Fight

CW: Mention of self-inflicted injury

He would wait for the gray light to set upon the west of the dark valley and crouched inside the wet divot. On his bony, thin hand were wooden lines of a withered set of two right-angled bars. Although the palms were scared, they held on to the bark like a soulful parade of dancing drummers did their sticks back in the days of evergreen. The evergreen was for forever, the wise scholars said long ago.

As the afternoon breeze hailed dust from above the high ground of the hole and blew across the sunless sky, his puckered lip shook to the dry canyons down below. “Are you there, God? It’s me…” Tired. He scraped the soot from the roof of his mouth with his tongue and gulped the scavenged saliva down his throat with a croaking wheeze. It tasted of nothing but dying glands and sharp dirt and thick mucus. The wind picked up around him, and it made him forget about what he had done to his mouth. So he slowly closed his dark eyelids and continued his thoughts and then slept for a time. His mind was not his world. Across the vast lands of blackness and tyrannical endlessness, a meek vein of white light struck the grand canvas display of a secular biometry, and his sin screamed like a whale’s sharp cry in the deep.

When he woke later, he could not see. It must have been a few minutes since the prayer; nay, a few hours. When the faint landlights waned and dispersed it could no longer be bright upon the world and was blacker than black could inhabit. He sighed, licking the floor of his mouth with a gulp and then a grimace, because he noticed the taste was more pungent than the latter roof he had consumed, and closed his eyes again. The view was the same.

Gray. He groaned awake in the divot and moved his arms and thighs as best he could. Colder than usual. The dull orange blanket had swayed with the wind to his lower side, not covering him well. It explained his shiver. He took the blanket in his free hand and tightened the knot around his bare neck for warmth and shook his muscles around to get the veins pumping. He rolled to his left side for a moment before setting up slowly and grabbing his cross in the dirt and blowing on his cupped hands for carbon heat. Then he stood and crawled out of the divot. He grasped the falling rubble of wrinkled stones and rasped his lips. “Oh, God? It is I, your humble servant. I pray for a good day. Please, lord. I pray that you strengthen me this day, lord. That you give me what I need and deserve. Let your will be done, lord. Our Father, Who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come. Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.” Just after this, he reached the high ground from the divot and was out limping past the dead plane towards the tree line. He cradled his belly in his arm. It growled.

Fifteen minutes after he reached the forest he met the filth at the pond. He carried the worn leather satchel of scattered belongings in his left hand and his injured lower gut carefully with his right. He set the bag down and removed the knotted blanket from his back to crouch and thirst without getting wet. He drank the water slowly to see if it was clean of bacteria from the southwest and southeast corners, which oozed with bubbles. It was good. He thirsted well. When he was finished, he sat up and cracked his back. He grabbed the satchel from the ground and took the blanket in his hand and re-knotted it to his neck and groaned from the sudden calf cramp. Minutes later he groaned and sauntered farther into the woods. He was extra careful with his gut when he moved. An hour’s stretch of three miles in forest view before he reached the forest end and the start of the open space where the ash-laden street was.

Looking around, he saw only coiled roadside wires connected to broken concrete buildings and soot-stained walls with weakened window panes. He walked down the crest of the hill toward the road where the shop was on the side court. His stomach mumbled a strange hymn. He took the shop’s doorknob with his two forefingers and let the door open with a creak. Inside, the shelves of stocked cans and boxes were nearly spent. The reserves would last another week at most, if not a jumble of days and nights. He sighed and walked through the door with a limp. He took a brown can from one of the shelves and tried to find the small label engraved on the metal top, but there were no words to be read. He sighed again before taking his steel church key and prying at the lid with more effort than he thought he’d need. It opened with a clinking noise after a struggle and he looked inside to see what it was. Green beans.

The last time there was color was when there was sun. The sun was bright and hot in the sky. It shone upon the land like a light, which was as a star. It was colorful then. When the ridges of the valley forged the box of the shimmering green patches and holy grounds, the word was good. His mother told stories of the lands of the Lord Above, where his forefathers and foremothers waited well. And he liked those stories because they made him want to live to see it one day. But once the showers of falsehood came, and the ramparts of pride fell to the burning rays of benediction, those stories felt closer to fables, and the fables felt closer to myth. The day the color died was the day that felt the brightest.

He was tired all of a sudden. He looked back at the shop, now in the near distance by the uphill street corner, and there was a growing unease in his chest. He carefully took another step forward and the unease turned into pain. He felt the sharpness across his muscles and tendons and veins twist like a latch. He moaned and slouched to the ground and then hacked something into his shirt. Ever since he was a child and became an adult, he could only ever see three things. Black, gray, and red. Now, he sees that third and final color, splotchy and threatening across his clothes like the firm wave of a paintbrush.

“God… Why can’t you hear my prayer?”

He coughed again and pulled tight on his chest with his left hand and clenched the cross in his right. He clenched the cross so hard that it began to splinter. The wood drove into his skin, and more blood came out. He groaned in frustration.

“Good lord. Why is everything so dark. Answer me, goddamn it.”

There was silence in his mind. In the distance, the valley of white would soon seal across the world and all would be dark again for night. He couldn’t see and think and turn his head around and sit up and walk and be alive and he groaned once more because he knew it. Somewhere and somehow and somewhen and someone said something back to him. But he couldn’t hear it.

“What is it?”

Silence. Silence in his mind. Silence in the wind. Silence in the world around him. And once again, there was someone who was there that said something and he could not hear it because of what was in the front of his mind. And so he focused. He closed his eyes. He centered his thoughts on his senses. He cleared the fog of reason. He waited. The pain was fierce and threatening in his gut, but still he focused on the darkness of his sight, the prayer enveloping his head.

When all he could do was breathe and listen, he understood Him. He didn't try to think. He let the Word be his soul.

When he was gone, he opened his eyes. And he could see. He could see the light around him. In the sky there was blue and in the wind there was the earthly dirt of brown and in the ground was a small, sprouting green enigma that smelled of old time he thought never was. His flesh was of a happy child. His wounds were healed anew. A long fight, which grew from doubt, a tear, and a forgotten path; all laid waste to a smile, and the colorful grin of the Lord.

The gray light of the dark valley was gone. It was never there.