Historical Setting: Yet unknown
How long had I been thrashing in the sea – days – nights – years – eons? It is the same moon that comes and goes repeating its phases like old language prayers, void of first meaning but savored in reliable repetition.
My shiver was noticed. He looks my way and stops his groveling. He has with him a woven linen funeral bag tied up in the ropes of this sledge. He unfurls it, and spreads it over me as though it is a blanket.
Thank you, God, for such a shiver to speak life to us both. He clearly answers your empathy with his own. Thank you, God, for sending this little wooly man.
We move slowly up the incline away from the sea — it is a steep climb — the little man in his cumbersome wool towing the sledge with the rope and my useless weight. I imagine myself to be twice his height. He retrieves the log rolling toward the water and hauls it back to the place where he left me, angled and nearly sliding back down. He lifts the rope end of the sledge and struggles to roll the log under once again, then tows forward and upward, until again the sledge drops back onto the rocks while the loosed log rolls back toward the sea. Again and again, he takes me rolling and crashing as though the rocks were waves and the sledge an unworthy skiff. I don’t know if it is the hurt or the shock or just the raw…
***
I awaken in a dark place with a circle of sky beyond rock — a hole left open in the top of this dome, as though I am inside a monstrous eyeball roof with squared-up sides. I struggle for a full view of that porthole of day sky because the warm breath that is only a foot’s length from my face, blocking my view is issued from the fangs of a silver beast seething and growling, drooling onto my face apparently hungry for a nice dinner of a man’s flesh — maybe mine.
A finger of daylight amid the dark probes from one side of this hovel, surrounds the little wooly monk, just come in from the outside. He closes off the light that follows him in the doorway from the outside, by leaning the sledge over the opening. Now it is dark again, except for the sky hole.
The little monk makes a grunting sound and his guardian beast looks away from me.
(Continues Tuesday, May 26)
Lazarus Ink 