His Tongue Has Tasted Blood
The blue, dusky light fell in the room from the opened door, giving the high ceilinged parish hall an eerie muted feel, like a dark forest at twilight. It had been a warm day, and before the potluck we had played prisoner ball with the sagging volleyball net outside, but the light faded and the breeze cooled the air, giving my skin that stiff, dried sweat feeling you get when you cool down after being outside all day. The light from the projector was the only light in the room but for the blue, dusky light. The speaker spoke of Zambia. She showed it on her screen.
And then, one of her pictures caught me like a fish, or maybe it was something she said which caught me like a hook catches a fish. My breath stopped, my ears plugged up. I swear, the experience was similar to being a fish. The fisherman struck with his pole, the hook yanked into my gums, and the line yanked my head in another direction. I was completely disoriented. My vision spiraled to darkness.
I wasn’t in the room. I had been snatched into a vision.
I was in a twilight field. The sky was grey shifting steel and cobalt. The tall brown grass bowed in the wind to a dark figure.
Before me was a lion. He was the color of shadow. His eyes, full of lurid arrogance, locked in to mine. I stared back, perspiration starting to form around my tense muscles. My skin shuddered and hardened with goose bumps, and the wind, raked the rigid hairs of my arm and sent chills down my spine.
I stared into his narrow, obdurate stare.
I did not know his name, but I knew his works. His teeth were like daggers. They devour the helpless. His tongue has tasted thousands of gallons of blood and yet is not satisfied. He has no mercy, no compassion.
Courage–or foolishness–swelled in my chest. I did not break my gaze. I knew that to break it was death. If I broke it he would pounce and sink his jaws into my flesh. I had to remain firm. But my knees, would they hold the weight of my panicked heart?
The woman droned on with her presentation, but I did not hear her voice. I was in one of her slides. I was standing in a field with my enemy before me.
My knees shook. I held my gaze.
The lion’s eyes were yellow and in them was cruelty. In his eyes I could see his countless victims. I could see them even as the woman, the “missionary” droned on about the statistics: the percentage infected, the AID’s deaths, the hunger numbers, the poverty numbers, the disease numbers. And though I did not know his name, HE was the statistic in that place. And he was watching my every move.
We stared. It may have been seconds but it felt like the string of eternity was tied between our eyes, and to cut that string, to break that stare would be death. That I knew.
But my knees, would they hold me? I wasn’t sure I would be able to stand under that stare.
