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| The Last Nights | |
| By sam_duke | ||||||||||
| 04 April 2007 | ||||||||||
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An aged recluse living deep in the Appalachian woods is facing his final hours. When he was young he was idealistic and passionate, driven by a zeal of desperate violence to change the whole world with his grand ideas. But now he's failed, and in his last moments of life he finds himself striving to give some meaning to his whole existence. Written one moonlit night earlier in the week. His back was arched and his head bowed, his eyes fixed on the pen and the paper he’d set down on his old wooden table as he sat in his chair and thought the thoughts of a desperate man. The only light of the room came from a dim lamp in one corner, though the space was small enough for the bulb to illume the folds and creases of his pale and aged skin, the shock of grey hair atop his thoughtful crown, and the scrawl of his shivering hand as he wrote his words on the page. He glanced up, away from the table and out through the single, tiny window straight facing, and watched as the trees thrashed and smacked at the violent, thundering, hazy black sky, and as the rainfall splashed onto the glass and trickled down the pane. Every night had been as furious as the last for quite some time by now. He would stay awake through each and every one, and sit in that same chair and set down the same thoughts with the same pen and the same ink on identical paper. He would stay awake and watch as the forces of the night’s sky hurled their thunder and their breeze and their rain, all through the hours until the first glimmer of the peaceful morning sunlight frolicked on the green spring leaves, when at last he’d go to his bed, and fall into slumber until the cool and misty, gentle day had passed and it was evening once more. He hadn’t even stepped out of his home, a small timber lodge deep within the evergreen woods of Appalachia, for an age. Why would he? He’d lived inside his mind all his life. Why should it be any different now that he was a dying man? What was he writing? It couldn’t have been a will, for he had nothing at all to give the world other than his mind, the bold ideas he’d harboured up there in that head of his ever since he was young and daring, the idealistic, principled, passionate redhead he could remember, the man who was going to change the world for good, the crusader who was going to right every wrong, who was going to write an epic novel while he was still a teenager, all to declare his love for that beautiful, darling girl he was going to marry, and with whom he’d raise the perfect family, and live for ever. At least he always had a sense of humour, he’d always think, all these years later when he gazed out through that window and gave no more than a moment’s thought to the sad and sorry truth of what had become of him. He could always smile a sad smile, for deep within him this was exactly what he’d always expected. Deep down, he always thought he’d be mocked, or scorned, or jeered at, or maybe just ignored and forgotten. He could cope with defeat, for no matter how ambitious and idealistic he had been in his youngest days, he had always been prepared for it. A man who sets his sights so high is destined for disappointment, he’d always known. But all the same, he could hardly raise his terminal frown to even the slightest of self-belittling smiles any more. It hardly mattered any longer though, what grand design he’d be dreaming up, all alone in his room, what thoughts might be sailing on the high seas of his mind. It hardly mattered any more. He shook his head, sighed, and dropped his pen to the desk, a splash of dark ink fluttering onto the paper, smudging whatever he’d been writing. He raised his frame, his bones and his flesh creaking more than the chair and the table he had to hold to keep his balance, and, clasping tight to a stick with both his hands, drifted over to the window, to gaze at the night. The winds clamoured as if they were fighting themselves, and the rain fell like the tears of the victims of their war. Through the air coursed the whining, whooshing sound of the elements, thrown around by the tall trees battling the gale in a losing fight. The timber frame of his hut, though covered far beneath the canopy of the woods, shuddered and shook. Peace seemed an eternity away. But above it all, above the trees and the wind and the rain, above the hefty shadows that everything earthly had to leave, above it all the Moon was out, suspended high and far in the distance, watching over the entirety of the vista. It was shining, gleaming brighter than a gemstone, its aura soothing the pain of the violent night. The old, dying man looked up, and suddenly his spirit increased once again, as if the light in the sky was the source of his hope, as if to set eyes on the Moon was the reason he rose every night and slept every day, as if she was the captor of his heart and his mind, as if she was the deity whom he worshipped, as if she was the goddess who gave him his peace, as if she was the one who made it all right. The shapeshifters, the werewolves and the villains all had a friend in the Moon. But that dying man found his comfort in the glow of its white too. He knew it better, for he had looked deeper, and felt inside that he had met the goddess who gave its splendour, the idol of the lunar globe, the Romans’ Diana, the Olympian Artemis, the Greeks’ Phoebe. That was why even his embattled mind could find its peace whenever he gazed up above it all and set his eyes upon the Moon. It was Phoebe’s light that glowed from the sky, and that gave the night’s illusion that he and her were the only ones living and breathing. And suddenly the pallor of his cheeks and the thinness of his lips seemed to rush somewhere else, and leave him with a smile. When he was young he wanted to give that lost world of his its purpose, bring hope and aspiration to all people, and show every soul its worth. And he’d failed. But at least he’d tried, he suddenly thought, that dying man, facing the very end, and maybe the very beginning. Heaven’s dawn was about to break in only a few more hours, and then that would be all. At least he’d dared to dream, he thought, his glazed eyes still set on the glow of the Moon, his mind and heart suddenly content. Maybe that was enough. Maybe that was his task fulfilled. Maybe.
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