The Prophets(114)

“You sick?” Isaiah asked, grabbing at the same areas. Samuel felt hot.

“No!” Samuel shouted suddenly. He pulled himself up and leaned his back against the tree. “Don’t touch there. I don’t wanna hurt you.”

“You scaring me. Tell me what’s wrong!”

Samuel’s eyes opened wide. They began to glow like lamplight. At the edges of his body, a halo orange as a sunset and red at the rim appeared. His breathing changed from quick panicked spurts to a labored rattling. His glowing lit up the night. Isaiah stumbled backward. He hit the ground as though he were pushed by something. In the night around them, Isaiah could see what looked like faces, so many faces. Some of them his.

The light grew brighter and brighter and Samuel screamed.

“KAYODE!”

The name spun and echoed, sped by Isaiah, and left a burn streak across his chest, marking him. He put his hand there. He looked down at the scar, then back to see Samuel reaching his hand out to him. Isaiah crawled forward, pressing against the invisible thing pushing him in the other direction. Closer, closer, humming, from everywhere, humming, like voices, five? Six? No! More! A proper circle. He heard it. Pushing, pressing, away, away. And Samuel right there. Isaiah getting closer. Almost. Their fingers trembled and nearly touched. Then it was too late.

The last sound was fluttering. Samuel burst into fireflies. Or was it embers? On his knees, shaking his head, mouth open and quivering, with his eyes still dazed from the light, it was hard for Isaiah to tell.

The tiny bits of light that were once Samuel, maybe still Samuel, swirled upward, into the night, with no regard for who or what they were leaving behind, blinking, twinkling.

“No!” Isaiah yelled and tried to catch them, but they floated in the air, too high to reach. And soon, they disappeared into the darkness. Isaiah stopped. He fell face forward to the ground. Slowly, he turned on his back. He closed his eyes and it was, he thought, as if a light rain had fallen on him, dew trembling at his tips. He opened his eyes. I witless, he thought, allowing himself, finally, to be calmed by his own slowing breath.

But he had touched Samuel’s face, so it couldn’t have been a dream. He had felt his breath, his wet skin, stared into his eyes and seen the virgin soil of them. It was real. Had to be. He looked at his own chest. Mark right there. But people don’t turn into fireflies, do they? He had seen eyes at the bottom of the river, his own face in a light. Dead, then. Maybe he, too, was dead.

His heart cracked. As each piece fell, it made it increasingly difficult for him to move. He couldn’t get up and he didn’t want to. He would wait right there for Paul and them. Whatever they decided to do with his hide was all right. However they decided to skin, stretch, and wear him was now destiny. So he sat there, trembling, weeping into the palms of his hands.

Then someone whispered a name.

He looked up and saw, in the north direction, a tiny orange light.

“You here?”

He got up and ran in the direction of the light, not looking back, not stopping. It could have been a piece of Samuel, lingering, drawn, sent to fetch him. Isaiah followed it, panting and reaching out for it. It led him deeper into the forest, where he stumbled over bumpy roots and felled branches, got up, and leaned on pecan trees whose fruit hadn’t yet husked. And still the light, like a tiny, dimming star, hovered, danced, and whispered a name. When it did, Isaiah lunged forward, allowed himself to be pulled along and led to the source of everything.

He leaped and bounded into patches of dirt, pieces of earth that seemed scorched and not yet reborn. It was hard to tell in the dark. He fell over and over again, scratching his legs on jagged rocks. But he kept going, running until his chest burned right where he was marked, and begged for all motion to cease. He collapsed onto his hands and knees at a place of great darkness. He looked behind him and it was as if the world had sealed itself off, a barrier never to be breached. All that was there was the speck of light he knew had to be Samuel, bouncing gently in the air, holding within itself the dawn.

He heard a sound coming from that place, too—a hissing, maybe a growling?—and thought that meeting his end by way of copperhead or cougar was unfair given the lashes he took from other animals; his back was proof. Besides, something else had already begun to eat him: desolation. No more Samuel. No Maggie. No Essie. No Sarah. No Puah. No Be Auntie. This was the purest damning. Even Amos’s company would do now, as long as he wore the name somewhere on him for Isaiah to see.

Deadly thing this kind of solitude. When unwanted, it was a tingling, then a burn. At least that was what it felt like to Isaiah, starting right at the gash on his chest. It was growing, spreading like fingers that might at any moment become a fist or curl in an attempt to choke. He knew that the pain would become harder and harder to bear. And he knew that it would always be with him, whether he was alive or dead. This was the burden of the soft ones: to suffer in all but silence because the whimpering that slipped through the lips was inevitable. Samuel must have been right. Surely, he cussed the heart that knew not how to protect itself from the rift. For shame.

There was nothing else to do, then, but wait. In those last moments, the least Isaiah could do was honor Samuel by giving stone a try. It wouldn’t be long. Just time enough to receive his blessing though no one was there to see it. He looked ahead to face it, whatever it was, in the same manner he was sure Samuel faced it: eyes open. The darkness before him wasn’t still. It convulsed like a living thing with seven tentacles, attached to figures maybe, twin darknesses. Holding sticks. Voices that sounded more like pebbles than humans. He had no choice. He reached out to them, fingers unsteady in the moist air, and felt something touch him. He jerked away and then, in the following quiet, reached his hand out again. Whatever it was, it was smooth, silky, familiar. He crawled toward it, plunging his hand in farther and farther.