Blood Is Thicker Than Water

The blood on his hands dripped into the water. The sound of the first drop falling had startled him, as the surrounding forest was dead silent. But now, as he stared dazedly at his bloody hands, he found tranquility in the steady drip, drip, drip. He crouched down and fully submerged his hands in the ice-cold lake, watching the hot blood swirl off and stain the clear water. The blood on his hands wasn’t his.

The ripples on the surface of the water distorted his reflection. A crusty red splatter of dried blood smeared his face right above his left cheekbone. It almost looked like war paint. In a fight-or-flight stance, he stayed squatting on the ground, staring at himself in the water. Focusing on the blue sky behind his reflection, he wondered where heaven was.

He didn’t want to think about God. But as he sat there, looking out to the lake, he couldn’t help it. A Biblical story his mother had told him when he was a child came to his mind. Cain and Abel. He hadn’t thought of the story ever since, yet now it had come back to haunt him. Vengeance is sweet, and it is a choice. To him, it hadn’t been a choice. His mother had been taken from him, and now it had been his turn to take. Images of her lying on the carpet in a pool of her own blood arose in his mind—images he had desperately tried to repress. He pictured the man who had taken his mother looming over her lifeless body. A reincarnation of Lucifer. A reincarnation he had ultimately defeated. As death’s stench penetrated his nose, it dawned on him that his mother would never come back.

The pain came sharp as a knife. Gasping for air, he fell forward and collapsed on the ground. He didn’t have the strength to rise up again. Thinking about his mother ached his heart. The wound she left was still too fresh. Lying on the cold ground, he wondered where she was. With God? Was God real?

The lake lay still in front of him. The other side was far away, and the mist between the trees of the forest mysteriously veiled the landscape. It seemed to him as if the lake was the divide between heaven and Earth. Maybe his mother was right there, across the lake, waiting for him to join her. Could he really? He had become Cain. He shut his eyes in agony and imagined seeing his mother again. He imagined laying his head on her shoulder and letting her loving arms hold him. What would he say to her? I’m sorry. Forgive me. She was so vivid in his memory, so full of life. He could almost hear—

Son. The ethereal voice reached him from across the lake. In one moment, all of his longing, grief, and faith crashed over him, like waves desperate for shore, drowning out his thoughts. There she was, his mother. She looked just like he imagined she would. He saw her step onto the water and come towards him, carried by the soft waves. Was his mother coming to welcome him to eternal life? He felt like Peter watching Jesus come towards him on the water. In a trance, he rose and watched himself take a step out onto the water, feeling the billowing mass under his feet lift him up. Incredulous, he stumbled across the surface of the lake right into his mother’s embrace.

Blood is thicker than water.