Stillness
397 Words
Chancho awoke at the same place in the nightmare as always, with the same feeling choking him from his sleep. It should have been me.
He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and listened to the gentle sounds of early morning. He did not often choose to rise early, but when it was thrust upon him he took it as a sign—a signal from heaven to listen. Why, he wondered, had he never liked to listen? Ah Puch’s words rattled in his head. Is it because I have no sense of time? True revolutionaries like Maximilian Robespierre, George Washington, even Jesus the Christ understood the importance of timing. He shook his head. No, I am not a revolutionary anymore.
He stretched and reflected on the two years since leaving the revolution. The standoff with the rinche had been the first time he’d held a g*n during that time. He had hoped the void left by violence would fill with understanding. So far, it hadn’t. He scooted his boots out of the way. Without wasting time on clothing, he grabbed a Bible given to him by his adopted grandmother and climbed out of his wagon into the embrace of all the earth.
The stars had gone—the eastern horizon yet to blush with the colors of morning. He moved carefully in his bare feet around cacti and thorns until he reached a rock outcropping perched on the bluff. He skirted the edge, located the best way up, and scrambled to the top. He eased his bare buttocks onto the cool sandstone and crossed his legs as he sat.
In the startling stillness, he wondered if his own breathing might be the beginning of a vicious wind across the globe. He rested the Bible in his lap, opening it to his favorite book of Ecclesiastes. Too dark to read, he located the book by the worn feel of the gilded pages and left the text open in his lap. He only needed to breath the same air as the words—words he had memorized. He stared into the muted tones of the horizon, rubbed his earlobe, and did his best to listen. To listen to anything and everything that might fall down to him from the heavens or rise up to him from the earth.
No matter how quiet he got, he never found an answer to why he’d been spared, and his best friend taken.
- Writer
