The Forgiven

by Lawrence Osborne

The land smelled like Morocco. Cypresses, resin, lemons and dry dust. The breeze had forest in it and parched hillsides and the smell of algae drying on stones.

The moon danced as a dinner-plate-sized counter-image on the water’s surface, not even undulating, intensifying by its presence the depth of the shadows lurking around the pool.

The skies were so clear that the whole hillside was shocked into visibility. Cacti beyond the walls shone like tin; the rock formations offered a thousand ancient details. The air was warm, soothing, still, and the palms murmured as a breeze sifted through them, then stilled themselves in preparation for the next murmur.

Only the slopes of loose rocks looked higher than they had, less regular, and between them the groovelike ravines where the darkness seemed to collect like a fluid. It was now heavy in some way, this landscape, ominously saturated with its own inner gravity. Bones, marrow, but no skin, no external sheen.

The outside never knows anything.

Deep in his grave, his son remembered his past, but no one else was admitted to it, and the riddles from now on would recede and grow more complicated, since life is but a sport and a pastime, as the Koran carefully reminds us, and because it is a game and nothing more, one forgets that the point of life is death.