Sumera Parveen
The Last Sacrifice While sitting near to the sparkling stream, Ali touched its running water with his shivering hands.
The water, clear like the blue sky above, was not cold enough due to the scorching heat of June. He held some water in the palms of his dirty hands and drunk it abruptly like it was his first sip of water since he had born. The fear of being chased and caught by the infuriated villagers made him oblivious to his extreme thirst.
He stood up on his weak legs with a jerk and desperately moved his horrific eyes in all directions to find a suitable place to hide. Suddenly, he saw a small opening inside a nearby rocky hill, directly facing the sunlight. He ran towards it b ut as he reached there, he started listening the violent noise of furious mob that was approaching him like a vicious honey bees’ swarm wildly searching for the sweetest nectar to make a life giving honey. The thought of people with long, curly hair and beards and holding iron rods and machetes in their strong hands, made his situation more pathetic.
He even started limping out of fear as his legs were denying to move further but finally he succeeded in adjusting himself inside the narrow opening after reaching there and shut his dreadful eyes as tightly as he wouldn’t open them again. People were shouting and the clamor of their voices was sinking Ali’s heart which was already thumping like a pernicious knock by a stranger on a thick wooden door and he could even hear it through his own ears. He was losing all hopes of life. He closed his eyes tightly and his dense eyelashes like a thick blanket covered the tears swimming in the oceans of miseries. He embraced himself with his cold arms and glued his legs to his own chest.
The enigmatic smell of earth inside the small pear like hole, started soothing his deeply agitated mind and made him oblivious to his rigorous battle of life. The loneliness, pain and fear left his body for a while like a restless soul leaving a sickening body and returning towards eternal peace but the piercing sound of his shattering dreams like a clay pot being dumped on the floor along with the horrible shouting of villagers, led him to the world of desperate extremity. Ali had tightly fastened his bleeding abdomen with the only cloth, a three corner scarf embed with the symbols of deliverance and life, available to him during this time period of extreme helplessness.
His heavy eyelids with the burden of his imminent last sacrifice were drooping and blurring the dazzling landscapes outside the soothing hole. The smell of freshly oozing blood was being mixed up with the pure aromas of earth emanating from a dead soil that was watching the spectacle of existence with silence and anxiously waiting for the moment of the last sacrifice that could give her a possible new life.
