My stream-of -consciousness take on the first worlds involvement with the middle easterners. MIDDLE EASTERN DREAM MUSIC A swarthy man tended a small garden in the distance. As I drove closer he looked up and shook his head. I felt that the shake of his head relayed his feelings about his condition, and the state of his place—I was as certain as I could be that he was not hostile to my arrival. The piece of twisted iron I had been briefed about lay between his meagre garden and the cracked pavement of the road. I stopped and got out of my vehicle. He walked towards me. The twisted, sharply ragged sheet of corrugated iron lay on the ground between us. I had come to move it, to put it somewhere safe, or to fold its edges so that it presented no threat, but it was wired to the ground, and I had nothing to cut the wire with, nothing to fold the edges with. Somehow I knew he’d left it there at a time in the past—why it had been wired down I had no idea—and it had become part of his daily life. He looked into my eyes, ignoring the iron, and he tripped on one end of the sheet, slipped and fell forward onto the upturned corner at the other end, the end nearest me. The point went into his throat and he looked amazed and horrified for an instant and then he smiled up at me, looking somehow, insanely, comfortable, while he worked at lifting himself away from the iron and failed as the sharp edges slit long gashes in his hands. He kept on raising himself a little and falling again, and blood fell in a small widening fall from his throat as he rose and fell from the point; still he smiled crazily up, a small shadow of sadness blurring his features, the gash in his throat growing as the point worked its way in. I could not move. ‘This is the way it has to happen,’ I said senselessly. ‘It’s what’s best.’ It seemed to calm him, and he nodded a little as the point bit further into his throat and the blood gushed faster, and while he showed no sign of pain I felt an enormous pity for him. The rain poured from dark clouds, over us, diluting and spreading his blood. He struggled on while the sky grew black as the sun set on the other side of the hills, and as I stood there in the rain and the growing darkness he was eventually lost to my sight. There was no sign of him the next day when I went outside to look, and no blood on the corrugated iron or the dirt around it.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 12:41:44 +0000
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