Of Ceaseless Rivers

• Jamal Moussa, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2012

White face. His eyes were closed, the folds of his eyelids forming relaxed wrinkles below his eyes, like dry rivers of tears digging through the surface, the blue-purple of his lifeless face only just visible beneath his young skin. His hands looked old, wrinkled as if he had spent too long bathing or as if he had left his palm too long pressed against a gravel road, leaving the imprints of each rock, its stories, and its fading surface existing in his palm. And now, in death, forever buried in the crevices of his hand to hold stories of life, love and war. Of war...of the sweating trembling hands of a young man gripping his new gun. The throbbing of his heart in his cold fingers, pressing hard, hesitantly on the trigger. Bang. The dead man falling to the floor, and his hands, free of wrinkles in his young life, brush the dead man’s eyelids and close, forever to close the life of a soldier and allow him to sleep. To sleep on the wet decomposing ground of a war field, his body bleeding, branches cracking beneath the old boots of young feet as the trembling men with their guns run past, their hands too gripping guns and closing eyelids, bestowing sleep on those who had families praying for them to wake.

The boy standing beside the coffin wondered who it was that closed his father’s eyelids. His mother wept, small bullets raining down her face as if she was the unforgivable sky, raining down upon the earth. The boy stood beside her, staring at his father. “Why do they look different when they die?” he thought. Smaller. Fragile. His mother continued to weep. The boy looked outside, wondering if the heavens were crying too. They weren’t.

Many years passed without his father. The young innocent experiences bestowed upon children at birth had been stolen, ripped away by the unforgivable dawn of war. The young man stretched out on his carpet and starred up at the ceiling. He often did this you see, he found happiness in the realisation of his insignificance. No matter what shall happen, no matter who shall die before their time, he would live until he too was called by the unforgiving void of inexistence. One was too small in this world to worry about the man behind them, holding a gun, getting ready to shoot. To turn around and face the gun was a futile cause. To run was also a pursuit in vain. One can only look forward maybe to focus on an object, a leaf glistening in the beauty of the sun, waving, it seemed, telling you to close your eyes. One could only focus on what their eye could see, think what the mind could think, and face the fate given to them, by the man with the gun. That’s what his father did anyway. The boy sat up and brushed the dust off his hands. Looking down he noticed how much older his hands looked after being pressed against the carpet for so long. Lines, etched angrily into his skin, like rivers he thought, digging their way to the surface. The stories of each grain of dirt, each piece of fabric embedded in his skin. He stood, looking into his mirror and noticed the slight wrinkles around his eyes. The rivers of stories and memories, he thought, that came with age. He looked once more at his hands; they seemed, in all the world’s vastness, like the wrinkled hands of his father living once more after death.