A Most Spectacular Rift

Chapter 4

Men now walked on the side of the street as the cemetery leaned back, a distant cold place. Huncho stopped in his tracks to eye it one more time, for there was a little predisposition in the back of his head that wanted to see it one more time, to haunt the mind once more.

Beyond the gateway where the pikes churned back and forth a bit, and the gate, unlocked, swayed back and forth as the wind picked up, and beyond the grass that was not verdant, was not green, nor yellow, nor parched, but the most healthiest of grasses, strutting, hale, and unbeaten by weather, prevailing tall, there juxtaposed the graves that indicated that there was someone, someone ashen, emaciated, hollowed, pale, thin, frail, and like dust down under, where the eyes couldn't see, but the mind could ponder 'bout, it was death, and as a kid, Huncho didn't understand it, could not wrap his turban mind cross the head of death for it was too dark, elusive, too ... unreal.

Huncho's leather jerkin was tight to the skin, and he held his cuffed collar close to his neck where his breath transcended. He shouldn't have looked, yet he did, and he would probably look more in his dreams, now nightmares.

The burst of color into Huncho's frame of sight shocked him alive, and he proceeded forward, every step light or heavy or adamant - he could not feel for his bone marrow for it was cold as ice and his veins were jelled and frozen, the blood slick, turbid, and thick.

No, Huncho washed that sight away. It was Secor's bloody face on that day. He was choking on blood, his eye crawling with crimson.

Huncho buried that thought, just like how those graves buried dead men.

Mr. Hans, Huncho muttered under his breath. He really hoped that Mr. Hans wasn't that bad, because a part of him didn't want to go to the second cemetery, wanted to excuse himself, but didn't know how, was balanced between the fear of another scary encounter and the disappointment strewn across Enzo's face if he was to return jobless.

Anyways he walked and walked in thought and sidewalk, double thinking as his legs crossed autonomously.

Finally, after a myriad of blurry buildings, Huncho reached almost his destination, or soon to be, after asking a somewhat hysterical man (timidly after trying to find the cemetery himself for countless minutes) where the cemetery was, and hoped that the hysterical man did not lie and lead him to the wolves.

The cackling behind marked the end of the village, where the vagrants parked, and the bulldogs roamed, and the rabid rats scurried, and the sick lepers coughed, and the orphans sheltered, and the handicapped crooned, and where Huncho had to tread back (and where they would attack him if not for the soldiers nearby, and the word that Arbitrators were in the village).

Huncho looked at the path laid out before him, both sides mounted with large trees, their bark ripped and knurled, and above a cyan, delightful sky.

The dirt path had been trotted by horses recently, and Huncho knew very well whose horses they were: Arbitrators, and that calmed him not a bit, but a lot. It was like resting a warm towel over his face. He was walking on a safe road, one that an Arbitrator had perambulated, one that protection blanketed.

Huncho gathered his leather closer as the sun dimmed ahead, cupped in a covert behind drab clouds - the diametric of gibbous - save for the ones bleached by the sun's radiance, not red as in usual summertime, but a tarnished yellow that couldn't be perceived lengthily by the eyes, one that bleared them instead, but strengthened the clouds pellucidly.

The trees to the side now sheltered bushes with wrapped and knurled leaves familiar with the climate, different types of thistles that stemmed beamish upwards, but upon further inspection, their flowers dried and had already bloomed in the summertime, now wilting as if their loved ones conditioned bereaved.

Where the shadows had crept to the edge of the forest, Huncho thought it was important for the mind and eyes to coordinate and look at where the light spoke. And where the light spoke was always odd in different angles, often distorted, perhaps moving, shifting, dancing, hitherto there, quondam here.

The bark seemed striped when the light pranced on it, or when the leaves above dangled carelessly to leave just enough space for the sun to intrude and subsume the shadowed grooves in a paroxysm of brilliance.

Picking up pace, Huncho stared at his leather sandals with types of leaves warped around that he didn't know, and he shook them for rocks would jump into the apertures. He tried to notice how his arms swung oppositely with his legs and how his head became hotter as the clouds parted somewhat.

Soon, not soon enough, Huncho arrived at the cemetery. He saw that the trees stopped first. Then he saw that there was a mound of uplifted dirt. The gateway, not a triumphal arch, but just a small gate the width of two doors,

Dread bleeded into his mind. Huncho didn't know whether the road he tread would be tread again in the next second. The uncanny augury that came with anything pertaining to death became so overwhelming as is a sense of friendship to a leper.

The wind deracinated Huncho's bare, twinging legs, and Huncho had no choice but to muster all his courage, which was not much, and walked like a stone giant towards the gate, for it was always a gate that endows a cemetery, and Huncho's quietism did not object.

Huncho pushed open the gate because it was unlocked, and solely for that reason, but with a spectacular abundance of doubt wherein his heart was afloat with the most willingness of bathetic release from the haze of fear that ingrafted his mind like the cage's bar to a bird's freedom.

Creak by creak, the shriek of what seemed like little kids buffooning mingled with the sheet music of metal against chalk against nail against teeth, and transgressed the laws of physics, as no movement gave it impetus and no wind breathed force so that its solemn rasp to and fro was a contumacious nonconcordant infringement upon motion.

And thus, Huncho strayed away from the black streaked gate, an eerie lustre coruscated by the still-glowing sun, a bulbous white like that of a bald shining head, but the dichotomy between the stark black and the white, and for a brief glimpse, the pikes of white light on rows of black fulgurated so that darkness blinked for just a tad too long, and Huncho wailed back in utter shock like a cat scared of its own tail.

Then he pushed the gate open, ever so gently.