I got to “How even the child that comes to us is never what it seems . . . ” and a backstory started to emerge. It was a collective backstory—specific enough to be one but in the context of all the other details it becomes the kind of private story (fable, almost) that could have been all of the different henchmen’s stories. So I worked on its shape.