dontravis.com
blog post #314
 |
| Courtesy of Wickipedia |
Brother Bucky got a pot load of hits last week, but not many
“likes.” Would appreciate a few from my readers.
For this week’s short, short, my friend Mark Wildyr allowed
me to adapt a story he posted on his blog on April 1, 2014. He wrote the story
in homage to a friend he lost to HIV/AIDS. A recent article I read on the global
health crisis known as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, prompted me to
recall the two individuals I have known who succumbed to the horror more
commonly known as AIDS. In the early days of the disease, it was almost always
fatal. My friends depicted below were stricken in those days. More recently
Antiretroviral Therapy (ART), has allowed many of the infection’s victims to
live longer, less horrible lives. Let’s pray the affliction is soon wiped out.
At any rate, here’s my adaptation of Mark Wildyr’s April
2014 piece.
*****
WITHERED
ON THE VINE
Shafts of sunlight piercing
cloud-capped tempests. A slender oak sapling prematurely gnarled by drought. A plump
young melon rotted from within… withered on the vine. We’ve seen them all.
A bright future never realized.
A quick, mischievous mind laid waste. Wiry swimmer’s muscles emaciated and atrophied.
Tanned, silken flesh suppurating and splotchy. An indomitable spirit piteously
eroded. You’ve seen them all? Then you must have known my friends, one felled before
his time and the other in his prime, by the poison whose name is whispered in fearful
awe.
They were both as incandescent
as that golden sunbeam, as tenacious as the fledgling oak, as sound as a prospering
gourd. Joyful, flirtatious, puckish, engorged on sweet temper, sated by gentle good
will, they shambled through life handsome and desirable, recognizing and reconciled
to being different from their fellows. Too late, each put aside promiscuity born
of lively curiosity and turned to steadfast fidelity. The hateful venom had
been transmitted. Invaded from within, they began a long, horrid, inevitable diminuendo,
complicated by tuberculosis and meningitis and bacterial infections that defied
naming.
Struck down by God for
abominable sin, the self-righteous proclaim. Nay, the libertines decry, there
is no God. How could an Almighty permit the destruction of such humanity?
They are wrong… their
certain knowledge as corrupted as my friends’ shriveled frames at the end time.
They were not vexations upon the population; they were the most human of
humans: a blend of perfection and fault, good and bad, noble and mean. No God
of my acquaintance could be offended by their genial attendance. Challenged,
perhaps. Unsettled, maybe. Enchanted…absolutely.
But if there is no God, then these terrible tragedies
become meaningless, insufferable, interminable catastrophes. If He does not
exist, then who will pluck those unique, harmonious souls from the wretched human
detritus left behind?
Such horror must not be
the end; cannot be the ultimate Omega.
*****
Such
a tragedy.
Apparently,
the virus was not originally carried by humans. It originated in champanzees,
and somehow was transmitted to humans.
Please
get a copy of my latest book, The Lovely
Pines, and provide feedback on
the novel. If you do read the book, please post a review on Amazon. Each one
helps.
As
previously noted, The Bisti Business was
named as a finalist in the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards in two categories:
Best Mystery and Best Gay Book. Sadly, the book took no prize in either
category.
Now
my mantra: Keep on reading. Keep on
writing. You have something to say… so say it.
My
personal links:
Facebook:
www.facebook.com/donald.travis.982
Twitter:
@dontravis3
Buy
links to the Lovely Pines:
Abaddon’s
Locusts is scheduled for release on January 22, 2019, and the first draft of The Voxlightner Scandal is this close to being completed.
See
you next week.
Don
New Posts are
published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.
No comments:
Post a Comment