Michtam's Hubris - Excerpt

- You, the reader, will likely not fully understand this excerpt since it deals with issues and characters you'd know from finishing Anticipation of the Penitent. Still, I'm hoping the interactions between the characters are understandable and interesting. The general outline from Anticipating Dawn is completed, so now the story is being written. I usually write at a point I feel like writing, which can be at any point in the book. Thank God for outlines. :-) 

Anticipating Dawn

Selah’s green eyes, the hazel flecks glowing in the flames of the bonfire, looked up to Michtam’s soft, dark brown eyes. He held her gaze for a moment.

When Rachel spoke, Michtam shifted to his mother's warm hazel eyes, softened even more by the sheen of developing tears. “Nothing can be said to make any of the family members think of him differently. What could be expected from any of them? Their hurt was much more than my own. Many of them never even found out what happened to their babies.”

Rachel’s view panned over to Tim, who after staring into the fire, looked to her. The grey flecks of Selah's husband's eyes hued more toward tan in the light, while the brown looked darker and sadder. Holding Rachel's stare, Tim said, “I’m not sure if that’s what he means right now.” Shifting his eyes to Michtam, he said, “I don’t know for sure, but I think you want to understand whether your father ever considered what the families thought. Did they even exist in your father’s mind? Is that it?”

Michtam looked to him, his gaze expressing uncertainty, and he remained silent. Alezea, whose face was lifted above the flames as if the flickering light scratched a soft spot under her chin, voiced a soft humming sound. Then, seeming to read directly from within Michtam’s heart and inner thoughts, she said, “There’s no way to know the whole of what’s in a young man’s mind. Except that he wants to know who and why his father was, and if there’s anything he could do to help fix the harm he caused. That’s usually what a good man wants, to repair what’s been broken.”

Facing Alezea, it seemed to Michtam that the dark patches in the crevices of his grandmother’s eye sockets reached out from within her soul to comfort him with the vast flowing of her love. He felt that cradling of tenderness and tears pooled at the edges of his lids and ran down his cheeks. Michtam shamelessly looked from Tim to Rachel and back to Alezea, then held. Alezea continued talking, stroking his heart which ached with what was years of longing to know his father. “You’d like to put the pieces back together even though you had nothing to do with what’s been shattered.”

Understanding past the generation between them, and their different roles as grandmother and grandson, Alezea placed herself on equal plane with Michtam’s loss. Michtam never had his father in his life, and Alezea never really had her son, only what she had believed was Satan’s prodigy. They both knew of Thomas’ true heritage and his eventual transformation to good, but not having known him after the transformation, it was hard to look past the years of damage and legacies of destruction he must have caused so many families. Not that they could ever discount that damage, Alezea prayed everyday that Michtam could celebrate that Thomas did not propagate that line of destruction like he initially longed and planned to do. Instead, there was this beautiful, sensitive young man before her.

Of course Alezea had never laid eyes on Michtam. She never had eyes since he existed. Even so, during Selah’s drawings of portraits of Michtam over the years, she described him to Alezea with the loving vision and exquisite detail that only a mother could have. Because of those years of hearing Selah describe her growing son, Alezea felt she saw Michtam clearly each time she thought of him, especially when he was near and she could feel his spirit.