Glenda

     It was going to be another hot day. Glenda had walked all night; the second night. It was not easy. The heat exhausted her easily. Her pack weighed nearly 70 pounds. The sun wasn't two hours above the peaks yet, but gnats already hovered around her sweaty face, annoying her even more. She was irritable, paradoxically, considering the idyllic beauty.

     Her backpack was an army brown tan. The sides were frayed and tattered, borne of many years' use, adding a camouflaged attribute. An assortment of patches on her jeans blended with the soiled stains of many earth tones. She reached for her bandanna and wiped her sweaty forehead, belonging to a chiseled, bronze toned face. She hated the stickiness of sweat on her skin. She felt miserable, out of sorts and realized that at least she felt. She had sensation.

     Her brother had none. He had no sensation from his neck down. Her long distance treks in the back country of California's Sierra Nevada Mountains were solace for her brother's condition. She missed Theodore. They spent many years together trekking cross country over vast distances. Their passions for hiking and adventure were equal. They were soul mates. She missed Theo.

     She walked with a frustration and anger that she hadn't dealt with yet. Her anger remained unresolved, even after many years. One of her personal attributes by which friends recognized her was her tension. Friends' comments included her metaphorical reference to being a glass vessel dangerously prone to shatter and with it cut those in range to ribbons. So far she hadn't yet snapped, far from it out here in the wilderness.

     The wilderness helped her to cope, otherwise she may have leaped off a skyscraper by now, she had confided to a close friend.

     Glenda fell into a mesmerizing, automatic mountain trek of leg motions in her strides. She reflected the past as if a video were playing in her head. She would hit pause periodically as she reached certain frames of particular poignancy, Theodore had almost died; his spinal cord had almost completely snapped at his fall. He had fallen nearly 200 feet, bouncing and tumbling off a granite cliff's ledge. His fall had been broken only by loose scree at the bottom of a grass tufted ledge.

     The accident happened five years ago. Theodore was in a steady declination of death since then to the present. She thought of him as a wild caged bird. He couldn't speak due to the paralysis. Glenda thought that his eyes begged for her to kill him, but it was against her faith's beliefs.

     Anger continued to escalate in her again. "If only Theo could be here now, God!" 

     "God, I . . . !" She couldn't say it. She thought it, but she couldn't curse God."

     A cold tear slowly built-up in her right eye, gathered volume and drifted slowly down her cheek. Other tears followed its trail and then others fell from her left eye, released beyond her control to hold them back. The tears' combined flow accumulated down past her jaws, joining to become a stream onto her neck and beneath her blouse.

     Glenda's anger increased toward God. She felt humiliated to cry. She had done her iron- willed best to restrain the tears, but their release was beyond her ability to control. It seemed to her that God had won; she had blinked first.

     And yet. It felt good to cry. She felt an immense release of withheld pain. The anger melted away, replaced with a profound sadness which now affected her heart. Her heart seemed to fibrillate with a cool sensitivity. It felt as it an unseen hand was holding it, holding her chest with love's tenderness.

     She clenched her jaw, resolved to stop the tears' flows. She would not yield, not until Theo was either dead or healed. She had stopped walking momentarily, overcome with grief and now she firmly took another step of conviction forward. She was driven by an iron will.

     The pastel clouds had moved southeast somehow. She felt she had lost time. During her emotional release of tears and introspection toward Theo; time seemed to have stopped. Somehow she had walked to the point she now found herself. The sun still blazed above her, further up its zenith. The gnats remained behind somewhere, for whatever reason unable or unwilling to pursue her. Perhaps her strong two and one half mile per hour gait was too much for them.

     Tiny particles of granitic sand and grit shattered erosively under her boots' soles. Pleasant sounds to her ears, now calmed by tear's earlier release. Other than these sounds it was utterly quiet. No moving creatures of any kind anywhere near her. Her breathing was rhymic. The creaking of the backpack and her steps didn't count as sound. She loved the sound of walking, boots on granite. It was music. No other sound compared to it. It touched her soul and melted glass; her glass became silk, silken strands of acceptance. No drug, no therapist, no sauna could assuage her hurts like being outside, in the wilderness, alone. Except being with Theo!

     "God, I am sooo mad at you!" Her angry shout bounced off the rocks and sky above her, muffled only by tree's absorbing branches. Small birds appeared out of nearby shrubs and flew away from her. Formerly invisible, they served as reminders that she had violated reverence toward their creator. 

     For the first time she was able to express her anger to her invisible God. 

     "You could have prevented his death, Dad . . . , " She stopped short of uttering Daddy, an address she often used in addressing him before Theo's accident. 

     "You could have prevented him from being paralyzed God. He's not dead, but he may as well be!"

     She quickly realized one of her mistakes in shouting out. Firstly, someone would surely have heard her outburst. She had avoided the main trails. She had to. People were looking for her. The prisons in this New World with its new world order rules were full of people like her, people of faith, people who were unwilling to accept the new world order's mark. The mark was not a tattoo she was willing to receive.

     Secondly, she realized that she had yelled at God.