Story #34
Four of Cups
Tristan was never satisfied. At least, that’s what his father continually told him, as if it was a bad thing. His mother was a little more understanding. She only shook her head and smiled when she startled him out of a daydream, which happened quite often.
He’d been a naturally curious child, but the closer he’d gotten to his teen years, the harder he’d been for his father to manage, to groom. It was his father’s intent to pass leadership of their thriving community to him when he turned 18. Tristan didn’t want it.
He’d always admired the trackers, the water-witchers, the sailors that went out into the desert sands, skimming the ground in their modified boats, pushed and punished by the brutal winds that swept across the land after the bombs had done their work. He’d linger around the edges of the cantinas, tucked into the walls of the Grand Canyon, where his family and a few others had sought shelter long before he’d been born, hanging on the tales of adventures. He dreamt of traveling the surface. He wondered how he could possibly be a strong leader for his community if he had no first hand knowledge of anything outside of the canyon. His father just kept telling him to wait until he was a little older.
Now, on the eve of his fourteenth birthday, he wondered if he would finally be considered old enough. If I don’t get to go on the next excursion, he thought, I’m running away. It was a threat he’d considered a million times over the last few years. As of late, he’d taken to wearing the light leather breeches favored by the sand sailors (pirates, some called them), and a long cotton scarf like the ones the men and women of the desert wrapped around their heads and faces to protect from the blazing sun and sand-filled winds. In his boot, there was tucked a dangerous looking, jewel-gilded knife that had only scarred the soft insides of mesquite wood, whittled into snakes and lizards.
He’d begged Felipe, the captain of his father’s guard, to take him out on a sand skiff a million times. Usually the grizzled old sailor would just ruffle his hair like he was an errant child and tell him to ask his papa. Today, though, the old man had hesitated. “I can’t take you out on the sand, but there’s no rule against taking you to the rim. Meet me at the gate at dusk.”
