Real Is The Break Of Dawn

As a ground rule, religion is too dubious a topic for experimentation. Where one man sees faith as a passage to eternal life, another sees an immortal coil, and a third is apathetic to the argument his companions are having over a notion that can neither be proved nor disproven. With so much disagreement regarding the existence of an afterlife, it’s seldom wise to test the validity of the issue yourself, but that doesn’t stop people from trying anyway.

In the dark hour before the village clock’s hands struck midnight, Mel stood before the edge of a steep bluff, because he was going to kill himself. Before leaping to his death, he took a step back. Inhaled sharply. Exhaled, slowly.

It was cold and his breath plumed white. His skin felt raw in the night air, so he pulled his coat closer together and started jumping in place to stave off the creeping frostnip. He’d heard from Annie of Dee’s farm that dying frozen was a bad way to go, worse than dying in flames even, and he didn’t want to die in either of those ways.

“Hi, God,” Mel said. “It’s me again.” The woods were silent, save for the murmur of granule crunching underfoot as Mel shifted restlessly. The forest, as always, seemed to contain nothing but itself. Mel’s nose was itching, but he stayed his hand out of respect. He continued to stare up at the starry expanse a while longer, waiting. Then he sighed.

“You never answer.” There was no hint of irritation in his voice, only a leaden statement. “People been saying you left us, you know. That you don’t exist. People are leaving the village because they’re not so sure anymore. Annie of Dee’s farm said she knows a religious man outside the wall, and he says that people outside are just fine without God.” Mel’s expression hardened. “But they’re devil-folk.” He spat on the ground.

His legs were getting tired now. Mel seated himself on a nearby rock, then belatedly remembered his oblation. He picked through his pockets, and with a satisfied grin, produced a stick of dried meat, which he lay aground a few paces ahead of him. “I brought food,” he said, perhaps inauspiciously. He waited again, his mood souring as seconds and minutes went by.

“Maybe you really have left us or—" he knit his brows in hard thought, a look a mother would call ugly “—or maybe you’re dead. You died. Maybe Annie’s right.”

If he was expecting the booming wrath of some disembodied voice, he received none. He dug the dagger deeper. “Or maybe you never existed, and if that’s the case...”

Mel rose from his rock and bent down to retrieve the stick of dried meat. When he got back to his seat, he returned his gaze to the sky, occasionally taking bites of his food and scratching his nose.

The moon was gibbous, and its diffuse light limned Mel’s face in all its adolescent glory, pockmarks and erupted pimples and everything. If someone had been there to see him, they might have wrongfully sensed indignation in him (and maybe also purged the thought that he was one foul-looking bastard). But the boy’s eyes were welling with tears now, even as he cuffed his sockets to force the sadness back in.

“I don’t see the point in living anymore,” Mel whispered, to no one but the night. A kind of hopeless resignation washed over him, as though he were standing in the path of a tornado, or afflicted with some terminal illness even a prayer could not minister to.

He threw the sausage over the edge and listened for the moment it would land: a muted thud, roughly five seconds later. The cliff was high then; Annie had said devil-folk could calculate how high.

“If God is real, and God is good, I’ll wake up tomorrow.”

And in an instant Mel was up again, a spindly puppet animated by the deadening sorcery of despair. Slowly he shambled forth, inching toward the dark abyss, and then he was a hair’s breadth from stepping into empty space, peering into the dull black below.

A sound. A furtive sound. Like the papery padding of something in the underbrush. Mel arrested his forward momentum, right foot suspended over the edge.

The next day, he awoke to bright, blinding light.