Young Writers Society

I stared at him.

I stared, because I hadn't the mind to do anything else.

He did not seem to notice me. In a way, I thought, it was good that he didn't. He lay crumpled on the dirty linoleum floor, bleeding where his rusty manacles rubbed skin. It was disgusting, how his skin not only chafed but rotted, leaking ichor alongside blood and pus. His hair was a tangle of long, blood-shocked strands that clung to his face, neck, and shoulders. He lay motionless, broken on the ground, head bowed. His whole form shimmered, almost as if he was a mirage. I stared at him in awe.

I stood transfixed, something akin to fear rushing through my veins and roaring in my ears. My wrists, my ankles, my neck felt bitterly light and increasingly so as I looked down at them, then at the manacles that so cruelly clamped around his. He did not belong there. Yet there he was, in what seemed to be a hopeless repose that touched the borders of death. A picture of defeat on a blank white canvas. A foreign thing in a room, a space, wherever it was we stood, that held nothing, nothing at all but him. And me, of course.

What was that, twirling around in the periphery of my mind? Guilt? Sorrow? Curiosity? I failed to place it. An alien, obscure weight in my stomach, sour and restless and flopping like a dying fish. Words; words tumbled around in my mind. Meaningless fractions of sentences and questions bounced off the insides of my skulls, colliding with each other and forming more meaningless phrases. Even unbound I could hardly move.

"Why are you in chains?" I inquired, surprised at my own ability to speak. My heart hammered wildly against my sternum with the force of Mjölnir, faster than a jackrabbit's. Silence was his only answer. I stood. I stared. I gathered myself and stepped closer. "Who put you in chains?"

Again, no response. I asked again and again, repeatedly, incessantly, madly, and he still gave no response. I could not see his face. I paced closer to him so that his bowed head was only two feet away from my knees. His stillness was gasoline and he was fueling my frantic, confused cacophony.

But what was he to me? That I could not tell. He was nothing. He was a thing with chains on his limbs, unmoving, unresponsive. That should have been the extent of it, but it wasn't. I needed to know who he was. I needed to know something, anything about him. Something that could clear the clutter in my thoughts and the rush in my ears. Something that could stop the hideous churning in my stomach.

Countless questions I flung at him, a silent breath his only reply to each. IT was not long before my words were barely words at all, merely noise I made in a vain attempt to drown out the raging swirl of little demons inside me. At last, in a blazing column of frustration, I screamed--a hoarse, anguished screech rose from the deepest regions of my being. I screamed until I could not feel my head. I fell silent. No. Fell into silence.

"What's your name?" I asked, after an eternity. His frame expanded, breathed, came to life before my eyes. His hair shimmered and shifted from one color to another as he moved. He moved to rise--his shoulder blades protruded, not unlike a cat's when it stalks its prey from tallgrass. As he got onto his knees I saw that he was naked, but in that time and being I did not care. He stood. He was incandescent. Kaleidoscopic. Positively divine.

In one moment, he looked a Bedouin--skin dark like the finest rosewood, an angel of the desert; and the next, he was an ivory sculpture of Freyr. One moment he was skin and bones and nothing more; in the next, he stood a spitting image of Apollo. I looked up. His eyes were as iridescent as the rest of his being--shifting and dancing across and within a vast spectrum of colors. And yet all this inconsistency mixed into one solitary unfathomable hue of wholeness and perfection--one that not even the blood and wounds could mar. He bore his manacles, bore his collar, bore his chains with pride and strength that I have, in all my life, never encountered.

"Tell me your name" I implored. A smile wove onto his face, one that so easily displaced hopelessness and defeat with a valiant halo of victory. He breathed in deep before releasing it again. His lips parted.

"My name..." he began. His voice was like sandpaper, hoarse and dissonant, as if he hadn't spoken in centuries. Even so, it was a timbre of deep, elegiac melody and I felt that his voice alone was the definition of music. "Is Freedom."