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Rated: 13+ · Short Story · Foreign · #1509231
Tail of a man...
(* needs serious corrections:)


The sign of pain.


It was third sunrise which he faced knelling in meter wide cycle of dirt, which somehow eluded the unstoppable spring growth of  any kind of plants that inhabited wide field on the edge of forest. Strong orange light was again hurting his ayes, but he wouldn’t close them. For that past few days only change he could feel was in the intensity and color of his pain. And change was something that he welcomed marily as a child.
    He was uncertain  in words. They didn’t pictured the world any more, in the same old fashion, on which he was used too… Evan he had someone to talk, hardly he would be able to tell any thing about his thoughts and that strange, poltergeist like, mass off hardly understandable … principals, which was circulating around him. Yes… He was seeing it… being not hollow and faceless… being furious and mild in same time … and unrecognizable to him…. It was something like hurricane, which thundered all over that lonely field, without  waving not even the most delicate stalk of grass. He and that circle of fruitless ground ware in the middle of it, still untouched and unfretted.

He wouldn’t know how it came to bee. That grassless circle,  in which he was kneeling…. Just few days ago, when he walked across that field he didn’t notice it. That although didn’t mean that it was not there… Back then he wouldn’t notice many things off which existence he was aware now.
  Sun was fully reborn in that one, vagueness and  unique moment. The fierily orange light had have turned brighter, until it didn’t reach the foulness of specter. It’s light was strong now and his ayes adopted to it. The pain dwelled from them finding its stronghold somewhere else in his body. He could see around now. Blood on his T-shirt was dry. Wound on his arm stopped bleeding while ago. He looked at it, thinking how deep it could be.
Yet, he was shore that he didn’t felt that powerless just because of that star-like penetration in his skin. No..  He was a strong man. Wounded more than one time in that conflict to which they gave such a serious name right at the start.
In the same manner, he would say, they give the newly born baby’s hard to pronounce und distinctive names. May bee to make them bather reedy for hard times too came.
           He was not reedy. Not even now, after more than two years of fights. He was still telling himself that he always did what he had to do. Such words never gave him any sense of relief. He learned how not to ask himself abut things that happened yesterday… and more important about things that will happen tomorrow. That got him through the days. Many days. Until now.
         He was restrained. Not by any force he could understand or feel but by the strange lack of power which defied his will and any attempt to move. He questioned his sanity even now, but perception of pain was telling him that his brain works regularly. Clarity of thoughts was spooking him, like something unusual for him, and unnatural considering the situation.  His inbred habit to despise any thing that would be given to him without  fight or applied cunnings may have been clouding his judgment. May be…or he yust flattered to him self.
It was a qustion. One. May be a bit stupid concidering situation..  May be.
There was an allusion of a feeling, deep inside him…silent and rock hard. Many questions… Comfort that his body was reqairing or courses and anger of his ego… They didn’t comply with that allusion…  As sun started its journey over sky, he started looking for answers, without questions he could formulate
He startled, the moment he becomed aware that circulation around him decremented. Sun was high at the sky. And for first time, ewerything  of this has started, he could hear crickets and sound of breeze in  the tree branches on the far edge of the field. His perception of dimensions became ordinary un-relative and pain found its way on its bitter side. After a while, he felt ability to stand up and walk again, but he didn’t got to it. Something… maybe no more than unfortunate circumstance, made him to look again in that wound on his hand. The color of dry blood triggered something in his mind.. Something that took place while ago, was now live before his ayes. All of the participant in that event ware dead for decades, except him.
With memory, a kind of itch tickled his still sleepy avernes of an newly found way and something moved in his frozen inside.
It was summer nearly hot as that year. He might had ten years back then. In his short life newer before he  faced suffering and worries until then. Once again he could feel the scraping of hard cloth against the delicate skin on his neck and grasp in his throat, while he was walking aside his grandmother, escorting the remains of his parents to their last residence. Like it was not enough, that all good of which he know on this world, cold and locked in the darkness of wooden coffin, was traveling to its final destination deep in the dirt of nameless cemetery. The slender shadow of his new guardian was rigidly falling upon him.
He should stay focused on that episode. There was a whisper in his head that honored clarity of thoughts and invoked the right way but he didn’t listen to it.
         As the memory of those moments surfaced in his cognition, together with sadness, he felt implacability to perceive every momentum in time, that have inflected trajectory of his life. So he started to evocate more and more memories. Simplicity with which he was doing it, embed nicely with everything that was all reedy going on.
  Pretty son those ancient events over-flooded his considerations. They stoked him in numbers that suffocated the very essence of meditation. He started cracking them like nuts, finding satisfaction any time when awareness of somebody’s else blame accorded for his unsatisfying way of life. What is too biter doesn’t have to be eaten, he heard the hollow words from the past. And soon he lost count and memory.

