The Seven Days of Wander

by Broken Walls Publishing

cross, then? What lines met behind my Father and grieved with pricks of blood, brow beaten?

  Blood, Father, lies in the shadow of stone. Like a two handed fist tight in prayer binding the bloody palms from two horizons.

  Mother of sun was right, Father. Blood flow is the mind of stone."

  He looked for a moment at the sun. Then back into the owl's single tooth. "What then father is the sign from the set of sun? For which hunt has thou arrived?

  Does not all shadow bleed from the stone as the sun lays gentle upon horizon?

  Yes, Father, weak you were. As weak as I. Weak from the furthest journey.

  For your shadow points in all directions as mine turns back upon itself over and over again.

  Blood and stone are the same, when the flow of time is of no meaning. Time brings the shadow of separation.

  Time for the setting of suns.

  Yet I struggle on stone to believe in the necessity of your crossing, my Father, or my stoning. zbn

  For your cross, it looks still too much as the tool of a puppeteer. Alas, whose hand had fallen away in a stupor of disregarding.

  As is my Stone.

  Better the witness of many tiny fools at hand then one solitaire sweep without even the mercy of misunderstanding.

  I cannot believe in your God, Father, I cannot."

  A deep sigh gathered a few tears as the Beggar looked out again into the graying air.

  "Yet, truly, for all our love, I believe in my heart, the existence in your death, Father.

  For time giving shadow from blood to stone; stone to blood what is that but the shadow then of death, of change, of movement, of the times itself.

  The man emerges out of Cross.

  The outer skin is the living shadow of the inner death.

  The skin is the rim of bowl. The rim is only as real as it appears as a shadow of the empty soul.

  They spoke of thy resurrection, Father. But misunderstood in their religion of hope of a life after death.

  Thy resurrection is not life coming out of death but rather death coming out of life.

  The bowl taken away, the emptiness has an image of the bowl's form but is no longer contained in the bowl. Thou, Father, are now free to reform in a more unique eternity.

  For what was the form of body but the internal artist painting. A pause in destiny with the bloody flare of offered flesh.

  The set sculpture of that destiny.

  Inside the stone, fate has a flow. The weather of history leaches it to surface and gives later vision a historic worldly view.

  You knew your destiny, father as now I see mine. Yet fate is a daily thing found in the elusiveness of moments.

  Destiny is the calling, fate is what men turn and turn again to without even understanding, to grapple to that final encampment. And await the fickle dawn of history or not.

  And they cross, they crossed roads as death moved out of thy skin; history perhaps was ready and moved two worlds to follow thy death.

  As I feel this stone pressing for release. Is there as like a world pressing behind it?

  Like the cross, the stone moving becomes death moving out of the world. Does such transform the world into life?

  When the Beginning and Ending reform, when the shadow separates from stone and fills the night air with its wings; when it refolds and hides under Dawn's bright Hand, where is Death living? Where do the living carry their bowls?

  What is a Round but a cross whose four limbs bend upon its hollow and join behind. Declaring then no Beginning or End, without time's shadow for contrast.

  Does not the thing bend around the soul of myself?

  Perhaps then it was your godliness of Death, father, which showed two worlds intersect at the Man.

  Using a fated climb, we have both offered a destined moment for the oracle of history. Yours has begun.

  I doubt mine.

  You could forgive them, father. For you saw the eyes all around you rung of your own fates, your own destiny which bid their limbs as cruel to the cross as your own.

  By the ferocity of your will to love and to die.

  I have only loved one that well.

  Can that burn away all the shadows of humanity passed by?

  Perhaps thou being the mirror of all arms flung full, shows the God of species.

  Perhaps I, the mirror of encircled worlds, shows a God of single Man. For that Man only one hammer can empty the blood vessel.

  For the rest, I can no more forgive then a hare forgives the flea that disturbs its silence tunnelled below the waiting jackal.

  I see only the nails of fools shattering under the heavy purpose of some larger hammer."

  Jerking hard on the ropes in an old attempt to clasp his hands for prayer he shouted "In thy name, Father, WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THIS MOMENT!"

