/lit/ - Literature

I open my eyes to a blue sky. I am a vitruvian man, clothed only in a clean and innocent brightness. I float on my back and hear soft slaps of water against my skin. A warm wind meets with my breath and carries it away. I lay for some unknown duration of time before I rise and see that I am standing on an endless pelagic of sapphire. The water is serene but a playful breeze occasionally sends ripples skittering this way and that, like some a bird overcome with joy in the spring. I turn and look around but I can see nothing but a seal between the matching blues of sea and sky. There is no sun. No clouds either. I do not know how deep this water is nor how I am standing on it. I try to wake myself up with the realization that I am in a dream, but to no avail. I attempt to fly away. No good. I follow what I imagine to be some sort of path marked by the wind.

Maybe I am dead. I blink around looking for some angel, maybe holding a sign with my name on it. My mother always told me angels existed. She said that they were among us disguised as ordinary people, and that we would never know if we met one. “Give to those who ask because it might be an angel testing you.” Only much later would I find out that the task of testing, or tempting, fell to The Accuser. The image of my young mother reaching into her purse and giving a panhandling Satan a few dollars occupies my mind as I cross this lonely blue nowhere.

The kindness of my mother brings to my conscience all the times I had failed to follow her example. So many times had I refused pittance to the beggar on the curb, regarding him as some creature of hell, some foul-smelling incarnation of vice and indolence. Ah, yes. Mothers make the devil out to be man and sons make man out to be the devil. Still worse were those instances when I simply ignored the beggar. I would avert my gaze or mark a path around him. Yet to withhold from him any form of acknowledgment, to refuse his existence, was to betray his humanity—and to betray the humanity of a man is to betray the whole of humanity. There was dignity for him in being denied his impetrations, but none in him being denied his existence. Ignoring the devil has similar consequences. The man pretending not to see the beggar sitting on the curb is very often the same man pretending not to feel the devil sitting on his heart.

>>12398021