The monastery

   The poor creature did it al by itself. It had carried the body of a lost hiker after almost dying in an avalanche. The donkey was exhausted and collapsed after crossing the gate of the monastery. Monk Yato was crossing the yard in order to get to the kitchen and was the first one to see the poor animal and the person it had brought to them. By the touch of his fingers, Yato noticed the donkey had died. It was probably due to exhaustion. As far as the man was concerned, Yato and other monks carried him to one of the rooms.

 He was in some kind of coma for almost a week. Every so often, monks would check on him and realize that he was doing great except for the fact that he was fast asleep. But life in the mountains went on, no matter how interesting it was to have someone from the outside so close by. The younger monks were the most curious ones, whereas the older ones hadn’t cared yet and had decided not to visit the tourist at all

During that week, the monks held a small vigil for the soul of the donkey, which they had buried near the main temple of the monastery. They all appreciated a lot what animals could do for humanity and had a tremendous respect for any kind of life that was lost during accidents in the mountains. The men from beyond didn’t seem too convinced by this but the monks believed it with all their hearts.

 One week after, the hiker woke up in the middle of the night. His name was Greg Emerson and he had been climbing almost every single mountain nearby. It was very dangerous as some of the mountains had special regulations but it had been clear he didn’t care about it, at all. When he woke up in the small room they had put him in, he instantly thought he had been captured by some foreign force from beyond the mountain range. He had no idea of monks or their beliefs.

 The halls were being watched and his bedroom’s window overlooked a large chasm with no apparent bottom. The morning after, when one of the monks decided to check on him, Greg committed the mistake of being excessively aggressive. He thought he was too strong, so he released the man in order to stand up and run away. But the monk had not being that injured and jumped at him, tacking Greg to the ground with ease.

 He was locked up in the cell once again and no one came to tell him anything for a whole day. It was very late when he noticed the movement of a light behind his cell’s door and then some steps. He trusted he was going to be released real soon. When the door opened, it was the Grand Monk, a very small mall that seemed to move his legs really fast in order to move at a normal pace.

 When he entered the cell, he told Greg that he knew who he was, his full name, his job in the city and why he had come to the mountains. He even knew that that his reason for wanting to get to know the mountains and nature was false and that’s why he had been confined to that cell until he got better. Now that he was, they had to check if it was in their best interest to release him or if it was better to keep him for a longer time. He complained, saying it wasn’t legal and ethic to retain someone against their will but the Grand Monk clarified he could leave his room but not the monastery.

 The following day, he noticed the Grand Monk’s orders had been honest: no more monks came to check into him and the door of his cell was now wide open. He could walk all around the various levels of the monastery, including the dining room where all of the monks gather at night to have a very sensible and small dinner. Greg missed the real foods from the city, sometimes being hungry for a hotdog and other times for some pasta with meatballs. In the monastery there was only a lame kind of bread with nothing on it and some goat cheese.

 One day, a monk showed him the burying site of the donkey that had brought him to the monastery. Greg remembered that creature and thanked him on his grave for having saved him. As far as he could remember, he had been riding the donkey for a while through the mountains just when they had been caught by one of those awful storms that sometimes happens deep in the mountains. During that awful weather, he had been knocked out and the animal had done everything by itself. 

 Weeks after being “released” from his room, the Grand Monk ordered him to participate in the various activities that the monks did all around the monastery, as he was one more of them for at least a while. So they decided to try him in various areas. The first one was the garden, a small hydroponic plantation overlooking the chasm. He wasn’t very good with plants so he did not do a great job. Besides, his hand were not at all delicate and he was always distracted, looking over at the view or being apparently immersed in his thoughts about how he would return to civilization.

 The next place they tied him on was the goat pen. It was really simple: he only had to fee them twice a day and let the roam around the main yard for a while. The ideal walk for the goats would be to go beyond the gate but they couldn’t let him go with them there so the monk had to tolerate the goats being all over the place now and Greg being useless when feeding them. He only gave food to a couple of them and then he just got distracted when looking at the snowy mountains and imagining what his loved ones were thinking right then.

