What Forgiveness Must Be (in the Garden)

By Peter Bowden

The moon was a bowl tipped slightly above the trees, spilling silver across the grove. The fire between them was no more than a sigh now, a hush of coals breathing faint light onto their faces. One looked like dawn remembered. The other like a shadow trying not to fall.

“You knew,” the first man said. His voice carried the weight of stars—not blame, not anger. Just the ache of knowing too much.

The other man didn’t answer at first. He held a stone in his hand as if it had been placed there by the night itself. “I did,” he said, barely above a whisper. “Since the beginning.”

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was crowded with memories, with laughter from other fires, sandals kicked off near wells, crumbs of bread left on plates, names spoken gently in sleep.

“You could have turned back,” said the first.

“I did,” said the second, “in my mind. A thousand times.”

“And yet…”

“And yet.”

The wind moved through the olive branches like a woman brushing out her hair. Time stretched, yawned, and bent.

“It wasn’t the coin,” the second said, gazing into the ash.

“I never thought it was.”

The first reached out—not to restrain, not to punish. Just to touch. A shoulder, trembling, perhaps. Or maybe still.

“Did you hate me?”

“I loved you,” said the second. “Too much, maybe. Or not in the right way.”

The fire gave one last spark and fell quiet.

“Will you ever forgive me?”

The first man looked upward, where the stars blinked like the eyes of old prophets. “I forgave you before the first word was spoken. Before the first footstep. Before the first kiss of dust on our journey.”

The stone fell from the second man’s hand. It lay quiet in the dust. The coins near his feet glinted faintly in the firelight, as though ashamed of their part in it all.

They sat a moment longer, as though time had given them a gift it rarely offers—stillness.

Then they stood.

One turned toward the garden, toward the gathering storm of footsteps and steel.

The other walked toward the edge of the grove, where the trees gave way to nothing but dark.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Woman Who Folded Her Way to Glory

By Peter Bowden
Image
She folded t-shirts at first. Part-time, under fluorescent lights that flickered like indecisive lightning. The shirts were always the wrong size or the wrong color or folded the wrong way, but she smiled anyway. People asked her where the bathrooms were. Sometimes she told them. Sometimes she pointed vaguely, just for sport. It was the beginning of something, though no one—not even she—knew what. In time, she went full-time. Gave tours with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for puppies or preachers. Her voice could bounce off stone and charm a bored teenager. She wrote press releases that made people care about sidewalk chalk festivals and the grand opening of the third best coffee shop in town. She remembered birthdays. Brought cake. Brought joy. She once stapled her blouse to a budget report and didn't notice until after the staff meeting. It became legend. She was that kind of legend. And now—after 29 years, 10,713 days, 4 broken office chairs, 113 bad hair days, 7 crises...
Read more

She Was Always Sad

By Peter Bowden
Image
She was always sad, though most people never noticed. She laughed at the right times, nodded when spoken to, and never once caused a scene. But there was a heaviness behind her eyes, like clouds that never moved, just hovered quietly. At the coffee shop, she always took the seat by the window, looking out as if waiting for someone who never came. The truth was, she had once loved with the kind of fullness that makes you believe you’ll never be alone again. A hand in hers, a voice calling her name from across a quiet room, the warmth of another body curled beside her in the coldest months. And then one day, the world cracked open, and he was gone. Just like that. No storm. No explosion. Just silence where there had once been everything. So she carried that silence. Not with drama or despair, but with the quiet dignity of someone who had known something precious and lost it. Her sadness wasn’t bitterness—it was love, still alive, with nowhere to go. And so she let it live inside her, s...
Read more

Things Are Quiet

By Peter Bowden
Image
The house was quiet now. The mornings came and went like old friends who had grown tired of the visit. He would sit at the kitchen table with his hands around a coffee cup that had long gone cold, staring at the empty chair across from him. The ache was not loud, nor did it rage. It sat in his chest like a stone sunk to the riverbed, unmoved by the current of passing days. He thought about the way she would hum softly while drying the dishes, the sound slipping through the cracks of his memory like sunlight through a dusty window. He missed her without ceremony, without grand displays. It was a dull, persistent throb that never asked for attention but never left him alone. Sometimes he would walk the old path down to the river, where they once threw crumbs to the ducks and talked about small things that seemed bigger then. The air was thick with the scent of pine, and he could hear the water moving over the rocks, just as it always had. It made him angry sometimes—how the world did not...
Read more