Page 28 - TheRedSon_PrintInterior_430pp_5.5x8.5_9-22-2019_v1

CHAPTER THREE

When the candlelight began to die down, the shadows grew
wide and indistinct as they joined with the larger body
of darkness that flooded the under-church, and still I sat
upon the stone floor, wondering. After the first night, the
light completely passed away, leaving only my memory
of candlelit spaces to illuminate the basement. Though the
blackness had become absolute, I still felt the cold shadows
of over a dozen crosses pushing softly against the currents
of flowing darkness, refusing to melt back into oblivion.
When the second night came and went, I was still sitting
upon the floor, losing myself in the cool stream of silence
pouring from corpses and cold candle wax, from old books
and dried blood.
Interpreting silence was one of the first lessons my
mother taught me, when I was but a child. In the middle
of the night, during one of the fiercest thunderstorms I can
remember, I was huddled in the corner of a room, wincing
at the thunder. My mother knelt down beside me, placed her
lips almost upon my ear, and whispered, “It’s not the thunder
you should be listening to, but the silence it leaves behind.
Before there was anything, there was silence, and after
everything is gone, silence will remain. All that ever was,
or could be, whispers its soul into the sound of silence—and
the only thing you will ever need to do, to know anything at
all, is listen to it.”

The Red Son | 31