Cain

The tall florescent signs cling to the buildings, illuminating their heights. He walks among the bases of them, as he always has, shuffling his feet as he goes his way.

There is a space between him and everyone else. It is not a conscious thing on their part, but all of them part and walk around him. He knows why. He knows why no one looks him in the eye, why everyone gives him a wide berth. It is that old mark, almost as old as time itself; literally.

Somewhere a voice blares out advertisements for the latest in virtual pleasure. He will not go. There is nothing for him there. They offer only artificial love, not real love. Real love is just like thirty five cent soda pop. They don’t have it anymore, haven’t had it for a long time.

Centuries of wandering weigh him down. He left Nod and never looked back, never stopped walking. The road was his place. The life of a vagabond wanderer, with nothing to call home, that was his. But was that part of the curse? He did not know, and he does not care now. Too much time has passed for him to care anymore.

Time. He has known quite a bit of it. The past is lucid in his head, though he has lived for millennia. He remembers when all was still somewhat new. He remembers his parents, and how they plowed the land for their food. He remembers looking far off, and seeing the paradise they were shut out of. He remembers his brother. He remembers his brother’s blood.

The mark on his forehead, the one put there as a ward against harm, itches. He rubs it. It always itches when he thinks back to that time. Not simply a murder, but the one that begat all the rest. Perhaps, deep in their souls, the people around him know this. Perhaps this is why they move away from him. Even so far after the fact, they know him.

He still walks the city streets. Cars whizz by him, honking and grumbling as they go. The people move around him and go on their ways. They go to friends and family. He has neither. No human will call him a friend, and all of his family went the way all people must go in the end.

Yet he has been denied that. Always he has lived on, feeling neither hunger nor fatigue, seeing slaughter and sex and all manner of violence and debauchery. He does not know why. Maybe this is another facet of his punishment; viewing the offspring of his action.

A pain grows in his heart. He does not understand why they have not learned. He learned a long time ago; spent a long age crying in a deserted place with guilt threatening to kill him. Perhaps he has been absolved, perhaps not. But he has made the effort. They have not. They go on in their ways, ignoring the warning that his punishment was supposed to be. It was written down for them, so plain, he does not understand how they ignore it. Even after all this time, he does not understand it.

There is a God still, this he knows. Perhaps one day he will understand, one day he will feel weariness at long last, and go to the same end that all others from that time have. He is not tired though. He walks on, beneath the giants of his creation, head bowed down in perpetual penance.