Forgetting was the consequence he sought, but the ode of emotions that came before caused the strengthening of his character.
That was the lie he told himself every night.
Nights that were spent awake, roaming the sleeping streets of the city, searching for whatever he had found but lost before.
When he was finally found, almost dead in the docks of the city, the Father took him by the hand and forced him to cry his sins out before the statue of Jesus Christ, their Lord.
The Lord’s salvation would not be able to erase his past. No, not even the mighty hand of God would be able to raise him from the grave he had dug for himself and the woman he once loved.
It wasn’t the case anymore, but old habits die hard.
The drink called for him every night. The solution, simple, clear and crystalline, was more than simple alcohol. T’was the Devil, claimed the Father. T’was the problem, claimed the Mother. It was death, believed the wife.
Every night he still escaped, but now with the care of not drowning in the pier. Sometimes he’d take the boat out to sea, distancing himself, but never enough to lose the city lights.
Until the torrential rains and the undertow dragged him to where he’d lose the city’s light.
First, there was fear. Then, shame. He felt he’d not die, but he’d be seen either at sea, adrift, or returning from the pier as the sun rose. He knew he’d take too long to return.
He knew not he would not return.
If the Hand O’ God was too weak to save him, and the Devil’s Hand too busy to take him, then the ocean would bring him an answer.
The Sailor’s moon tears a hole in the storm, and the stars behind shone not with radiance, but with radioactive nausea. The pitch and yaw of the ship catapults the man from bow to stern, from port to starboard, and the lone and solitary mast shatters under the force of the wind on the sail.
The moon and the tempest vanish beneath a wave of colossal proportions, a mountain of salt and water that approaches.
The face that emerges from within the ocean is as big as the unseen city left behind. The eyes, sunken abysses where lost souls would fall for evermore. The skin, green, scaly, fetid.
The presence of that before the alcoholic paranoia silences the world. The moon, now again in the sky but in the wrong place, and smaller, watches as a mother who mourns her son’s death. The land, now unfathomably distant, had abandoned him like a violent father.
The man looks up. He becomes aware, then and now, of the amount of lies the priest had spoken.
God couldn’t save him. Not before, not now.
The creature opens its mouth, wings unfurling like volcanic explosions, and as it rises, the sea level drops a few meters.
– What do you want with me? –The man thinks.
He does not speak. Fear forbids it.
But the creature understands him anyway. His gaze twists like with curiosity. Maybe the question has not reached it, maybe the answer is obvious.
But it replies anyway. The voice sounds not like a voice, but like a comet ripping through the atmosphere and colliding with the Earth.
– Life sustains itself through life.
When the creature punctuates its sentence, the sound it makes as it stretches an arm the size of the world and a hand the size of the moon amplifies the nausea. The man holds, with some magical bravery, the alcohol inside him, and thinks:
– But… Why us? We are so small. You eat stars.
The sound of rushing water first dazes him, then brings him hope. Could it be God, sending forth a strong current that would drag his boat away, far away from that creature that, in size alone, already bested the Devil to his title of Enemy?
The man looks overboard, and understands again, this time finally. The sound was not of rescue, but from the waterfall that ran from the lunar hand that lifted the boat, like a drowned ant, from the surface of the ocean and towards the creature’s eyes.
– You are all made of stars.
