The New Gerbil - I

The children cheered wildly. I could hear them across the yard, through my closed windows. In the silence of the book lined room, heavy and still, their cheers reverberated like pebbles made to skim and plop on the surface of a lake. I try to live in the now, to look on the new and the beautiful, to see and hear hope and life. Those infant sounds, so loud, so disruptive of my solitude, brought painful recollections. Suddenly everything was there again. The horror, the insanity of my cousin’s death. I am again lost in the images, in what I witnessed. Sebastian’s body torn, blood. I hear the chant of those other desperate children. I know that is not my present but the past follows me. People have tried to make me believe that what I know to be true isn’t. That my experiences are imaginings of a delirious mind. But the truth is what I saw, the truth is was I told. From the other side of the window glass I hear new sounds, louder, stronger. There is no way to avoid them, I want to know, to see what is going on. I go to the window and I see a group of young children jumping, clapping and cheering around a tree stump. As I open the window to better hear, to see more clearly, I notice the smallish animal, rodent like that stands on its hind legs and speaks to the children. I hear part of what he says: “maybe”, “that’s sound”, “done as a demonstration”. Because I no longer stand in awe of anything, because I have learned from Sebastian all that I can be, I am not shocked, not even surprised. I am telling this story because it is true, I am sure of it, I was a witness. People will doubt me, surely, but that is because they have lost the ability to believe and to wonder, to marvel. I will keep telling the things that I live, that I see. Isabel Baptista