 His last opportunity was in the kitchen, where a big Monk called Hitso, taught him about how to make the simple bread they ate and how to do some other dished with the vegetables they grew in their small garden.  They didn’t have any modern appliances, only an oven that used wood but there was no wood nearby that they could use. Beside, Hitso explained to Greg that the monks preferred not to eat things that were cooked, instead eating everything raw.

 In the kitchen, Greg really felt he was a little bit happier. Maybe it was the fact that he was serving the monks and that gave him some kind of purpose or it may have been the fact that he had stopped thinking about how to escape and about his loved ones in the city. He just realized that the monastery was his reality at the moment and that it was best to use it in his advantage instead of always being distracted by other things.

 Greg began to enjoy the company of all the monks and even tried to meditate like they did but he wasn’t that calm yet. In his spare time, he would look at the chasm and wonder what marvels laid down there, beyond the light of the sun. Monk Yato explained to him that the monastery had been built right there because their religion believed an ancient evil slept beneath the darkness of the chasm and that it was necessary to have prepared religious people nearby in order to defend the world once whatever lived down there emerged.

 It was a very nice story and, of course, Greg didn’t believe any part of it but he respected the fact that the monks were dedicated to their beliefs. He began thinking that maybe that was something he was lacking. He didn’t believe in anything except fame and fortune and going on to the next thing. Greg was very impatient and had always been like that. He wasn’t the kind of person to wait patiently to see what happened. No, he was the one “creating” his future. Now he was doing the opposite angle.

 Months after arriving in the temple, the Grand Monk called Greg to his room and told him he was ready to go back to the outside world. The young man nodded but then he knelt and asked the old monk to let him stay with them and become a monk like them. He wanted to learn their ways and be calm and a better person.

 But the Grand Monk said that couldn’t be. He had to go back to the outside because he had unresolved business there. Greg had to attend to that and, if he still wanted, he could comeback afterwards and join them. Greg left that same afternoon. He would never come back to the monastery but would always remember what he had learned and try to pass it on.

After

Stepping on the sand, feeling it beneath our feet, it was different. We had been walking along the road for such a long time that we had forgotten what it felt not wearing any shoes, any clothing except underwear.

We were six people, three women and three men, and we had been wandering the country for almost a month. We had begun walking because all the cities had been destroyed, devastated by war. Bombings and attack troops and orbital bombardment. All done because of many wanting the same: rule over the world.

But the world couldn’t be ruled, not by only one person. So all the war had caused a violent reaction from nature. Pests and natural disasters had stopped the fighting and violence. So much was the catastrophe that the war had to be finished, as there were no more troops to hold an invasion, an attack or even to support a small settlement.

Our group had seen thousand of bodies on the roads, mostly of soldiers and other men of war but also from people that had flee the crisis too soon or too late.

I, for one, had stayed in the lowest part of my building, waiting for all the sound from above to stop. I had a radio, a mobile phone and a small portable television but they stopped working after the first month. I also had rations of food and batteries, a lamp and even a sleeping bag. I had been prepared.

Family? None, at least not in this city. They were far away and there was no way of knowing if they were alive or not. All transmissions had died slowly: TV stations, radio stations, satellite feed, everything stopped at some point.

So when I came out, the city were I had lived in for the last five years, was in silence, deserted almost completely. I found a few people on my way out of it and we formed this group. I had told them I needed to go to my family’s city and see if they were dead or alive, as the doubt was eating me up.

The route was a long one so we headed first to a gas station and took several maps to help us get to our destination. We also got a little cart to put all our things in and we would take turns pulling it but in the first week we were lucky enough to find farm animals, cattle and so on. So we borrowed a donkey from one of them and he has proven to be our most prized possession. 

In the group, we all have the same responsibilities and duties with each other. There’s no one that rules over others or someone that gets to do nothing. We all do, we all pull, we all feed Burrito (our donkey) and we all get food and explore the places we walk into.

