The Leaf

She awoke, her champagne hair spilling from her face, her eyes deep blue pools of truth, to a morning kissed by the bright promise of the Mediterranean Sun. She walked to the door of her small cottage in the shore town of Lemesos and stepped outside to the comforting smell of sea salt filling her nostrils as she took deep the morning air. She walked the short distance to Petra tou Romiou for a morning swim and relaxed on a large white boulder in the sea, appearing as Aphrodite may have after she emerged from the bright sea foam, exhausted but alive, with the secrets of love and beauty smiling from the corner of her mouth. She thought to herself that it would be a good morning for travel to Northern Cyprus in search of the beautifully intricate Turkish silver jewelry and powerfully seductive perfumes of ancient times. She donned a white cotton sundress and pair of leather sandals after carelessly drying the sea's lasting dew, leaving her body semi-visible as if her skin kissed through the cotton in a vain attempt to expose itself to the Mediterranean sun.

The filthy stench of the cab that carried her to Northern Cyprus was only surpassed by that of the driver, and both stood in indignant juxtaposition to her calming confident beauty. It had only been a few days since the Greek and Turkish border had been opened. Very few had traveled between either, through the de-militarized zone crowded with razor wire, barricades, and buildings that stared vacant at one another, their souls long consumed by the mortar and bombs of men obsessed with important powerful goals, goals just as vacant. Upon reaching the border crossing, the cab violently revolted as the driver refused passage, the air around filling with the empty still smell of fear. Her long elegant legs lifted her slowly from the cab as she traded a handful of dead coins in exchange for the services of the wreckage of a man capable of nothing as commonly brave as delivering her to her final destination. He had abandoned her at the guard gates. She had liberated herself of his presence.

Each foot pressed forward the other in a cat like style while the sound of her sandals on the burning black asphalt announced themselves all to readily through the bullet ridden barricades and razor wire lined walls. It was only about one hundred yards across, but with every step her adrenaline fueled blood violently rushed through her head and ears sounding like the jet engines at Larnaca Aeroporte and she could feel the eyes preying on her. They were the eyes of men with guns, men in opposition of another by order of writ. For the first time, their cowardly eyes watched a woman walk on foot through a passage where men were brutalized and died, the ground tainted by their blood then slowly consumed by the soil under their warm bodies as all their memories melted away from the split second impact of burning steel and copper. As she approached the Greek guard gates, she passed a devastated storefront. Posters for movies long forgotten hung limply on the exterior walls, flaying in the hot dry wind. Advertisements for products long deceased consumed the windows, their colours faded like the souls of those that frequented here. The porch was decorated by the various remains of a Volvo station wagon half visible through the front doorway, burned beyond recognition, a testament to the oblivion of a mind whose value was no greater than the effect of self-destruction in an aim to harm the innocent. "What was the cause?" she thought. Everything was covered in the blank empty grey of nothing, her mind buzzed with resentment not for what she could think and feel but for what she did not know.

A brightly colored crimson leaf hesitated in the dead hot air between her and the ghost of a building, like a testament to memories that reminded her of someone she once knew. Someone who danced between the rich colors of now and an empty pale future, taunting either in endless obsession with a dare even the devil would not entertain. She stopped walking. There were no trees nearby or vegetation save for the dead dried grasses and shrubs in this passage of death, yet they were all that were left to speak the story of what took place here. She heard the loading of a gun, the sharp sliding of metals coming together in anticipation of nothing. There was nothing living here, except for the twisting and turning leaf, briefly floating in the hot dry air, slowly, painfully, reaching toward the ground while reflecting her memories from across the past and into the future.

She thought, "Where did it come from? Was there some garden nearby? Some, oasis in this valley of death? Where was it going?"

The greedy echo of a gunshot stole away her attention. She glanced in the direction of the sound only to audibly witness more, all hollow in existence, followed by more, all hollow.

Turning back, leaf was gone. She thought, "A testament."

She turned back toward the shots rifling through air, thinking, "A testament of another kind, but hollow."