Wind God's Silent Psalm
Joseph Jacob Reyes
ReyesJ@kenyon.edu

Images flashed against his eyelids; a dented frying pan, familiar faces, bo staves, waterfalls, a stiff, wiry beard that changed from black to grey. All of these were devoured in explosions of flame, in the repugnant scent of hot metal slashed though with ozone and smoke. An acrid taste still lingered on his tongue, and the vast pressure that was like giant hands squeezing still grasped his body. Memories came back to him and fled and mixed themselves together with wild and feverish dreams.

And yet, through the unimaginable horrors that he imagined and recalled, a tiny thread of music wound its way into his heart and spread all throughout his body. The sound of many united voices and instruments carved by nature rather than man sighed all around him, sometimes raised high in song, and sometimes no more than a vague crooning. He existed in a strange state; half conscious and half not, in which he could understand the terrible state of his broken body, yet did not accept it. Sometimes all that held him to his sanity were those piping voices, like silvered bells and reed whistles.

As he lay broken upon a pallet woven over many weeks by tiny hands, he tried to remember, to hold on to any true memory that was not fogged by the blazing hot touch of death that he had only just escaped. Just as he believed not even that thread of music could not hold him, blessed coolness came with familiar hands and familiar voices.

“Will he be well?”

‘I think so. The sylphs have done well by him. We must let him rest.”

The hands and voices departed, but left behind a silent song that only he could hear, and he fell at last into true slumber.