Origin

By Janet Belding

Everyone gets born the same way, the name in the Bible.  Well if I was written in there it was lost in the fire. We had no water to put it out and there was wind, no rain.  I woke up one day and I was a man with no memories. I don’t even remember the name of my father’s wife, after my mother, sometimes I sense her outline.   I woke up one day as you see me now. I come from God, placed on the earth already grown. I dodge the accusations I am the reminder the devil can appear out of the dried up well in the backyard.  They think I set the fire so everyone thinks I stole the baby’s veil because I left to seek my fortune.  If fortune is what all I’ve seen.

Everyone is dead now.   So I walk away, into the landscape, where the rain has started.  I have a kinship with the rain, not with floods, something lighter, rain mixed with sun.  I don’t wait for a rainbow that may slip notice anyway.  I just walk into the hills, and down the other side into the town where the railroad stops, then moving on to the next stop and the next..

I carry things I have no idea where they come from.  However I am still young and I can breathe.

Young enough to have a wife who bears a son, but I can’t sit still, can’t live in a town, work in a bank and she wants to stay.  I send for her a hundred times and each time she doesn’t answer.

Janet Belding is a writer living on Cape Cod. Her passions are gardening, walking in the woods and the study of nature.  She has been published in “Sky Island Journal,” “The MacGuffin,” and “plainsongs,”