A Story

Here's a very short story I've cooked up in the past month or so.


The Wall

Even with all the anxious stress, the unending torment, the psychological weight that burdened his steps as he inched closer to that self-constructed barrier, he was glad to finally be approaching the wall again. Its brickwork of awkward sadness and painful memories brought a single tear to his eye in remembrance of the jilted, sorry eve from whence they'd last parted paths, nearly three years before. The wall was still strong and its grout work still lay as intricately as the day it was built. Neither wind nor rain had eroded away the brightness of the heated rock, no outside influence damaging enough to scar its strong face.

He pressed his hand to the last brick he could remember placing into the wall and whispered to it. I hope all is well.

Moments later, after his amorous breath floated over the roughness, an unexpected crack worked its way across the wall and opened a slit of light shining through from the other side. It was the first time since he’d erected this wall that he had seen this sun, and it warmed his heart. It shown as bright as he’d remembered onto the field bristling with softness he’d forgotten amongst a tree whose fruitfulness seemed too ripe to disturb.

Suddenly filled with a happiness long since vacant and content with the sunlight that had been shown upon him, he parted ways from the wall onto his path of daily chore. Milling and grinding, reaping and sowing, bailing and hauling, no chore of his day could tire the energy afforded by his reacquired sun, and at the end of the day, when no more work could be done he returned home, still satisfied.

The next morning, upon returning to the wall for another blessing of sunlight for the next day’s chores, he found the wall intact. A new stitch of cement where his crack had been, his tiny sunlit hole patched up. The wall had been repaired overnight, reinforced by some other bricklayer. He was again left unknowing of the other sun’s brightness, the other field’s softness and the other tree’s fruitfulness. He was left to live out the rest of his life in exactly the same manner as before, only he himself able to recall the slight glimpse of what life was under that sun. And the wall remained intact.