The world creaked.
The dead spoke.
His body heaved.
Unseen hands stroked.
It is good to be drunk when one is dead, for the rending of flesh and mind by mane and devil seems distant, a pain not mine.
He was a small man, a stone mason by trade, with big hands and sharp eyes and a stern way, the man that had taught him to work, who had taught him to obey, who had taught him to stand before his Master, and “let the storm pass,” Father.
Yusef stood tiny and alone.
Mother quavered, soft and undone.
Father stood, submissive, yet stern.
The “storm” had not “passed.”
The axe-faced man sat his war horse.
Little Yusef was held by the Hound-Master’s cruel boys.
The bell-headed Hound-Master cracked his whip.
Mother was taken into their house by their Christian Master—never to speak again, to live out her days in a numbed silence.
The four hounds, long, tall, lanky and wire-haired, long teeth white in the morning sun, slathered and snarled.
Mother’s first moan came from the house and, as if on a cue, the hounds were unleashed.
Father went down like a shrub dragged from its place by a harnessed mule.
Yusef shivered at the tearing sound, shook at Father’s wheezing gasp, trembled at the cracking of the bones, quaked when a hand—those strong mason's hands—was torn loose and the boys who held Yusef laughed in guttural pride as if they did this thing.
By the time Father’s head was cracked open with the Hound-Master’s stave to permit ravenous jaws to get at the brains, Yusef could no longer hear, his mind having willed the ears to sleep.
The soft, rasping creak of coconut husk fibers against the beams and boards they bound into a dhow, came to him out of the mazed dream that ever returned, synchronized with the heaving sense he recalled from his year sailing the Sea of Got down to Zanzibar, only he was heaving as well, a swell on the very heaving deck he sprawled upon.
Or was he that deck?
Or was he the swell that made it heave?
Why could he not see?
Were his eyes taken?
Why…
And he swelled, on the swelling deck, on the swelling sea, slipping from life into the unlit Lands of the Dead who spoke, spoke above, spoke below and spoke all around, whispering their ghastly greeting without a sound.
