I wish I could tell you.
That thought kept Salvador awake for many countless hours longer than he may have liked. Since the first of spring, since the harsh lesson his mother had taught him, he had thought on little else but that. There were too many secrets between them, and he didn't like it. Too many secrets between himself and the sinner.
Karma Made Flesh he was called, and sometimes he wondered what that meant. Among his other titles, he was also Secret Keeper. People told him things, and he kept much of what they said in strictest confidence. He was not a member of the ever popular rumor mill that others whispered about. Things he learned he did not spread around for the world to know. Some things were not his secrets to share. It was a code he stuck to as often as he could, but sometimes...
Sometimes it hurt the ones he loved, and those were very few and far between.
He wanted to shout the things he knew to the heavens. He wanted to scream them in the sinner's ear. He wanted to tell him what he knew so badly that it made him ache in ways he'd never felt pain before.
There were stronger forces at work here, his mother had said. He thought he could defy them. He had tried. As soon as the words started to pour out of his mouth as syllables, something shut down inside of him. He blanked out and hit the floor. He even tried writing Sin a letter to say exactly what he was thinking, but the precise words came out a garbled mess upon the page. A dozen crumpled scraps of paper had hit the trash that day.
Thirty-two roughly hand carved wooden chess pieces, half of them maple and half of them walnut, were scattered in no particular order upon the coffee table. He paced before them and wondered often how to solve this puzzle. There had to be a way. That seemed to be their shared mantra concerning completely different matters these days. There had to be a way.
In the late hours of one evening that bled into the next, an idea struck him. When he was alone. When the sinner had snuck out of the apartment without his knowing. While he paced and pondered on the nature of the complication as a whole. He had an idea and gave it a try.
Crossing to the window sill in the living room, he picked up his journal and flipped it open to a fresh new page. Removing a pencil from his pocket he paced back toward the sofa and flopped onto the cushions. Closing his eyes, he cleared his head as best as he was able and focused first on seven specific letters. This was a mental exercise he had never challenged himself to attempt before. Those seven letters were the key. He locked them in his mind and then scattered them amidst the thousand other disjointed thoughts that plagued him daily.
Those seven letters were bold and bright, and they spiraled around the jumble of other, dimmer words. Opening his eyes, he put the pencil to the page and pulled the words out one by one. Seven letters out of eighty words. They remained bold and stood apart from everything he wrote. When the flow was finished he set down his pencil and regarded the page with some mild speculation.
"That one was easy," he thought aloud. As things go, he had to consider also that perhaps it had been too easy. This first was a practice run. He felt exhausted, still, after even just this one experiment. Tomorrow, he decided, he could try another, and if that didn't work he'd have to think of something else.
The apartment was empty, and that didn't settle well with him. He got up, took his journal back to the window sill, placed it there and grabbed his coat. "It's never easy," he muttered while walking out the door.
That thought kept Salvador awake for many countless hours longer than he may have liked. Since the first of spring, since the harsh lesson his mother had taught him, he had thought on little else but that. There were too many secrets between them, and he didn't like it. Too many secrets between himself and the sinner.
Karma Made Flesh he was called, and sometimes he wondered what that meant. Among his other titles, he was also Secret Keeper. People told him things, and he kept much of what they said in strictest confidence. He was not a member of the ever popular rumor mill that others whispered about. Things he learned he did not spread around for the world to know. Some things were not his secrets to share. It was a code he stuck to as often as he could, but sometimes...
Sometimes it hurt the ones he loved, and those were very few and far between.
He wanted to shout the things he knew to the heavens. He wanted to scream them in the sinner's ear. He wanted to tell him what he knew so badly that it made him ache in ways he'd never felt pain before.
There were stronger forces at work here, his mother had said. He thought he could defy them. He had tried. As soon as the words started to pour out of his mouth as syllables, something shut down inside of him. He blanked out and hit the floor. He even tried writing Sin a letter to say exactly what he was thinking, but the precise words came out a garbled mess upon the page. A dozen crumpled scraps of paper had hit the trash that day.
Thirty-two roughly hand carved wooden chess pieces, half of them maple and half of them walnut, were scattered in no particular order upon the coffee table. He paced before them and wondered often how to solve this puzzle. There had to be a way. That seemed to be their shared mantra concerning completely different matters these days. There had to be a way.
In the late hours of one evening that bled into the next, an idea struck him. When he was alone. When the sinner had snuck out of the apartment without his knowing. While he paced and pondered on the nature of the complication as a whole. He had an idea and gave it a try.
Crossing to the window sill in the living room, he picked up his journal and flipped it open to a fresh new page. Removing a pencil from his pocket he paced back toward the sofa and flopped onto the cushions. Closing his eyes, he cleared his head as best as he was able and focused first on seven specific letters. This was a mental exercise he had never challenged himself to attempt before. Those seven letters were the key. He locked them in his mind and then scattered them amidst the thousand other disjointed thoughts that plagued him daily.
Those seven letters were bold and bright, and they spiraled around the jumble of other, dimmer words. Opening his eyes, he put the pencil to the page and pulled the words out one by one. Seven letters out of eighty words. They remained bold and stood apart from everything he wrote. When the flow was finished he set down his pencil and regarded the page with some mild speculation.
"That one was easy," he thought aloud. As things go, he had to consider also that perhaps it had been too easy. This first was a practice run. He felt exhausted, still, after even just this one experiment. Tomorrow, he decided, he could try another, and if that didn't work he'd have to think of something else.
The apartment was empty, and that didn't settle well with him. He got up, took his journal back to the window sill, placed it there and grabbed his coat. "It's never easy," he muttered while walking out the door.