One day when the goats dozed in the field, Jamal wandered into the old man’s garden. The grass unfurled between their hut and the lake. In the west sprawled the rest of the village, the houses and the desert beyond. In the east reared a tall hedge, its entrance dim with afternoon shadows, an unexplored world beckoning beyond.
Jamal stepped through, and found himself at the beginning of a narrow green labyrinth. He followed the tunnel, narrow enough so that his outstretched hands—or those of a blind man—could easily guide him along as he walked through.
He ventured deep beyond the blossoms and the birdsong, deep where the old man worked, caught up in his own secret, his own world. Jamal paused between the streams of uncropped hedge that led him like the rivers to the underworld. For a long time the youth watched the shears fly like silver-mouthed birds in the old man’s hands and clip protruding twigs with bladed beaks. The tool attacked a bush. And then, suddenly, as if in magical afterthought there was a life-sized fresh-shorn ram. It stood frozen, one twig-hoofed foot raised as if in greeting.
How do you stand it? Jamal’s voice fizzed in sharp metallic tings before it faded upwards and was consumed in the clouds. His eyes blinked back sudden wetness, hands thrust deep until lost, unseen, in the void of his robes. When he opened his mouth, the black wind rushed in, so that his next words emerged only with a fight. Being different.
The old man maneuvered the shears around the hedge. Gray bolts of light flared up like electric sparks at every rhythmic clack. He didn’t seem startled by the voice or the anger. Jamal wondered how much he knew, how much he could see after all.
Why should I stand when instead I can dance? the blind man said.
The light faded as Jamal watched him pattern his choreography. He watched until the old man rounded the hedge, until he could pinpoint his position only by the flashes of light that sporadically spurted behind the bushes.
"Angreek87"
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