“The silent silhouette, passing through the light, there and gone, is burned into my mind. Someone else was there. A savior, perhaps. It’s not much to go on, a memory of a shadow, but you dig, and you find stories, stories just like mine, stories which go back, back ten years now, back to you. What did you see that night?”
“Nothing. Nothing, that is, I can add. You saw what I saw. I thought that was the end of me. Those, back then they didn’t even care much about taking your wallet or nothing. They just wanted to kill. Put people in hospitals. That group’s burnt out now. You don’t hear too much about them. Not politic. I just wanted to tell the truth. They were already on me. I was trying to fight, but I don’t care who you are; five guys jump you and you’re gonna get beat. Anyway, they were kicking me, and I thought I heard the sound—you learned to listen for it in those days—the click of a knife. So, I knew it was over. I can still see it all now. Look at me, I’m trembling. I think you said, burned into your mind. Well, this is hard to remember, because I can’t forget, lying there, in pain, knowing I was going to die. Then, they stopped. Someone shouted, I don’t know what. Not English. And I lift my head, for just a moment. My vision’s really blurry right then. I was concussed. I see someone, all in black, and he’s like a god. Moving faster than any man I’d ever seen, knocking those vermin down like, like, it was so graceful, it was like a dance. Then only darkness. No one believed me, but they didn’t know what to believe. Tried to make me a racist, you know, for being white and getting attacked by a bunch of brown guys. But, they couldn’t pin the deaths on me when it happened again, and the same story. I don’t know who he is, what he is. That was ten years ago and he’s still going and I don’t know how. I think he’s got to have something. Don’t know what. How old he’s got to be, I’d say he’d passed the mantle on or something, but there isn’t one in a million, not one in a, I don’t know. The physical prowess he’s showed, what others have said, it’s unreal.”
Tale Told 