The Girl Who Kept Running

4. Going Gently Into A Dylan Thomas Night

22 September 2050

He never felt like Jorge H. Bernardo when he returned.

He felt like Sinbad.

Arrived back at last, at the end of his travels, returned before the King, trembling in wait as his fate hung in the balance, having journeyed, wandered, gone wayward, and gone lost far and wide before finding his place in the world again. 

His beloved corner of Sekovia Drive: a lone Red Maple painting a chill gray on the sunlit pavement that he could claim as his own. 

He would stoop, panting, one hand extended to reach the broken bricks of the curb before his knee gave away, and support himself as he sat down, home again. 

Throwing his pillowcase aside, sliding backwards until his back nearly touched the southern boundary wall of the Duvall Shelter for the Homeless, he paused to hurriedly take out his neatly folded throw from the case and push it with his shaky hand between his back and the wall. Or a large burn stamped on his back would be the next big thing. 

He was fifty-two. 

Kneeing up his left leg, folding the right one underneath the calf of the first, he would rest one arm over the knee in a position of a graceful calm and stare ahead braving the eye of the abyss. And await the king's order. 

It hadn't come yet, the beheading, the bowl of sweet poison, the fall off the brink. He was ready for all and any, often imagining what the last moments were gonna feel like. 

Was it going to feel like a final release? Like a forever held breath, imprisoned inside this house of aches and heartbreak, of resist and desist, let go once and for all. 

Or would it be like a bland peace, like in the muscles of the immovable dead brought back in airplanes wrapped in a large bolt of patterned fabric? 

Maybe hell was just going to continue in another guise ...

At this point, he would smile. Hey, it isn't that bad in the land of the well-dressed satan, is it? Well, not for him. As long as they kept their hands off her Sheila, and someone made sure his baby was fed, he did not care what hells awaited for him and why …

He reminded himself to reaffirm vows by the Pattersons, the Lorenzos, and the Feuns, that they would keep his ladies herded. Lone sheep get branded first. 

At last, he'd settle on this idea that death in any form would be a beauty. An aesthetic marvel. Whether one found it scary, serene, fiery, blissful, avenging, or as providing closure ... must remain a personal interpretation. To each their own ...

The only sad part was that he won't be able to relate that beauty and the unraveling of the final mystery to anyone he would care to. To Geurro his closest friend from the shelter, to Shiela his beautiful life inspiration, or to Harry that eager boy with a mind on the grind. 

He chuckled when the day's adventure came back to his mind. And what a stretch that had been, three whole days indeed, switching the regular pains with an eerie surprise. Less self-flagellating enjoyment, more a forced-down-the-throat burn. 

That strange place he'd been to could have turned into a house of horrors in a few more days. It had all the makings of one. But for the wits he had kept collected to the end. The fun part was he couldn't even remember his commute. The route he had taken both to and from the place was missing from his memory. 

He blinked two or three times to jumpstart the screen of his mind into a moving picture but nothing appeared. He tried jerking his head to clear whatever blankness masked the details of the trip: the distance, the highway, the exits, the signposts, but again none surfaced.