First  of what he become aware in very moment he lost it was peace. He felt each in his legs  that ware bended under him for last three days. Each son changed over in pain. In that moment he fully understood how words lost their power in that state in which he find himself. Pain he met in last days got uneasy to bear for the first moment. It locked him in his body like in prison and made him even more reckless.

He needed his peace, he needed his pain… his teacher. His ego screamed and crystal bridge over the hollowness almost shattered.
         Moment has passed and he felt something in the mess of his entireness. Something long gone was back. Fear he knew well from the time of his childhood. Where and when he had lost it he couldn’t say. He saw cracks in the transparent essence of that what was holding him not to fall in the dark deepness of what he couldn’t see from here where he was. He became afraid not to fall  there. But it was dark and unknown here although . Where was there difference? And did something what he couldn’t see told him that difference existed. He wouldn’t believe something he couldn’t see…that was rule. Also smart thing to do. Flash and blood you can see. And it can tell you things to believe them or not. And you can look at them doing so. Problem was that now… from here, he couldn’t see much.  The endless field, and the circle of dirt outside and darkness in inside of him. Only fear got to him. Hypocritically, like long gone friend, it offered to him its hand. 
But today unlike any another day he didn’t took it easily, like he used to. And he didn’t turn its back to it neater. He tried to see the face behind the fist, with glum on it. But darkness became ticker living only hand sticking outside of it. So he took bather look of that hand. Fine glove made from some animal skin was covering it. It was elegant  and painted in un obtrusion brown color. Man like. Wide in palm and all square in shape.  But way with which it was offering it self was nothing of a manlike. He waited for first time in his life… wittingly. Time lost any marker in dark of his and also outside, behind his eyelids, where sun reached zenith and stayed there. He looked for something to measure his impatience. To give it tact… something to grove on. But, he couldn’t find any thing. So he tried to listen ticking  of his own hart. But he couldn’t hear none. Silence covered everything in the moment he discovered it. Like the cloud of fine dust, it expanded through dark and  empty look like space. Waved and changed in density, and in the way it traveled through darkness. At first he couldn’t see what it uncovered. Time stopped for him when he lost ways to measure it, and he couldn’t say how much of it have passed till that moment… or between any moment in before and now. But his silence painted the emptiness. Not in colors but in difference of the way. Could there be life without time or time prolonged in another manner. He didn’t look for answer. He waited.  He observed.


Glove and hand in it ware long goon. They have hided themselves in dark, but dark started becoming transparent.  The first silhouettes he saw didn’t look as nothing man like.  They didn’t try to hide themselves like he expected they might. Somehow he knew that same voice which spoke to him, without a words, now is speaking to them. They stood peaceful, like they didn’t have any way to hide themselves, now when dark is broken.  And while the way of his developed, he started to recognize human outlines in that vortex of changes.  He tried to give a name to that figure… but he chocked on it before a clear taught got to his cognition. It lasted for a while in that timeless period. Than he managed to perceive the full word.
Against him stood... he. Than his word broke the silence and called his own name and stranger answered. He wonted to ask him questions, all the questions… but he got afraid not to break the silence for too long. Instead he asked someone else. He didn’t know his name but somehow he was sure now, for what he felt before, that way of his has to do much with him. He called, without a sound, upon entireness in which he find life behind time, to answer him for his questions. And he waited. He listened for sound, all thou he knew that answer wont come in words. And he waited. Not for too long. Not soon. Truth come to him in silence. And it didn’t come from outside. Out of dark which was still un braked on the far sides. And more expectantly not over lonely field outside of him. He felt it inside of him. Being not hollow and faceless…  being simple in its roots. Him from dark and him of gray, met each other not to make the third in between, but to meat the third one that was hidden in bought of them.

