Melody pressed her nose to the glass, the cold surface sending a snake of a shiver down her spine but she ignored it. Everything was so bright and colorful, the greens of the seaweed, the blue of the water, the meriads of fish streaking through the water like rainbows.
Her eyes couldn’t seem to take in everything that she wanted them to, all the beauty that surrounded her only kept away by the thick glass.
She gasped suddenly as the biggest fish she had ever seen rounded past a large piece of purple coral. He stopped his current course in order to turn his body, his fins propelling him in her direction.
Melody couldn’t help placing her hand on the glass, said fish swimming even closer to her, his gigantic eyes focused upon her own.
“Flapper. That’s what I’ll call you,” Melody said proudly, patting the smooth surface as if she could feel his golden scales beneath her fingertips.
She stared on in awe for what’s seemed like an eternity, talking to her new friend with a new found enthusiasm.
She had just finished telling him her favorite food and in turn asked him his, when she heard a familiar voice calling her name.
“Melody! Come on it’s time to go!” He mother called, coming around the other side of the tank to find her daughter.
“Mom! I want you to meet Flapper! He’s so big and pretty!” Melody exlcaimed happily, skipping over to the older woman.
“Flapper? And who is Flapper?” She asked her daughter curiously.
“My new best friend! Come on!” Melody said as she pulled her mother by the hand to the other side of the tank. She felt that she successfully explained Flapper to her mom so that she would be prepared once they had the opportunity to meet, but Joan was very confused when her daughter showed her what she had been so obsessed about. The mysterious and magical “Flapper”, turned out to be only a tiny Squareback Anthias according the the plaque beside that particular aquarium.
Joan’s eyebrows raised as Melody introduced the pair to each other and seemed to habve a conversation between them that she was apparently not privy to.
Eventually, the pair had to return to the guys of their family, Joan’s husband looking at her with concern as they approached.
“You two go ahead but not too far, ok Andrew? Melody?” Dave instructed his children, the pair overjoyed at the prospect of seeing more of the aquarium.
“Yes Daddy!” The two called out in unison, giggling as the continued on their way.
“Are you alright? You seem confused,” Dave asked as he pushed the stroller forward, their youngest daughter ingrossed in her teething ring.
“Melody wanted to show me this colossal fish, but when we got there, it was just this little thing, barely bigger than a clown fish,”
Dave laughed good naturedly. “Is that all? I thought it was something worse!”
“I’m serious Dave. She had me worried,”
“I think there’s a much easier explanation to this than you think,”
“Oh?” Joan asked, crossing her arms. “And what would that be,”
“It’s simply seeing the world through the wonder of a child,”
“Come on trooper! We’re not outta the woods yet!”
The voice is forceful as well as encouraging notwithstanding the severe gash in my left greave and consequently my leg, the red staining the metal. My brother slides up to my elbow and leaves a trail of dust with his boots that I almost feel a need to correct him about.
“Brett? You ok?”
I nod through the smoke and dust encrusting my lungs and stinging at my eyes as it’s the only action I can muster at the moment.
The firefight sounds distant due to the ringing in my ears but I know it’s simply just over the ridge, our brothers in arms baring down upon the enemy without regret or respite. My eyes shift in my skull unbidden, my mind grasping the fact that I will not be seeing tomorrow.
“Pres, you gotta get outta here. Save yourself,” my words come out coarse as though sandpaper lines my esophagus and I can barely make out his brown hair shifting as he shakes his head no amidst all the debris hanging on the air.
“Not on your life!” He stubbornly shifts himself beneath my shoulder blades, his own weight jacking me up on him with a series of strenuous groaning. I hiss at the pain in my side as Pres pulls me from the rocky crags, hauling my nearly useless body free from the area and in the direction of what looks to be a cave hidden among the rocky outcropping. As we draw nearer, my assumptions are rewarded with being truth.
“Stay here,” Pres whispers, placing my wounded form as delicately on the stony ground as he can and apologizing profusely when he hears me utter a cry of pain.
“Like I can go anywhere!” I mutter sarcastically, a cough reverberating against my spine as I wave him off, encouraging him to return to the fray.
I have finally settled into a semi-decent spot, applying a makeshift tourniquet to the wound on my leg and removing the greave for better access. I lay my head against the cool stone at my back and my developing headache begins to simmer less.
The sounds continue as I wait and watch as much as I can through the small gap in the cave. Mostly, I just see smoke and hear the cascading echoes of constant gunfire that it almost lulls me to sleep as the day passes by into night.
“Brett! Wake up!” The voice is louder than I expected, my eyes and my ears gradually returning to reality.
I stutter awake only to see my brother sitting before me, blood streaked down his face from an unattended wound to his forehead, but he is smiling, blood and dirt smeared against the white surface.
