dating chronicles 5: risen, indeed

After that it was all a haze. I wandered for three days and three nights, waiting for a sign. Guilt and a bad cough filled my chest. How could I decide which way to go with that cursed fever cooking my brow?

The locals were all aflutter about a tall, white stranger in town - they believed he had healing powers. While I put no stock in their belief, I felt the stranger was the only lead fate had offered me yet. I would go see him.

He sat under the old tin coca cola sign at the cantina. People had been leaving gifts of fruit, incense and dried fish for him - the holy stench of it nearly drove me away. He was slouched in his chair, sweating under an old straw hat. Asleep. I stood timidly at the bottom of the steps and said, "Um. Hi. You're the, uh, healing guy? I brought you some mescal and bon bons."

He looked up and blinked.

It was The Date.

"You're alive!"

"For sure, for sure, man. It's all good. You're still kicking, too, I see. Good news, good news."

As we drank warm orange crush and gently brushed away the flies, he told me a crazy rescue tale of air pockets and underwater nymphs. I almost believed him - no one but The Date will ever know for sure what happened in that cave.

"So are you, like, actually healing people and shit?"

"No, no. When they saw me coming out of the cave they thought I was fulfilling the old bat-saviour prophesy. I couldn't talk them out of it. I'm just a man who survived some heavy shit."

I could see that much was true. "Sometimes," I said, "that's good enough."

"Let's get out of here. That fish smell is making me dizzy." We walked hand in hand out of town toward the jungle, feeling lucky. No point wasting all that preparation for the poisonous snakes tour.

So that will bring us back to doe.