Testament

by Jeff Cates

I am Father Matthew Steel.  I pray that a human being finds my emergency locator chip, then someone can read my testament. 

There were eighty-nine of us on the Prince of Peace when we left Earth 1,643 years ago.  We were so young when we were cold slotted on this holy mission.  I don’t know what went wrong or why I awoke before the others.  A titanium artificial rushed me to the waiting lifepod.  

I survived on prayers and half rations for seventeen months before I reached this world.  As the pod braked, the monitor gave me a cloudy glimpse of a patchwork quilt of stone cities, jagged fences,  and grazing herds.  Hundreds of these lumbering slis-slis died when the lifepod’s heatshield broke up on my rough landing and set their pasture ablaze. 

As I crawled out of the burning pod, scores of tiny Shish (as I later learned they were called) gaped at me.  Between us was a shepherd boy lying on his back in the blackened stubble of the field.  He wore the same woolly robe as the apelike adults surrounding me.  There was soot-stained mucus in the fur around his protruding mouth and nose, and his chest was not moving.  My broken left arm hung uselessly at my side, but I bore the pain and breathed life back into him.

When he coughed and cried, one female ran from the group, hugged him to her chest, and carried him away.  Half of the Shish fell to the ground as the others ran away.

An army of these meter-high creatures returned wearing leather-studded armor.  Several hesitant soldiers threw ropes around me and began to drag me down a dirt road.  When I tripped and fell, I must have passed out from the pain.

I awoke on a bed of grass in a tall stone tower with a barred window.  When I looked through the bars, hundreds of Shish hissed below.  Many held infants or colorful flowers in their arms and lifted them up toward me.  I did not understand.

Without vocal cords, the Shish sound like someone whistling through their teeth.  It took me months to learn even their simplest words and a year before I could string them together into sentences.

Their priests bring me food and drink.  I have told them hundreds of times that I am an ordinary man and ask them to set me free.  They listen politely and repeat that an ordinary man cannot fly and bring the dead to life.  My heart sinks when the Shish say they will worship me here forever and never let me fly away.

It has taken me hundreds of nights to loosen the mortar around the barred window with a bit of metal.  I have decided that one soul is unimportant when measured against thousands that gather in false worship each morning.  I dream that they will see me fly one last time.  May God forgive me.

Alfie couldn’t wait to get to the cemetery that morning. When the young man appeared in her headlights, it was a shock to her heart when she stepped on the brakes, and they didn’t work. It was a bigger shock for Israel.