The wheat crop had grown long this year, the heat of summer sun tied with the light rains giving it a perfect welcome as it crept from below the soils. The field seemed larger when the crop had towered so high. The daytime sky was clear and as blue as the Mediterranean oceans, or what I had imagined them to have looked like when having the image read to me. A light cloud hovered over every hour or so but there was little more moisture in the air than what came with that. The trees shone a light emerald around the field and the grasses below a shining darkness by comparison. The heat caressed my bare body, as it always did on these days as I plunged into the pond in the centre of the crop. Why it was there we had never decided with its bulrushes surrounding its edges, a pit only as deep as my forearm was long.
The water flushed over me, clear water, grey rocks on the bed glimmering under the liquid. I feel the water fill my ears, my nose, and with my eyes open I watch the sky. The blue is darker when viewed from within here. The water stings my eyes, but I refrain from blinking and potentially locking it within my sockets until they open again. The pond was perfectly circular, if my frame was twice as large I could touch the sides when completely outstretched, but I rest in the centre. Small fish begin to peck at my skin, but I stare onwards, still.
I imagine I’d like to be a fish; the dense water over my body relaxes me. Of course, the circumstances would differ; air is to me as water would be to a fish. But all the same, I imagine I would like to be a fish. The sun glares on, the water magnifying it, my skin hotter below the surface. I remember the first time I had lay in this pool, hiding, escaping the world as it was. I had felt as if I was invisible to the outside, I was away from everything. And I was, to an extent.
I had been running, hiding, through our families fields, through the tall crop. And I had came to this; A pond. I dived in, skinning my chest as I plunged to the bottom, and there I rested flat against the water until my father had caught me and scalded me. I made a snorkel from hollowed bamboo the second time I’d came, the first my having to surface for air had given my position away. Since then, when I had ran, and hidden, this was where I came to relax, to be relieved of the outside world. I was hidden in a clearing of trees, through a field of long crop and in a pool of water. Today I had left my “snorkel” behind as my brother had come with me. I was to be leaving soon and I wanted him to know the hiding place that I used when father was stressed.
I surface moving the top half of my body until I was at a ninety degree angle upon myself. “And that. That is how I escape it.” I tell my brother, him having stared for a minute at my lifeless body submerged in water. “I will miss you brother.” He replies his tone was stern for him, tense even. “And I you, but I must leave, if you could come with me then you would be free too, but I imagine that we’d both me subject to more pain there than here.”I inform him, my hand now on his shoulder as I’ve steadied myself to standing.
“You don’t have to go though, neither of us do.” He insists now, his stern tone lost.
“I wish that were true, but with mother gone and father as he is, I must.” I look to my feet, avoiding his gaze, knowing this pains him more than it does me.
“Then you shall promise, that you WILL return.” He whispers, a tear falling from his cheek to his worn boot.
“I promise.” I whisper in return knowing that I’ve broken the promise. Knowing that for it he will hate me. For tomorrow I leave, and I do not return, as long as money reaches my brother it will not be in vain, but I will not return.
I pull my brother towards me, stepping backwards as I do. His toes reach the side of the pond and I push him to his knees, myself now by his side. His hand hit the water hard. “Goodbye.” I sigh, fighting away the tears, the pain. And in silence I walk away, hearing him sink into the water, listening to the sound of him hiding from everything he fears.
I was carted to the city the next hour, and from there I was shipped across the sea. I was paid to carry the flag into war. The flag of my country; unarmed and ahead of the first line. And there, as I strode my head high, I would be shot.
~S
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