  The knot gave, slipped from its capture, the Beggar slid down the face of the rock: his two legs shattered as they drove into the sand. He sprawled forward, outstretched before the Stone at his tangled step.

  The ends of the rope fell behind the Stone, their weight snapping away the rock bridge which bound the stone to the mountain.

  At the crack, the white owl rose and gave flight towards the city.

  The stone hesitated in its ancient inertia, giving the Beggar a moment to look up towards the winged bird. They opened again and again like sharpened hands, bearing a faint crown of sun dusk in the horizons.

  He sensed the tremble of earth below him and knew its purpose; history gathering from its slumber.

  Without fear, he whispered to the fading owl "Blessed are the sons, for their eyes will mirror their fathers’ footsteps.”

  The stone embraced him, gently exhaling his Death.

  A moment later, the villagers trembled and rose in fright, as the stone churned and rumbled its charge down the gorge past their blackend huts. Exas screamed, torn from the severance of his sleep.

  The stone maintained its deliverance across the flat desert, its stain of red going slow revolution like a continuous blink.

  A distance and then it struck the flat rock where she had imbedded the knife. The shudder of its collision and stop cracked the flat in two and drove a vibration deep inward along a flaw of compacted earth.

  A minute crevasse opened; a hair thin as a dogs; yet travelling miles downward; webbing, connecting with other flows till a reservoir of molten crust was tapped.

  The pressure boiled; inching towards surface.

  It would take a thousand years to fount and spread a thousand, thousand arm lengths of winged flame and ash, "Exploding over the City."

  But that moment was now destined to come.

  THE END

  EPILOGUE

  Unusual for an author to endnote his novel. Few indeed are the writers who do.

  But I am here to ask something again of the reader.

  The readers who staggered through the endless wander to get this far I thank. I apologize as well.

  No novel can be or end more than its creator.

  Fate, History, Destiny, God, Man.

  These still puzzle me.

  My brain remains an unfolded flower that can only grasp a little of the bee's hummings.

  The Beggar changed history. Like Christ.

  The Mad Poet was wrong. Men do not rob from their individual history to alter the history of the species.

  A Man is first historic unto his own self. Against fate.

  His destiny is the choosing of the species' history. Using fate.

  It hints of explaining much and hints of the terrors of such.

  In order to remain unending, History must continually turn from its direction and circle...and spiral.

  A Good Man must be found for Evil times.

  An Evil Man must be found for Good times.

  It has been said: 'The Times make the Man'. Yet, too, the Man makes the times.'

  Both then are Gods dwelling at the edge of shadows.

  As are all Men and Women worshipped in their greatest moment.
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  Their Death grants them eternal. Unfolding beyond the mirrors of fate. It is History which writes the illusion of their living.

  They themselves may or may not have been that fiction.

  A Man, a Woman is a great unified holy thing...men, women become...in their numbers...lesser and lesser so...

  Destiny for the Species is about destiny of one...the one leads...by walking away...

  Fate must kill him...or her...and thus save the Species...both by the leading and the dying...

  History moves in great leaps to nowhere...evolution is found in the footstep, in the creation, of one tiny defiant...

  ....the gods than give us only history...

  ....Man gives us Destiny.....

  Suffering

  a man: to understand suffering, one must suffera god: yet to see suffering,

  is to suffer. a soul: yet to know suffering, even to suffer, is not...in itself...to end suffering.

  .One sees that the god and the man are really only concerned with the degree of suffering that each has compared to the other. The god suffers watching the man suffer. The man suffers because he does not know there is a god caring or even a god exists to watch his suffering. Neither one can reach out of their ignorance or impotence and end the suffering of the other...and thereby, end the suffering of themselves.

  The soul exists, is even created by, the angst, the anguish that this suffering itself is not ended. It does not exist in god or man...it exists only between them...the Messenger not yet put to death...

  Thus the Soul cries out “ Man killed the Son of God; God killed the Son of Man; will they ever forgive each other?”

  A LOOK AT THEPHYSIOGNOMIST ..fate is always present; destiny is only exchanged between future and past...passing through present in only brief moments.

  fate is but the wheels of the universe ever turning, the seas of time and trial ever churning; fate has the appearance of chaos to one eye, purposefulness to