Gabriel A. Simpson (possibly)

 

He was named for an angel. But he was just a boy. 

He remembered dimly a lost friend. A friend who spoke with him without words. Their speech was between the words and behind the lines. Though he wasn’t very aware of it, this friend had stepped between himself and sure death and had thereby died.

He felt the loss of this friendship always.

Gabriel was born into a time of fading memories. He had heard the history, but it was mythic to him. They said that people moved around the land easily in the rusting vehicles he saw in driveways and backyards. He had heard that there were thousands of people in his haphazard town and countryside. He tried to imagine streets full of people and cars.

He had heard the words school and hospital and president and television and movies. He knew, though in a story like way that once there had been factories making all the things of a modern life and that once the whole world had been in instant communication. He didn’t know much about the world outside his own area. He did read books about what he thought of as the old world.

Ah, but he lived in a time also of things which would seem imaginary to us back here in history, before his time, though they were around, just not seen. He saw the watching Lights and knew them to be benevolent. He knew of the destruction of the Dome of the Rock and the deaths of all the malignant characters there. He had heard from his own parents the epic tale. He knew that the dark forces always try to arise anew and must be countered always.

He grew at home with his family, Doug, and Jen and the four younger children. One brother and three sisters. At last, he reached his moral majority, which traditionally is at about thirteen years.

Gabriel had a heavy head of blond curls down to his shoulders. He had light blue eyes of a disconcerting hue. He was as tanned as a farmer, for in actuality he was a young farmer. Almost everyone else was a food producer of some sort. He was tall for his age and wiry. There was a girl he thought of frequently. But he was too shy to mention this to her.

“Mom,” he said one day to Jen, “I want to go get Jeremy and ride into town and see Mr. Jones.” You remember Mr. Rupert D. Jones. Jeremy was Lou’s oldest boy. He lived near the Port Gardner café that Lou ran near Milltown.

“Gabe, Mr. Jones is getting kind of old. I hope you guys aren’t just bothering him when you go over there,” said Jen while spooning some scrambled eggs to her youngest girl still sitting in a highchair.

“That’s exactly why he wants to show us how to run his internet station mom! He knows he won’t live forever, and he wants to train us to do it.” Jen stopped and looked him over. At last, she said “that sounds fine, honey. Please come home tonight.”

He stepped out into the brilliant light of a spring day near Milltown. The sky was blue, the wind was just bending the very tops of some evergreens a bit, it was still chilly, but he didn’t mind at all. He wore a heavy navy blue sweater knit by a handy neighbor lady whom Jen had helped at a birth, and so he was warm enough. Leaning against the side of the house ready to roll was his carefully maintained bicycle. He had painted it a shiny bright red color.

Off rode Gabriel, standing on the pedals, flying like a sort of angel, curls flung back in the wind.