High Hope

I sat upon a sharp presibus, looking out over the land. It was a harsh landscape, like most dormant volcanos, but it seemed much too jagged.
When one usually thinks of a volcano, he thinks of liquid fire boiling out of the of the ground, some times gurgling, and eventually spilling out and running towards the sea. But here it was different. Here the volcano had exploded, sending violent plumes of fire and smoke into the high in to the air.
It eventually returned to the earth in the form of hellfire and brimstone. The people at home had ran to the church in a desperate attempt to save their souls and to assure their place in heaven. I had been away at the time - learning at a local university about gemology - and had missed the wall of hot mud that had swept through the heart of town and had buried it.
I had stopped above the village on my journeyed to the summit of the caldera. It was oddly quite, a plain of flat grey soil were my home had stood only a few years earlier. The only thing visible above the ash was the bell tower of the old spanish mission, beneath which my family was interned in eternal rest. The only other beings left from my town were a she goat who had miraculously floated to the surface of the muck unscalded and a ancient friar who had lived in an annex just behind the chapel for more than five generations, until his residence became occupied by a less colorful presence. He had survived high in the bell tower, where he dutifully rang the bell as a warning to his fellow townsfolk.
His neighbors and friends had misunderstood the his bells and flocked away from the buttes, mesas, and highlands and toward the long dry river bed of San Antonias. The planners of the town had chosen that spot as their town square because of the mighty oaks that had grown there since long before the first explorers crossed through the peaks.
The explorers had names the massive moss covered mountain that dominated the valley Monte de Esperanza as a sign of their hopes for riches and families. Ironically, this peaked had quelled their own posterity's future. The wall of mud had extinguished their hopes.

I looked down towards the greyfield far below were my town lay. The bell tower looked depressed and decrepid, a tiny point in the distance. the bell had long ago been remove to the provincial capitol were it now sits silent in a dark memorial that noone visits save a few junkies and a diamond jeweler. The old friar had asked that it be moved to somewhere that it could continue to sing the praises of the lord like a giant monotone, monosyllable choir. The praetor had liked the idea and had ordered that the bell be moved to the capitol, where it would be mounted in the renovated capitol building. Unfortunateley, the praetor soon lost his position to an angry mob whose members had been beaten until they screamed just to silence the masses.
I can still remember looking down from the bell tower -the friar had taken me there on the Feast of Saint Anthony- at the villagers in the townsquare who were partying. They had fiesta'd till the cock had crowed twice. The townsfolk soon begun to move towards their respective workplaces, where by public concensus the people of San Antonias would doze off their hangovers.
I then moved my eyes towards the base of the mount. There a vast field of pervertedly jagged rocks looked back. They seemed to be calling me, calling me to become one with them. They seemed to be yearning to poke and to prod me and to cause me harm, as they had done upon my journey up to the pinnicale. They seem to want to finish their creator's dark and dirty job but are much too large to do the work neccesary. They mock me, these, the laziest children of the volcano.
Thursday, November 8, 2001