So Be It [Chapter 9]

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 9:


The shining black miniature Mercedes sat parked on a cement step, twinkling in the brilliant Nairobi sun. Adam raised a large rock over his head, grasping it viciously on either side with his small, determined hands. He swung the rock down hard onto the car, the impact vibrating through his wrists, into his forearms. He pushed the rock aside and glared at the remains — shattered plastic windows with both tires on one side bent out sideways, flattened at a grotesque angle underneath the car’s mangled body. Adam was disappointed that the car wasn’t more broken. He brushed its corpse into a pile with other crushed, fractured toys, reached into his cloth carrying case and pulled out a small Land Rover. He placed it onto the cement killing field, measured and set just so, his lips pursed, intent.

His mother suddenly shouted at him, staring down from the top of the steps, “Adam!”

He looked up, turned away and ran, crashing hastily into the closed wrought iron gate.

“Adam!” he heard her shout again from behind. Her slippers snapped against the hard steps as she moved in his direction. He fumbled at the gate’s stubborn handle, hitting it with closed fists, shoved it open and ran across the road, darting into the hidden alley. Adam kept running, gulping labored breaths, his face contorted in anxious escape. He ran until he was sure she wouldn’t follow, until the brilliant tall weeds on either side of him changed colors and became short, until the curves abandoned the red-soiled path, allowing it to flow in sloping straight lines that led away from roads and homes and voices, lines that emptied into an expanse of rolling, wheat brown fields.

Adam stopped, his head nodded to the earth, his hands on his hips, panting. He swallowed, looked up. The world was behind a curtain somewhere back there, behind him, he knew, but not here. Here, the sky’s gentle, azure hands held soft puffs of cotton in the far distance, at a line where rolling tan fields reached up on barefoot toes to softly kiss lazy blue eyes.

There were no witnesses.

Adam caught his breath. He refused to look back, preferring abandoned fields and infinite blue. He stumbled to the path’s edge and dropped down, hugging his knees in front of him, staring at the gravel aimlessly, at the V-shape of the red rubber straps of his flip-flops, starting in a fork at his big toe and stretching over and around his small brown feet. The fields suddenly basked in a subtle scent of sandalwood. Adam felt a rustle of air gather and move behind him. It brushed its delicate fingertips against the back of his neck in paternal faith and then trotted off into the fields, its ashen palm fading.

Adam closed his eyes and sobbed.