The Witness: Fallen to Darkness

Part One of "Arik"

                In a time when the weak were down-trodden and all the lands were lost in darkness, tragedies became overlooked.  No one saw the damage done, as their eyes were on the frivolous exploits of their idols.  Here was a city blind to their shame and disgrace, as they gorged themselves on any exploit that could be found.  This was a people bleeding with rage and hate.  In this land, there lived a young boy.  He was of tall stature, lean but well built, and a bright thinker.  His dark hair contrasted with his almost-glowing eyes, a translucent grey.  Despite his sharp features, he had a gentle air about him, as if he were as harmless as a dove.

                Every day, he walked up and down the streets.  He was astonished, shocked, by what he saw.  Every night, as he lay down, he wondered to himself.  When would it be over?  What could be done?  Yet in the silence of his warm home, deaf to the cries and screams of the suffering, there was no answer.  And each day, he would wake again to walk the streets.  At times, he compulsively helped them as they trudged by him�"sometimes a friendly smile was all they needed, or maybe a hug to someone who looked about to cry.  Sometimes he even slipped them a wad of fives and tens.  But he knew it wasn't enough.

                He had no use for school, since his parents had died.  Every room in the house, every place in the town, every voice in the church�"it all had haunted him to no end.  Long into his desolate journey as a homeless child, he found an old friend of his father's who'd taken him in.  He'd been taken in many times, but usually only for a night or two before he left again.  At times he left by choice and others by circumstance�"he'd endured his share of beatings and hunger.  Here, however, he lived with a respectable man in comfort and calm.  His soul, however, was in disarray.

                On one particular occasion, his inward discomfort pushed him to the streets long before dawn.  He looked at the shivering bodies, sleeping comfortlessly in the gaps of bridges.  He listened to the shouting of broken hearted couples, smashing glass and crying children.  One little girl ran right past him as he walked on the sidewalk.  He lunged out to grab her dress�"an automatic reaction from raising his younger brother.  And yet, he must have been out of experience or rusty on his skills or some other such explanation.  The tires did not screech as they had for little Aaron, and there was no blaring horn.  The drunk driver simply rushed on.

                Her bloodied remains scattered the street, but no one paused to look.  Her hair�"it had been a beautiful black�"blended with asphalt on which her mutilated body now lay.  The fragments were far too many to be put together, but he discovered she must have been no more than two, maybe three.  Blood sent its stench up in the air, but he knew it was only a fragment of what he smelled.  In his walk among death, he'd acquired a certain sensitivity to the smell of blood.  He had not, however, become so numb as to disregard the feelings that passed through him. 

                Shock flattened his chest first, making it painfully difficult for him to breathe.  Next his hearing went, as did his vision.  Blind, deaf, and gasping, he passed out on the sidewalk.  He saw no entrancing light, nor any flames of hell.  He remembered that four minutes without oxygen and the brain could survive unharmed.  He started to count.  Whether or not he was dead, dying, or simply unconscious, he must come back to life.  He couldn't die as his parents had�"with too much people could remember him by.  He had to disappear into the background, and perhaps then he could rest in peace. 

                He started to count.  Every time he got to thirty, he made a ringing sound instead of thinking the number.  It occurred to him then that this had not happened in a long while.  His fainting spells had started with the news of his parent's death, progressed through the murder of his brother, and had ended at the funeral of his God.  Furthermore, (as he reached the third ding), he realized with shock that he had not spoken to his God in quite a long time.  For the longest time, after he'd sworn himself to silence, he'd kept up occasional conversations with his God.  How long ago had that been?

                Approaching the sixth ding now, he realized that perhaps his God wanted him back.  Arik paused a moment in his thinking�"this was where the sixth ding came and went�"and stilled.  Then his thoughts poured in like a flood, completely washing out his thinking.  Had God been calling to him all this time?  Was this why he had walked the streets for the better part of his thirteen years?  And if this was why, to bring him back to his God, what was his God trying to say? 

                The seventh and eight dings went by.  Clinically, he was dead, but there was no time for such folly.  He had to think.  He had to understand.  Hurry, hurry!  What was this spell of solemn darkness here to tell him?  In his head, the bells had ceased.  All his energy poured into finding a way through this blindness, this silence.  He was not afraid.  Rather, he was quite determined that what would change his life lay right ahead, beyond this darkness.  And so he searched.

                In the street, all became dead and quiet.  The fights had finally stopped, the guns were finally lowered, and the bodies were overtaken by sleep�"some by snatched by that eternal slumber, and others taken by the lesser evil that would yield them to the next day.  The night was longer than it should have been, and all was silent in respect.  That night, the whole world had brusquely hushed as it awaited a change.  And a change it would definitely have.

Author's Note

I need ideas on how to continue the story... Help?