Pangaea
by Alex Cassun

The man sits sheltered under a blue plastic awning, awakened moments ago by rainfall unlike anything he’d experienced, his breath fogging as it goes.

He sits, ageless chiseled limestone, hands crisscrossed by more scars than are countable, the third and fourth fingers of his right hand missing, the assault of rain on the plastic a metronome, tinny and precise, in rhythm with his heart.

He sits watching raucous white- and brown-skinned children play an unfamiliar sport, giggling as they toss a brown oblong ball wobbly through the air and scrape knees and elbows on oil-slicked asphalt, the ball wet, uncatchable.

He sits, a dozen time zones or more from the village he’d spent his youth and raised and buried his family, beneath this plastic leaf-clogged awning over the second floor balcony of his hosts’ home, ivy growing greener than anything he’d known, the porch larger than the rusted metal container that stowed he and 17 others during their voyage across the seas, away from famine and violence and desert storms, biblical monstrosities.

He sits in the bland and brandless clothing he’s always worn, watching a member of his enemies’ tribe roll to the curb a large black bin overflowing with colorful paper wrapping and shredded plastic packaging and heaps of unwanted food while red and green and white lights twinkle like stars around his home and yard, not smiling, ignoring the kids, his shoulders stooped from years of labor and years of growing old before arriving in this place.

He sits as his host with his Boston accent and his French-Algerian wife offers a plate of cuts of bread and meat and cheeses which he declines, embarrassed, with a nod, understanding not a word as the man says goodday and smiles and sets the plate on a colorful plastic tray within arm’s reach.

He sits while a cup of tea loses its steam.

He sits, book in his lap, bible-thick, gifted to him from his hosts’ adopted daughter, an African, Sudanese likely, herself displace, offering a smile and a hug on the first evening in his new home, a political refugee, the tome massive, written in his native tongue and describing a history of the world so fundamentally different from the truth he knows, how the earth is not a sprawling series of immense landmasses dispersed between sea and ocean and sky, all created by the Almighty but instead simply once a single massive and unified continent, a world so enormous and all encompassing and ever-changing, formed by happenstance, infinite luck, populated by a single group of people who like the earth itself has over time drifted and mutated. And while the children play and a young white couple holding hands walk their German Shepard over smooth sidewalks and around flawless Japanese and European and American cars, he sits, heart matching beat with the rain, his whole body vibrating as he is filled with warmth from the knowledge of the existence of God.

Copyright belongs to the author on the publication date unless otherwise noted.