This one is for all the ones who have to suffer through the hate they face every day… this is for both the survivors and the ones who didn’t make it.

The Shape on the Horizon

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”  WB Yeats

The woman watched as the figures stumbled on the hill above, backlit by the setting sun surrounded by the slowly darkening horizon, as it crossed the skyline eastwards.
The men had been searching across the hill for several hours, slashing at the brush with machetes and hand-held scythes. One of the men screamed out curses against his son, calling down God’s wrath upon him. As she watched, the men seemed to coalesce into a single figure, humped, and sharp and ugly, lurching across the hill.

She had seen them do this before and she wondered how many people had felt the terror of being hunted by these men, men who insisted they were the best ones to tell the people what God said, what God wanted, what God hated, what God meant- and they had demanded their holy book be made law, demanded that their understanding of that book be the measure of a man or a woman.

They won’t find him she thought to herself, and a small smile touched the corner of her lips. He’s beyond their hate and their cruelty now.

-0-

The end of the world is nigh!” his father had yelled at him each October. “It’s coming! It’s coming! Are you right with the Lord?” and then his father had made him confess the many sins Jarvey had committed over the past year, and then set the punishment appropriate to the sins.

To read the rest of this story, see link to The Twilight Mirror and the New Dawn by Jordan Amar

© 2021 Eschate