The Love That Would Be Heard

As Noah slept, a pair of tears made their way under his tightly closed lashes and down to the sheet he held gripped in a fist at his chin. In his dream, an event of the day had disguised itself and was carrying on without reality’s rules and regulations.

He and Betty had been out on the water. He had anchored at a nearby island and she had waded ashore with their lunch and a blanket and the white terrier Monday. He was reaching for his camera when he saw the skull.

What in the day he quickly realized to be only a rock down in the seaweed, given a special look by the sunlight’s refractions in the undulating shallows, in his dream remained a skull.

A skull that started talking.

Coming through the water, the words were not clear. Seized with a sense of emergency, Noah plunged his head under.

“Son. My son…” he made out.

He thought he might drown, but he kept his head under.

“Papa, is that you?”

The words became more clear. “Noah, I’m so sorry.”

A wealth of pain bloomed in Noah’s heart. He didn’t want an apology. His father had left him. His father had kidnapped him. His father had died drunk at sea.

“Is that all?” he yelled back.

“Yes,” said the skull. “That is all. That is everything.”

Noah was so angry, if it had been someone live, with a body, he would have hit them as hard as he could. “That isn’t enough,” he said instead, with all the passion he could muster.

“But it is,” said the skull. “It has to be. Because it’s really love. It’s love with a mask that a blind man could see through.”

Noah lowered his voice. His anger had dissolved into a sadness so vast he was lost in it. “Who are you to tell me about love?” he asked the skull.

“I am the one. I am the one who can’t move on without your forgiveness,” the skull answered.

Later, when he told Betty the dream, she asked him what he thought it meant.

“It was my dream,” Noah said. “It meant I am the one.”

The bus came to a halt. They got up and went into the school. As he walked through the door of his classroom, Noah remembered he had forgotten his books, and his homework, yet again. He sighed, wondering what would become of him.

16 June 2024
Texas Jim
Prospect, Nova Scotia
www.granitecoast.ca