Flowers on Stone

The snake watched him, knowing instinctively that something was wrong with the bundle of flesh that lay not far away.  After all, it didn't move.  As nature had planned, the constrictor would be able to approach the feeble creature and swiftly wrap itself around the animal.  Once fully engulfed by the snake, the creature would soon lose whatever breath remained in its body and would die, later to be consumed at the snake's leisure.  The snake moved slowly, determined to reach the injured prey not far away.

     Water dripped from the big hibiscus flower above his head, sweet drops, really, of fine rain.  No longer the torrent that he had come to know so well in this land, this miserable hell-hole to which he had come, carrying his bag of dreams.  As he looked up, the flowers, bent down with water, leaked their moisture into his mouth, into his eyes, down his cheeks.  He lay there, unable to move.  He knew he was hurt, he just didn't know where or how much; his entire body ached so much.  Trying to move his right leg slightly, it became obvious that it was broken somewhere, the pain was so intolerable.  He looked up into the sky, now beginning to go dusk with the end of the day approaching.  His mind wandered back into the years that had been filled with promises, so many of them now broken.

     He tried to remember how he got here.  He closed his eyes, recalling not only this day but others that had been full of pain, loss and agony.  But there had been other days, well before these, that had indeed been sweet, happy and full of promise.  The torrent of rain that had hit him today had come from nowhere, just like so many of the outbreaks of anger that nature seemed to continue to heap upon him and those nearby.  Hardly ever with any warning, the sky always seemed to open up, furious, sending rivers of water sliding down barren hills, stripped by the men and their machines.  With a sound that seemed like demons screaming from below, the hills would lose their stability, dirt would wash away and men and machines and everything else with it. He remembered those nightmares, looking back over his shoulder, just in time to see the wall of water heading toward him, men shouting and waving their arms in useless resistance.  Nothing ever stopped the fury of the water when it came from the sky.  God, would it ever end?  Did it even matter anymore?

     He couldn't think like that.  If he did, it would all have been in vain, everything he and the others, men and women alike, had given up to be here.  There had to be a reason, a goal for all the sacrifices that had been made thus far.  H laid his head back, feeling the dripping again of the light rain from the plants just above his head.  The rain.  It tasted so different here.  He closed his eyes again and his mind drifted back to another time, another rainy day...