“What? What is it?” I ask, still trepidatious.
“We won! It’s all over!”
I don’t even dare to breath at his words. Over? Is he sure?
Pres nods, his teeth disappearing from his smile but his grin remaining all the same.
I instruct him to help me stand and we limp out of the space together, greeted by the sight of bodies strewn against the ground, across the hills and amongst the trees surrounding the gorge. The remaining Chaos Guard have surrendered and are surrounded by a number of our fellow soldiers armed to the teeth.
The sight of gold suddenly streaking across the bodies of our fallen comrades and the enemy forces both of us to lift our hands to shield our eyes.
“What is that?” I ask, uncertain.
“It’s sunrise, brother,” Pres replies almost reverently.
I sigh, breathing in the scent of the new day and the new beginning ahead of us. I feel the tears leaving tracks on my dirty cheeks as I gaze upon the sight.
“I never knew a sunrise could be so beautiful,”
“Red is such a ghastly color,” I think as I look upon the scene before me, crimson flooding every corner of the room. The brightly painted walls even make the flickering candlight bleed with the shade, almost as badly as the woman strewn across the bed. Her prone form saturates the room with the stench of death in a way that even I as a soldier cannot seem to get used to. “No one should have to get used to this,” I whisper, my colleague Aelius Horatius looking at me from the corner of his eye, asking what it was I just said.
I shake my head replying with a curt, “Never mind,” as my fist clenches around my helmet and I begin to turn away from the scene; the odor is starting to get to me. I make my way outside the small room, leaning against the outside of the building for some sense of support and take shallow breaths through my nostrils in order to fill my lungs with fresh air and eradicate the smell of rotting flesh.
“Domitius Caelius!”
I barely register my name on the lips of my fellow Centurion as he too exits the house, careful not to stumble into me.
“What was that about?” Aelius asks, his words heavy with his breathing.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I try to repress my own emotion back down into my chest where it belongs.
Aelius gives me a look with his striking green eyes, a look that I had gotten used to from our years of service to Caesar and our government. His stance doesn’t change, but his gaze is piercing and says everything that he doesn’t dare put into words despite our friendship and identical rank.
I sigh deeply, allowing some of my walls to break around my tightly clenched feelings. “I should be used to this kind of thing by now,” I reply, looking up at the cloud speckled sky.
“No one should have to get used to death. We may be soldiers but we’re no less human Domitius,” he says, his words bringing little encouragement like I know he was attempting to do. “Besides, it’s clear to anyone that this isn’t just another random murder. This was intentional,”
I give him a skeptical look as he voices what I had been thinking as soon as we walked into that room.
“That woman was silenced and her body is a warning to all those who would try to object the real power in this city,” He nods towards the temple that can vaguely be seen in the distance.
“The Pharisees,” I dare to breath the word out.
Aelius nods once. “Exactly,”
“But how can you be so sure?” I ask, still skeptical.
He taps a finger against the helmet under my arm making it “ting!” Under his knuckle.
“Use that detecting mind of your’s,” he says with a slight smile. “She was a follower of the Nazarene,” Something about how he says “Nazarene” instead of Jesus makes me a little uneasy.
“She was?” I ask, startled at the revelation.
Aelius nods yet again. “She was well, let’s just say undesirable type of lady. That’s why her body was staged the way it was to make people believe that she had returned to her former way of living and that one of her previous suitors may have done this to her. Those of us with half a brain can see passed that though. She was never as prominent as say, the disciples or some of the other women who followed Him, but enough that her death will send the right message,”
They both knew what that message was; stop believing in this so-called Jesus’ “miraculous” rising from the dead. More importantly, stop following him.
I shake my head trying to get that gruesome image of that poor bloodsoaked woman from my mind and another prone form makes it way to my memory unbidden. His body ravaged with streaks of blood that looked like they would never heal and wounds so deep in his hands and feet that I could almost feel the pain myself as I pounded the nails in myself. I blinked away the recurring nightmare.
“Aelius,” I ask, his hum the only response he gives as he inspects his own helmet.
“How do you deal with it? The blood?” I know that if anyone could help me, it would be the man who had been beside me while we carried out our governments orders.
He sighs, looking weary. “I don’t. Not really,”
That’s not exactly the answer I was looking for.
“But I remember the look on His face as He lay dying, a look that told me He forgave everything that I had ever done and everything I will do,”
I never heard such words of reverence pass my friend’s lips. He looked at me then, his normally battle worn face filled with a brightness I had never known.
“I can live with the color red, because it brought me new life from the loss of His,”
I watched my friend as he walked away, his helmet glistening in the sun as he placed it atop his head and his words ringing true as I now realize that he has been changing a little bit at a time over the last while and I’ve just now started to see it.
“Perhaps red doesn’t have to be such a gruesome color after all,”
