minimalism

One week ago, he sat in a barracks in the town, shoulder to shoulder and knee to knee with compares, under the watchful eyes of the dictator’s henchmen. 

Those henchmen fired their guns in the air and jammed them into the compañero’s backs as they left a mass meeting demanding rights for the campesinos and a new, democratic government for the people by the people. 

The prisoners were stripped down to their undershorts, slapped across their faces and heads, and spit upon by the henchmen. 

One henchman took Tomás’ hands, hands he used to write the speech that was delivered that night at the mass meeting, hands he used to build up instead of tear down, tied them to a table, and hit them over and over again with a heavy, jagged rock until they were swollen and sore, broken and bleeding, until tears streamed down his cheeks and fell off onto the dirt floor like drops of rain from a heavy sky. 

The prisoners hadn’t eaten for three days and drank water from a bucket and a rusty, dented dipper set down in the middle of the room.

His eye was swollen and blackened from abuse, his stomach hollow and cramped from hunger, and his tongue so dry he could barely speak. 

Then, as he held his head in his arms, hunched over, falling into despair, he heard explosions and gunshots around the camp. 

The guards ran this way and that way in confusion. 

The prisoners moved en masse toward the door and spilled out into the night. 

He made his way to the barbed wire behind the barracks.

She was there. 

She leaned close to him, catching her cheek on a barb, and took the wire into her own hands and pulled it apart until he could step one leg and then his whole body through to freedom. 

She pulled him to her and kissed him softly on his cheek. 

“Hola, mi cariño,” she whispered. 

“Gracias,” he breathed. 

“Estoy aquí,” she gently sang. 

“Estoy aquí.”

She rocked him back and forth in her arms. 

He wept as if he were a boy lost, then found. 

The tears fell again, but not onto the dirt floor of the prison.

They fell onto Gabbys dark, tender skin. 

In all of the chaos around them, she took his arm. 

“Vamos, tenemos que ir,” she said and pulled him away.

- trevor scott barton, stories for a brown-eyed girl, 2020