It may not be flash, but it seems to read quickly. >Maybe some tips on shortening?
My room opened onto a second story balcony. How wonderful it was for my hosts to provide such a view. From there, I could see the surrounding chapparal landscape, rock and wind-swept dust, ranging mountains of dirt afire in the glow of the brilliant morning sun. Below me lay a courtyard sanctuary of groomed trees and manicured shrubs. Two fountains at the far corners spilled their water into large marble bases with a sound like children innocently splashing. Everything was connected by several paths, all leading to an open center area close to the house. Most of the dancing the previous night had taken place in this center area.
It was there that I had been proposed a position on Don Carlos´ ranch. This was his great house. Looking into the morning courtyard, I saw her again, standing by the fountain whose waters now sparkled in light of the morning sun. She held her head erect, bending slightly toward the back. It was the dip. I remember it well. Same spot, same pose, the only thing missing was me. It was then that she stole my heart. Later that morning, I would have a proposition of my own.
She is as beautiful today as then, perhaps more. If only I were not so foolish and quick to act. Perhaps then she would again speak to me. If only I could relive one single night. Perhaps I must just become resigned to my sentence, for truly the action of a moment is the doorway to a lifetime.
She is far too young and beautiful to be so silent. At first I thought it would pass, and then that I could atone. But who was to know she could keep her tongue so long? Six months? One year? It has been five. And each morning, I rise to see her lovely face, her long dark hair falling from the crest of that vision, a vision that once had smiled, often and at me.
We would dance. Always in the moonlight of that same courtyard where we met. It had become our courtyard. Her parents died tragically in an act of senseless brutality. Bandits from the south invaded our small village. But there was nothing there for them. We are small, one square, one fountain, we do our banking in a town 10 miles to the north. They found nothing they wanted, and so they raided the outlying ranches for what spoils they could, leaving us in ruins. Yet still she could smile at me.
Every evening, she sits in her chair, knitting lace, making inventories for her kitchen; night after night, never a word, not one look in my direction. I feel a silent chill run down my back when I look at her, the beauty that is her slowly wasting away. I touch her when we sleep. She is warm, yet cold. I cry to her but she does not hear. She hears only the crying of our son. Echoes from another time.
On the night that he was born, the bandits returned to our village. As I held him for the first time, I tried to calm his crying with the tip of my finger in his mouth, but he would only push it away with those tiny hands whose fingers could not yet uncurl. When the word came to me, images of my smiling wife with her mother and father instantly played in my mind. I quickly turned to join in the fighting.
So strong was my fury at our loss and so blind my passion for revenge, I became too quick to leave my family. And in my urgency, I forgot the precious bundle in my arms. I turned back just as I was crossing the doorway. There was no sound from within the room. The crying had stopped. I followed the direction of their gaze and saw my son, now silent, lying on the clay-tiled floor. Where once there ran a decorative line of symmetry we had picked out before our wedding day, there now ran a red line of blood, racing for the cracks between the tiles, quickly navigating each intersection as if it knew the way of escape.
The bandito ring was crushed that night. None survived. Some said that was a shame, that it would have been good to hang them in the square. An example, they said. I had my own example. Their blood pooled in the dust of our roads. For them, there was to be no escape.
Perhaps there will come a time when my tears may melt the beautiful heart of my bride. And then we may again make a family. But for now I am here, in my own pool of bandito blood, and I wait.