How The Wind Feels From A Higher Ledge

He was walking through fields of grey, sometime after the American Civil War and sometime before when four planes were highjacked and flown into the World Trade Towers, the Pentagon, and the fourth went down in a field, possibly this very field, and there was a massive river flowing (some say a river of blood, others say a river of mountains’ tears) directly next to Stonehenge, which holy hell he had never seen before and it was really something to see. The sky was a bit overcast and a gentle breeze was relentless, so after standing there with his hands in his pockets for a few hours he started to feel a chill.

He was staring at his reflection in the murky pool just then, while his flock started to panic and run in all many directions. Something had spooked them. He squinted into the forest to see a great something emerging, in fact it was the same thing he had seen in the pool: It was Mufasa. He had come to warn him of the change of tides and the howling winds that represented a looming crisis in the great countryside: The riots in the south had started the deadliest forest fire that anyone had ever seen, violent with rage over Jim Crow, over the Quran, over blotted past. He had only a day to get out of there.

He tried a couple of things. He tried to walk but his legs had grown weak over the years and he resigned eventually to lying on the grass and trying to get closer to the stars. He tried to fly and that was a little bit easier but he only managed a few inches off the ground at best. Gravity kept him down while the sun was obscured behind a smoky screen, the burning trees from the south reaching all the way North. He had no will to know what to do. He started killing his flock, in a desperate attempt to redeem himself for all the nothingness he had brought the world. Better to be noticed by God and sent to hell than to sit quietly by and watch the teachers and doctors filter into heaven.

The fire was visible now and not a soul cared at this point. The few sheep he had left sat nursing each other’s lash wounds on the hillside while he played jacks with a pinecone and several pine needles. It was funny: as the fire crept closer he could hear fire engines, police sirens and fire hydrants unleashed but he never saw anything; nothing but the hungry, orange flame that sought him out from miles away.

He woke up the next day with the fire inches from his face. It just stood there with its arms crossed, smirking at his unkempt clothes and unshaven face. Oh you should have seen it, he was so ashamed. There’s nothing worse than your fire feeling sorry for you. It wakes up everything inside you. You realize how much of a fool you’ve been for putting faith in the fate of nature, for giving up all your possessions and affections but dreaming about them every night. It was, as he saw then, the stupidest way to live.

Then it ate him, and as his ribcage and thigh-meat and thin skin tissue were being seared and ripped into the dirt of the fields, he saw nothing but the smiling faces of sheep laying their warm bodies before him. I dream about one day returning to that field.