The good thing is that no one ever complained or tried to be more than the others. We just got along and, to be honest, we try to speak as sparsely as we can. Sometimes there are heat waves, and fighting or talking too much during them would be fatal. We just way under a large shadow and be sure to have plenty of water.

It does seem like some things are running out, like water. We normally find gas stations or supermarkets with bottles that are still good but the natural sources seem to be running out. Just a few days ago, we saw a gigantic patch of mud on the ground. None of us had traveled the region before, but it was obvious a large lake had been there.

We ate anything that would not need frying or real cooking of any kind. We had matches and a portable cooking thingy, but the first ones ran out fast and the other worked on gas, which was not really that easy to find, so we would rather grab all the jerky we could get, ham, cheese, and so on.

Not milk, never, as it had all gone bad already. Most places we entered had that foul smell of milk gone bad. But we rapidly learned how to stand it and soon we ignored it altogether.

We traveled mainly by the roads. Not directly on them, as the heat made it annoying, but on one side, walking on grass or dirt. There were small rural roads and freeways of many lanes. But these days they all looked deserted, except for the many cars left stranded a little bit everywhere.

The tough part was when we started heading up a mountain. We had to do that to go down the other side and from there it was practically a slope towards the ocean.

The mountain was really hard for Burrito and for us. I personally feared more for the animal than for us. We had fed him well with the few fresh vegetables we had found on our way but it never seemed enough for such a creature. On the way up, he was nevertheless relentless. It was like he didn’t feel the annoying angle on which we had to walk.

There was neither snow nor nothing that cinematic, only a lot of chilly wind, trying to topple us with its strength. But after a single afternoon, we made it to the other side. Unfortunately, we had to camp up there. This time, Burrito wasn’t that strong.

We buried his body, first thing in the morning. We all cried and said a few words. A guy on the group had a Bible (he was the religious type), so he said a prayer for the animal. We owed him a lot.

Now it was us who had to pull the cart again but this time it was harder. The weather had gone significantly worse: heavy rain for three straight days and that damn wind that never stopped blowing. Not even when we got to sea level, did the weather stopped.

This moment proved to be a test for all of us. It was then we really had to meet each other, when we learned about each other and why we were doing what we were doing. It wasn’t like before, when we wouldn’t speak or even breath too loudly. Maybe it was the rain, but that had changed.

Now, during dinners, we would share stories about our past. The unspoken rule was that only one could tell his or her story per night, but the person could decide for how long they wanted to speak. At first, the stories went on for as much as fifteen minutes but, with time, we got to a story spanning several hours, during which we would eat something and enter our sleeping bags.

The road after the mountain was difficult, very rough to the legs and arms. The person pulling the cart always had the worst part, as it was too hard to do it on rocks that would move when passing on them. It was sometimes dangerous and, many times, it pulled out all the feelings people were hiding.

But that didn’t split the group; it actually made us much stronger, like a family. We were learning to live together but we knew we stood no chance if we were to take on this new world by ourselves. Without saying much, I believe love started growing among us, the kind of love you have for sisters and brothers.

Rations were getting smaller. For some reason, these roads had nowhere to find food or canned goods or nothing. For a good week, we fed very poorly, and it was starting to show. Some of us had yellowish, greenish tint on our faces, as if we were in a constant urge to vomit.

So when we finally got to the city, everyone acquired new strength. The possibilities to find food were a lot higher here than anywhere else. And we did, yes we did. We ate like pigs our first night there. We actually ate pig: a lot of preserved ham and canned beans still good. And there was water and, in a hotel, we had found an ice room still working for some reason. We played like children in there, freezing but happy.

The next day, was the day we went to the beach. And it was then, when we first felt we were alive, that we were reminded of our humanity and that our time here was not done yet.

Some walked the beach hand by hand. Others, like me, just stood there with sand up their ankles, watching the ocean. The waves, coming and going.

And there I cried again, the first time since Burrito had died, the second time since… Since I didn’t know when. I was alive but the word was dying and we all knew it.