SUBMITTED to publisher 4/10
DAWN FOR THE FEARLESS
or The Fear Factor
Fiction
Excerpts
On the Farm
Thousands of years have passed….
It’s a midday summer in 1945. The field is hot as Hades with not a wisp of wind to cool the sweaty brow. The earth is hard and dry, cracked open into a spidery web, reduced to a maze of fissures. The air is heavy with strong odors of hay and manure, pulsing from its own warmth like in a Renoir seascape. The wheat stands bowed yet motionless. The white sun is high up and blazing in the pale blue sky.
There are no airplanes today. The world is at a temporary truce...
Woman and boy are walking through the field. The boy is chasing butterflies, monarchs and white-wings here and there. Every so often the boy stops to wipe the perspiration off his forehead and out of his eyes. Rivulets of warm, salty sweat are running down his face, chest, back and legs. Horseflies and mosquitoes are attacking mercilessly.
“Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Go!” moans the little boy, waving his hands, trying to chase away the relentless, blood-thirsty mosquitoes.
*******
For several days the family strolled aimlessly along the streets of the ancient city, as if just the simple act of walking in the free land could somehow magically restore their long lost right to normalcy. As if by simply inhaling the polluted air of the big city, reeking of car smoke, fish, human sweat and sewage, they would somehow regain their long lost right to being free and join the ranks of the free. And that their past life would be erased.
One very hot and humid afternoon John found himself standing in front of one of the most majestic cathedrals. He just stood there for a long while silently in wonderment, admiring the architecture and observing every detail of its refined, renaissance beauty as if he were trying to engrave it in his memory forever. Then, slowly, very cautiously, as if he was afraid to damage the very stones he walked on, he climbed the steps.
The cathedral appeared to be enshrined in the solemnity of its perfect quiet. And as he cautiously closed the massive church doors, he found himself in a cool, somber darkness, disturbed only by his steps that were echoing off the marble walls and the floor, disrupting an overwhelming urge to be left alone, to pray, to confess. It was darkness that somehow shut out the outer world of the living, of the sinners; a world of the hot sun, of pigeons, of sewers and stench, of both the beggars and the wealthy. And as he cautiously proceeded along the main aisle and broke that solemn quiet, he felt like he was drowning into another world, another dimension. He was falling against his will into a very different, very pious, very humble, very chaste, very disembodied world of thoughts, of endless prayers and hopes for salvation. It was an ethereal world of perpetual desire to commune with someone well beyond his immediate, humble human self. And for a brief moment he felt as if he did not belong.
Eventually, like the rest who had come there, John found a place to sit down and then slowly knelt and started to pray in solemn anticipation that his prayers would be heard and answered.
It was only after several minutes of intense prayer, after he had lifted his head and started observing more carefully the many greedy, often disfigured and sometimes cruel faces of the departing ‘devouts’ (of those who have already prayed and confessed perhaps for the hundredth time) that the strong doubts reinvaded his soul again.
As he stepped out of that oppressive darkness and pitiful gloom, back into the glorious sunshine of that hot and humid summer day, John finally felt at peace and free. At least for the time being.
Finally they were at home, where it all started some two millennia earlier. For they were Roman.