Feed My Soul

By Peter Bowden

He said it quietly, not as a prayer exactly, but as something close enough to be heard if anyone or anything was listening. Feed my soul. The words did not rise so much as settle, like dust finding its place in the corners of a room long lived in. It had been a day of small weights, voices that asked more than they gave, hours that moved without leaving anything behind. He stood at the edge of evening, where the light thinned, and the world loosened its grip, and he realized hunger was not always of the body.

He went outside the way a man returns to something he once trusted. The air carried the faint memory of cut grass and cooling earth. Somewhere, a screen door closed with that soft, familiar complaint, and a dog barked once, then thought better of it. He sat without purpose, hands resting on his knees, and let the quiet come to him instead of chasing it. A breeze moved through the trees, not strong, not certain, just enough to remind the leaves they were still alive. And in that small motion, something answered him. Not in words, not in any way that could be held or repeated, but in a feeling that filled the spaces he had been carrying all day.

It came slowly, the way good things often do. The sound of birds settling into their last conversations. The sky giving up its blue without argument. The steady rhythm of his own breathing, unnoticed until it mattered. He felt it then, not full, not fixed, but fed in the way a soul asks to be fed: a little light, a little quiet, a reminder that not everything must be earned or understood. He stayed there until the dark made him part of it, until the hunger eased into something softer, something patient. And when he stood to go back inside, he carried it with him, not as something finished, but as something begun.

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