The Sands
They walked through the sands of time, the deserts of despair and loss and wonder. Dunes rolled on and on like the most evil ocean they had ever seen, and its ultimate cruelty was that they could not drown. Night had fallen and with it came some relief from the sweltering sun that had for so long burned them. For now, it was cold…for now.
They rubbed their sun-burned backs and arms, reminded of the moments before when the pain was but current. Then it was not so bad as now, for they could not feel anything. Now all they could was feel. No life was anywhere, nothing but more sand that they called Time…just to give a meaning to something that they did not understand. They were only trying to give themselves reason. Some reason for wandering out here, all alone.
It was not the sands of time. These were not the deserts that may fill the wastelands of Hell or purgatory. These were just pieces of the Earth, and they too.
“God damn all this. Why am I here? Hm? What did I ever do in this life to make me deserve this. I’m burned, I’m broken, and I used to be so God damn strong. So God damn strong. I held people on my shoulders for days on end, held them all up with my arms and now look at me! Look at me! It has bent me! It has bent me without even changing my shape. You see the muscles…you see the sweat and the strength and my legs like iron….and I still can hardly breathe and I hang droopily as we walk. Just like all the rest of you. It has broken me without even changing my shape!”
“But what is it? ”
“Who the hell knows. God damn it all. As if I knew. I never tried to think about such things. It’s the sun and the desert and the loneliness and the anger and the pain…that’s what has done it.”
“But what has caused it?”
“Caused it? It is the cause!”
“You think so?”
The big man placed his thick arms on his side and stared up at the strange pale ghost of a wanderer who stood at the crest of an Eastern hill. They had walked forever and he had been silent. They had all been silent….nothing to say. Now the man spoke, and what he said made no sense.
“What the hell do you mean? Of course! What else is there that did this to us? Huh?” He mopped the sweat from his thick black hair and brushed the dirt from his green eyes.
“God.” A third man stepped forward, young and bright looking, his black hair cropped very short, almost completely away. His green eyes glowed as he seemed almost to be the bigger man’s brother. Whether he was or not no one but he and the man knew. “We are but his servants….humble or angered, sad or gay, we are all his creatures and this is our punishment.”
“God damn it…for what?”
“We sometimes are not told. But everytime we are punished, there is a lesson to be learned and that is the only way we can know why we are here and why we suffer so. It is God and He has his plan.”
“Fuck that.”
“It is true. You cannot deny it. That sun is his eye and it sets so that we may feel the pain that he has burned in us…yet we do not feel it when it burns us, though we can see it then. Does this not make sense to you? It does not make sense to me. Therefore I believe that it can only be a divine circumstance that things are so.” “Well you’re a fucking fool.”
“Hm,” said the ghost man upon the hill.
Another stepped from the crowd, his form bent over, clinging tightly to a gnarled stick that looked as though it had been charred all the way through and every last drop of water that could have been in it had dried up into nothing. He stared up at the men, wisps of dark hair upon his head as his eyes squinted so they could not see their color. “Ain’t no such thing as all that. It is us who has brought us here. It is us that will take us from here, if we are to be brought out alive. There is no Fate, there is no all knowing. Only us. We must guide our own pathes and make our own way through things.”
“You talk wisely, as if you were old enough to understand, but you’ve got no god damn clue, either.”
“God is the truth.”
“We are the truth, my boy. How old I am does not matter, how old I was when I made mistakes does not matter. All I know is what I’ve seen and done, and there are times when we fall because we cannot hold ourselves up.”
“You can’t hold your own fuckin self up, so what do you think you’re talking about?”
“Ain’t about that, my boy. Ain’t about real things and literal meanings. It’s about who we are. It’s about what we are. It is who and what we are that determines whether we pass out of this forever land alive.”
“Sun’s gone and made you all crazy.”
“Really? Then what do you think the point is?”
“There is no point.” At last the ghost man had spoke again. He turned back to the others and surveyed them, watching them with cold green eyes, a colder green than anyone had seen, though it was not the color but the way they seemed to be. He stared right through the three as the starlight rained down upon them and they could almost see a universe within his eyes. This was no miracle either, just an interesting play of starlight and position.