Amistad

A Story by MrOshimida27

I wrote this three times, this time was the only one that fit. It was a dream I had and slight reflections afterward. I woke up crying.

Amistad

WALK. Blazing a bright diamond white, the veritable centerpiece of the rubies and emeralds which hung about it, no signal could have been clearer. Two long and previously unacquainted roads terminated here at this crosswalk, this intersection. Though it was a foreign land to me, I reached the crossing with the familiarity of a native, a regular. My memories cannot name the place; my heart calls it the corner of First and Amistad. Beyond the faux confines of concrete and facades which flanked both my empty road and the unfamiliar yet equally barren Amistad laid the strangest and most alien expanse which my worldly eyes had ever beheld. A field of sown green grass, measuring perhaps one hundred yards wide and traveling countless miles towards the horizon, seemed to siphon energy from the heretofore overwhelmingly ebullient city in order to fuel its own warm, luminous glow. As the storefronts and porticos, even the mighty doors of Schmits Tivoli, dissolved into the growing blackness of night, and all around me froze in time and summarily vanished, I found myself entirely alone. Regardless, the beckoning glimmer of the distant field drew me towards it, beneath the gemstones of light that were the streetlamps and, as the beacon directed, across the crosswalk and to the fringe of the grass. A dark silhouette against the now-radiant expanse assured me that I was not alone.

With a twirl of her sable black hair about her familiar face, she whirled at catching sight of me, took to her feet and alighted with a half-restrained laugh. She fled not from fear but coquettishly, enticing me to myself break into laughter and enter into a faux pursuit. We covered a distance of what seemed to be miles as one, past the deep fringe of the elfin forest which tightly hugged the right flank of the park and eventually banking left along one of several concrete pathways which flowed through the vast expanse of the field. Here an odd covered bench, not unlike those at bus stops or train stations, lay in the distance, illuminated by some unseen incandescent light yet dimmer than the heartening warm glow of the park, which now encompassed all to either horizon, First and Amistad both far behind us. Though we had together crossed many miles in mere seconds, I felt no exhaustion; I felt, if anything, a rush of cold, of pure ice flowing through my veins; my heart of winter had surely shattered. She, however, though I had always known her as strong, had tired, or perhaps merely tired of running.

With the same casual flourish as always, she swung from the sidewalk and onto the bench, the left side, her head and shoulders leaning with comfortable ease against the sidewall, her legs halfway stretched across the bench and halfway twining down, allowing her feet to dangle just inches from the soft grass. A flirtatious gesture of her right hand extended to me an unspoken invitation. I gracefully slipped onto the bench beside her, our eyes meeting once more, our hands joining once more, our hearts together once more. And I saw, reflected deep within her beckoning gaze, the light which burned somewhere unseen, the light which fed both the heavenly amber glow of the field and that of the covered bench, our newfound repose. For in a flash of seconds, within a splinter of my mind’s eye, that unseen fire had rent asunder and melted my cold core, my heart of ice. Here, past the corner of First and Amistad, was our singular paradise, all else burned away by the fires of love.