The Nothing Within by Andy Giesler

Author:Andy Giesler [Giesler, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781733567602
Publisher: Humble Quill LLC
Published: 2019-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

6

Turning Back

I ran.

Though running’s not the right word to use, really, when you’re hurrying through the woods without being able to see it.

When you have no sight, you make do with what’s familiar. Why, by the time I left Surecreek, I suppose I knew that whole village as well as I knew my own teeth. When things are in more or less the same place today as they were yesterday, you get to know them pretty well, pretty quick. And although I imagine everything in that forest stayed in more or less the same place one day to the next, I didn’t know their places. It was about as far from familiar as could be.

But I got by as best I could. I knew which way to head down Slowbird Creek if I cared to reach the Scheiss, which I did care to. I stumbled often, and I fell now and again, of course. Only one time did I plow the earth with my face. Gradually, I remembered the use of my staff and my ears and my nose and my feet.

As I made my way along the creek’s edge that cool October afternoon, I thought of a great many things. But again and again I thought of Shepherd Gabriel. Of what I’d done to him. Of him lying there by the edge of Slowbird Creek. Of Mender Vernie when she fell, and how helpless she’d been.

By and by, I wondered. I didn’t know what Gabriel had done to take my sight. But as I thought on it, I remembered that whatever he did to me, it seemed to bother him, too. Even wrapped in my self-pity, I’d heard him stagger toward me unsteady. So I started wondering: If he could take so much from me, might he have taken as much from hisself, too? It didn’t seem right, hurting him so bad and leaving him there. Just didn’t seem right.

So that’s when I turned back.

It didn’t take me quite so long to return to the waterfall as it did to leave, for now I’d remembered again how to move. As I neared it, I followed the sound of the falls, then I tapped along the bank til I found him lying there, just as I’d left him.

It gentled my heart to feel he was still breathing. I set down my pack and my staff, and I spent a few moments washing and cleaning his wound with water from the creek. Then I tore a strip from the warm blanket in my sack and bandaged his head with it.

I imagined that in my travels to come, I might need food more than he did, but I left him half. Though I cringed to do it, I left him the knife, too. Out here in the forest, he might need it when he woke. I’d like to have kept it, but my staff would have to do. After dithering for longer than I ought, I finally decided to leave him the bow drill, too.

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