The Color of My Fears [COMPLETE]

Chapter 4 - More Visions [#16]

Time resumed its forward march and I fell on my knees. After a moment the length of a heartbeat, I saw a figure standing in front of me. He extended a calloused hand.

"Are you looking for me?" Ismael asked, helping me up from the moist earth.

"Yes," my voice quivered in the darkness, hardly audible. "I saw you standing beside the guava tree. And suddenly the tree grew tall and large and sucked you and your house. One moment, you and your house were all gone, and in the next, you're here as if nothing happened."

Ismael kept quiet. Why the silence, tell me why, I preferred to ask myself instead of the boy in front of me. His silence was deafening. If silence had colors, his was totally black, blacker than the dark that enveloped us, dimly lit my moonlight.

What were you doing there beside the tree, anyway?" I regained my composure, shook off the emotion I displayed a while ago.

"Oh that, I was waiting for someone," he said at last, in his characteristic way of stating the obvious. "Father said I'm to wait for the hermit here."

"Wait for who?"

"The hermit of the creek," Ismael said, trying to sound nonchalant. "He comes here once a year. When he couldn't, he sends a messenger."

"The creek hermit? I thought I heard you saying he's dead. He was drowned when he swam after that strange booklet you showed me."

"Yes and no. He's dead alright..."

Ismael stopped talking. He leaned closer towards me, and in a whisper, said, "He came back, resurrected (nabanhaw). He'll send a bird, all black, to bring something. I wonder when it's going to come. It's getting dark already. I might have missed it."

At the mention of a bird, the first part of his revelation escaped my attention. The rest did not so much strained my incredibility as it piqued my curiosity. The bird was all I had in mind.

"A bird? You mean like the one I saw in your closet? And what would it bring?"

"I don't know, father said it brings either good fortune or bad luck. It depends," he said, his voice back to normal again. But I discerned he harbored something that he wouldn't want me to know. For now.

"But it's just a bird, how could it probably bring good fortune or bad luck," I protested, feeling incredulously foolish. I was falling into his world, I was being enchanted, I was trapped between two versions of reality. Despite what I had just witnessed tonight.

"It's not just a bird," Ismael said. In a hushed voice, again he whispered, "it's the tinhab," putting his right forefinger in front of his lips. "The bird can trap anyone's fears in the bottle, as it did with mine." The sacred name was muttered, and a cold puff of air ruffled my hair, blew into Ismael's, swayed the branches and leaves of the guava tree, shook the house and disturbed the water of the creek, ripples sparkling under the light of a thousand stars, reflecting the silent face of the waxing moon occasionally marred by marching clouds.

My cognitive dissonance just ran deep. Reality and fantasy had merged and I didn't know one from the other. I could not discern the difference if there was any difference at all.

[End of Chapter 4]

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