It was a sunny and still a bit fresh morning in Bosnian hills. Summer was still young, but that year he and his family took their vocation early. This trip was something that they, or bather to say he, planed for a long time. Even now he felt creeps up his spine, driving down a newly built road, through the landscape, which he didn’t saw since his childhood.  That feeling followed him since that moment, in which the decision that he has to go back even for few days, become final in his mind. Everything was calm, as he expected by information’s he had, since they landed on Sarajevo airport. Hardly anyone, at first sight, could say that war raged through the country decade ago. He was not shore what so strongly pushed him to come here with his baby children and wife, which knew about this country only from his story’s. His mother died a year ago never shoving any interest to visit the land of her ancestor’s. On any questions about that possibility, that mild and always smiled women would spook her collocutor with comment that: ‘she would go back only to place the bones of those she loved in their graves when that would be possible’.  She would say that on bad English and she would carry on with smile, leaving his friends, only visitors in small apartment in which they altogether have lived, confused. He was still very young when two of them left their country. That what he couldn’t knew in those moments as a fact, he could  feel in all of its heaviness, dispute all the efforts of those closed to him to spare him from the terrible truth. It was not an hunger or the close and formidable breath of death that have moved them in the end.  His father got lost in one of many actions which he participated as an solider of his side. He was at terrain for an long time, and as known only to his wife, careless to contact his family too often. His parents separated not long after he was born, but his father always tried to spent as much of time it was possible with him. It was like that before war started. Than he left without much words. As kid he enjoyed every moment when his parents would exchanged even one word. It was not unusual for three of them to get together despite the fact he lived with his mother and his father had room on the another side of the town. They would laugh to the yokes of each other, and they would speak seriously about his school… his mother and father. Than he would think, oppositely from what he knew today, that they are still in love and that somehow they will come together.  It was in those days when he was still a child.
Months passed and no one had a clue where his father could be, although his destiny was plain for all. It was not a first time that someone’s father in the circle of his friends got killed in war. But most of them got back rapt up in bloody sheets, or at least the word about the way they ware killed got back to their little town. 
His mother hided her feelings from him, but hi knew that face she was putting on when ever she had to answer any of his numerals questions, is nothing more than a mask.
As news about his father newer didn’t came to them, and that time, in all of its ugliness didn’t left no place for hope, she started to look for ways to extract them to a safer place. Probably she didn’t have any idea that they will end up so fare, as over an ocean.  Fine line of thoughts and memories got broken when his two years old soon suddenly started to scream merely: Roses!!! Roses!!! He stopped the car at first moment scared by noise. Than he looked a side where child hand was pointing. Few meters down the road, by its side. There was a bush of red roses, all in blossom. Sight well known to his family due the fact that his mother in last years of her life developed a great interest, not to say mania, in gardening. When he had started working and they moved to a house with its yard, she would spent almost all of her mornings and early evenings planting and nursing seedlings. All roses. He never asked her why she was so decisive to handle only roses, which required lot of attention and time. He was happy for her to have some hobby, which would take her mind of some past times. 
That forced stop finally stretched his shaken nerves over the line he considered that was acceptable for him.  They (he) needed rest no matter what.  He checked long way behind and up the road and all around them through lonely field. When he was absolutely assured that there is no one, miles around, he decided to get out from the car.  Minute later he called his wife to step outside and helped her to get children. 
Air was sweet, soaked with the smell of pine and fresh. Silence was absolute and all signs of tension evaporated from four of them in seconds. They stood near that imposing rose bush which amazingly    grooved in the center of field, unattended and beautiful.  Around it grass didn’t grove forming a circle of dirt, which looked so gray and fruitless. 

















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