The Exile:

The Exile:

The American grasslands were truly great, Ivan learned this in un-great steps. An inch at a time, he progressed what seemed to be infinity. A vast half frozen plain stretched beneath him, a blue one above him. The things in-between appeared hellbent to kill him, in a slow, cruel and unusual way. He’ seldomly thought of cold as a predatory force before, but now it nipped at his heels, stole his breath and encircled him. Ivan slowed like tired prey, but he knew if he stopped he’d be eaten by frost and encased in the sub-zero belly of nature. He was hungry and surmised that everything else was hungry too. Even the trees looked starved by winter and they waved at the sky for mercy and sun. He had walked for two days, and his feet had swollen. His shoes were still laced and where the leather met the skin, resided a pain formerly foreign to him. The discomfort came in waves and began in his toes where the moisture had crept in through loose stitches. The pain then radiated to the sole and backward toward the heel. The unforgiving and firm terrain only exaggerated the sharp stabs and forced him to shuffle his feet instead of step. The only break he received from the agony in his feet was caused by his belt. A two day fast had shrunk his waist line, now his trousers hung loosely and rubbed on his thighs, the friction caused a sore. The sore had burst twice already, when it did, he was momentarily relieved of the pain in his feet.

Ivan had passed two wild deer grazing the frozen fields. Even if he knew how to hunt, he lacked the necessary tools, skills and energy to do so. By trade, he was a money man, he knew finance, banking, loans, investments and just about everything under the umbrella of money. Spiritually, he was a man of God. There was no money in the wild, and he found no God either. He tried to pray, although he produced mostly feeble whispers that slipped from cold and cracked lips. Where God had once been, in the trees, the blades of grass, the creeks, in the morning dew and in every creature, was now only nature. The two had been interchangeable before, synonymous even. To Ivan now, nature seemed inherently malevolent, and she ate anything remotely benevolent. Nature taunted his prayers, it whipped wind through the pines, for a moment he thought that God whispered back. He’d peer at the pines and the wind would break, and then it would whip again as though to snicker. Vulture like, nature kept a close eye as Ivan passed through it. It watched with a sinister anticipation, even though she had seen a similar finale a trillion times. She was patient, she refrained from spoiling the end and only prodded toward it with cold gusts and sharp hail, the fingernails of nature’s hand. Death was surely close for Ivan, but he’d survived longer than he had thought he would. Everybody back home knew his exile was a death sentence under a semi-humane mask, one they could face in the mirror. Now he wandered west of the westernmost point of civilisation, an inch at a time, and the furthest south he’d ever been from heaven. Greed and gluttony was his crime and it landed him precisely nothing, less than nothing, perhaps.

Ivan paused a moment and sighed. The Earth had turned a shoulder from the sun and away from the small warmth it offered. Now it rotated toward the vastness of nothing. Night was a peculiar thing to Ivan, how half of the Earth’s population was spun toward the coldness of infinite solitude and how the only lights in it, were thought to be ghosts in the sky. A grave reminder that man burns brights and dies slowly in isolation. The pain in his feet soared in idleness, so he moved again. The motion and moment made him think of a song his grandfather once sung. “Shuffle on, shuffle on. One step, two, shuffle on. Struggle on, struggle on. Don’t stop, for you, struggle on.” Ivan whispered the words and dragged his feet in time. One step, two, one step, two, and his eyes slowly closed. One step, two, he struggled on. The sun dipped beneath the horizon and would reappear in the morning behind him, he didn’t know if he’d be alive to see it. There was a cold night ahead and he was fading. He was scared, but why? There was only life in the plains, and not, only the living and not living. The transition between one and the other seemed much easier than clinging to the former. “Struggle on.” He sung. “Don’t stop, for you.”

In the quiet of approaching night, the music of a train thundering across its tracks echoed. From the distance, its thin plume of steam danced in the last of the light. Ivan inhaled new air, laced with trace amounts of hope. His shuffles became steps again and his grandfather’s song burst from his chest. Nature retreated to her former position, a merely beautiful backdrop, how it had been before exile. He moved as swift as his swollen feet could take him, but the steam and the symphony faded together, and the last of the light, and the song, and the swift steps. Nature whipped the pines and turned the temperature down. So many people lived off the land, until now, Ivan hadn’t realised how little it had to offer. Everything truly was starving in one way or another, and to feed, itself, it ate itself. Now the train was gone, maybe nature would eat him.

He pressed on into the growing night, toward the tracks and toward civilisation. The train was long gone, but he knew there would be another, maybe in the morning or perhaps in a day or two. All he needed was the strength to run along side it and hop up. From there he was out of natures grip and high tailing back to the land of glazed buns, hot baths and coffee. The cool air blowing in from the north was cooling further, and again he had notions of not surviving the night. A hot bath appeared like a mirage in the in the fields, like a mirage of a cold spring in the desert, nature had her tricks no matter the climate or terrain. This night’s trick was the stars and sky, the gentle sway of whippoorwills and the need to close ones eyes. Ivan did. He laid down and listened to the sounds. Now he was in natures arms and rocked whilst she whispered a lullaby. Rocked not to sleep, but to death, the best death, a light one. His eyes drew heavy and the cold turned to a near numbness that could be mistaken for warmth. The exile drifted toward obscure serenity as mist rolled from his nose and lips. Peace followed and frost fused his lashes. It was all okay, just sleep. He’d either sleep until sunrise, or sleep forever, the difference meant nothing now. “One step.” He said.

The morning sun met a fresh blanket of ice. From the ice, somehow, Ivan emerged. He wiped his eyes, shuffled his feet, hummed an old song his grandfather once sung, and made for the tracks.