Dark Valley
Aldeia da Esperança, Village of Hope. It hadn’t always borne that name. For centuries it had been known as Vale Escuro, Dark Valley, until the day a miracle changed it forever. And the miracle really happened.
But back then it was still Vale Escuro, and it was just another day in Saul’s life. He was sixteen, and his back still burned from the belt, the marks of what his father called a proper upbringing, a man who wanted a son born to work the land. His future was already mapped out: land, sheep, cold, hunger. Saul dreamed of Paris, where his cousins had emigrated years before. Folded inside his underwear, he kept the photographs they sent him: holding an ice cream beneath the Eiffel Tower, streets full of people, a life where the horizon didn’t always end at the mountain. He looked at them while he drove the flock along the dry slopes, always glancing over his shoulder. If his father found them, he’d tear them to pieces.
Temptations of the devil, he called them.
Some were born to choose their life. Others were born to inherit it. Saul knew which one he was. He would die here, like his father, the grandfather, every man before him.
From the hilltop, he watched the river running wild below. He had never left Vale Escuro, not even to see a doctor. Sometimes he thought the worst luck of his life had been being born healthy.
The river could leave. He couldn’t.
