[بحر الرمل قصة قصيرة]
ـ[د. مصطفى صلاح]ــــــــ[27 - 11 - 2009, 06:43 م]ـ
A Sea of Sand
Written by : Fatima Al Nahidh
Translated by : Dr. Abdallah Altaiyeb
We disregard; I emphasized every syllable of the word. Times change, we change, grow up, and start looking the other way to stay alive. But he said one sentence only, while staring at the horizon stretching endlessly before him; if only those who said this would experience what I had been through
It hadn’t been easy for me to know, in those moments whenever we reached that edge, the sun would drown in a well of darkness, and we would part with heartache. But I could swear that we, as creatures blended with myriad lusts, tended to forget our traumas so we could go on. Our enemy, the time, deliberately awarded us one motive after another to jostle forward with our pains and broken dreams on the road to the terra incognita of oblivion, only to lose them there and go back to perhaps resume the same sins and harvest desire and agony
It was neither a confession session nor a sudden strike of transparency, let a lone a planned one. We just walked and let our feet take us towards calmness, and silence walked kindly between us like a mutual friend
He stopped for a while as if trying to ascertain the place, so I stopped as well. He then marched on, and I walked next to him and the silence
There was nothing but sands across the land. They rose a bit to form a dune, rose more to look like a hill, rose more and more to perhaps become a mountain, but then went flat like a sea spreading mercilessly, and then leveled some more like an infertile dry valley
There were only sands, and nothing else! The astronomical moon seemed extremely close, much like a shield ornamenting a wall, sprinkling glistening silver on the peaks, and leaving us in a peaceful unknown
We shall have a rest on top of that dune; he clarified when we got closer to a sandhill about fifty steps away. I sensed that he said so because I had started panting with the effort of disentangling my bare feet from the softness of the sands with each step. I felt my back stoop a little as the walk upward towards the dune got steeper, as if the desert had been tilting
We walked a distance immeasurable with any decimal system ever since we left the camp an hour ago, going silently most of the time through silken sands, content merely with the company of each other
When we finally reached the top of the dune, we emerged onto a large open area of green meadow, with grass springing from the sands and extending to an end unknown to us. I screamed childishly: O God, why didn’t we camp here; my God where did this grassland come from? Is this your secret hideout
We sat down, silence along with everything before us bathed in an ocean of silver. He was looking at the far horizon, my hands were playing with the soft and juicy grass, not believing it was filling the spaces between my fingers, caressing it, touching the little flowers that glowed with sweet dew under the moonlight, forming circles, stars, lines, letters, and unlinked points
Then, like reading from a book, he said
We cannot continue looking the other way. Our pasts don’t die; we are prisoners behind no bars, we foolishly think we left them behind, but they rise in their due time, to announce their barbaric presence
My hand was still holding on to the coolness that was slowly slipping through my fingers; he was not waiting for a reply, and continued reading
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