The Shadow
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He came from Sudan. His long neck and ebony skin spoke of noble blood. The glow had grown lack luster, the result of a movie, a transplant from a tropical wasteland to an industrial one.
He would sprint across the campus from time to time, longing to feel that stretch in his tendons, that burn, running towards an eternally unattainable horizon. He keeps running though he knows that the path always ends, at a concrete bench or gray, somber pavement. This land is out of touch, it lacks life at its very essence.
He slips into lecture halls and pretends he is one of them, a child of the affluent, a child of privelage, learning about numbers and letters. He gingerly tries on these words like an expensive coat, places them in his mouth like a delicately crafted petit four. His tongue runs along the smooth edges of some. The integral, a beautifully carved curve, like a violin, holding some secret meaning that escapes him. Is this the secret to all of this, to those beautiful leather shoes, to her gleaming straw hair? Is it this knowledge that separates him from them?
He wears his work shirt with pride. It shouts the initials R, P, I in smart, authoritative embroidery that seems to be on fire in the scarlett cotton. If they could only see hi now. He’s no longer that child with torn rubber flip flops, his sole pupose to beat his older brothers in pointless races. But now, he has won the ultimate race. He jumped through those napalm laced flaming hoops. He dodged the traps that had been placed in his path. He made it. He’s here, alone yes, but here. This glorious land of opportunity.
See that immense glass case, holding a beautiful wooden ship? This is what it’s about, making your life something worth enshrining in glass. Something to be honored, for all to see. Lines will be pouring out of the doors to see this man, this incredible specimen of humanity. Look at this man, enclosed in glass! Look at him and be amazed! Just a man, one man and he made it. He made it.
