Tremendous Universe

There is an old man--bright-eyed and hawk-nosed, who makes the daily trek to a ragged garden overlooking the sea.  He occupies the same wrought iron bench at sunset every day.  With only a crooked tree and sea grapes to keep him company, he feeds greedy gulls while waiting for the moon to come out.  His gnarled fingers delve repeatedly into a brown paper bag, grasping for lumps of crusty bread.  He scatters fist-fulls across the pavement to the raucous gaggle of avians worshiping at his feet.

A threadbare coat shrouds his frail shoulders. His shoes are worn and riddled with holes.  He carries himself with the careless air of one who has little concern for the materialistic inanities of this life.  His sole treasure is a chained pocket-watch that already lost its heart decades ago.  He keeps the severed wing of a butterfly in it's empty cavity; a fragile symbol of the only promise he has left to keep.

The old traveler's waking dreams are filled with visions of a war he once fought.  Though time has taken its toll on his body, his legs remember running full-tilt, through tall greenery under a star spattered sky.  His lungs remember fighting desperately just to catch a breath.  He's still haunted by how the sounds of metal clashing with bone could be heard far afield from beneath that thick bamboo patch.  How his ruined limbs had plowed into the soft earth where he'd fallen.  How his glazed eyes had desperately fixed upon the evanescent moon.

As he'd lain there dying, the sagging battleground had become overrun by a host of moonlit mariposas.  Underbellies glowing, their wings pulsating with neon energy akin to drunken Tokyo nights; the army of gossamer fairies had drifted to this continent from some strange and distant world.  Drawn by violence and despair, they'd fed on the abundance of ragged flesh running red.  They'd drunk it down with the vampiric avarice of mortals bestowed with the nectar of the gods.

Death hadn't taken him, that night.  He'd awakened at dawn, battered but whole in a meadow, drenched in the growing stench of carrion and defeat.  One iridescent wing had been clutched in his fist.  Recalling his near-death vision, the warrior had been unwilling to rid himself of it.  He lived for decades, then centuries.  He became the perpetual wanderer who saw with his own eyes, all of the beauty and sadness there was in the world.

When he'd finally begun aging again, he realized that the time he'd been given was nearing its end.  He returned to the land of the one-winged shinigami.  Every night, he waits at the salty edge of the city that had taken root in that once, bloodstained ground.  Death, he knows, will return for him here.  It will be heralded by an effervescent cloud of shimmering wings.

*Author's Notes:
Mariposa = butterfly (Spanish)
Shinigami = death-god/grim reaper/angel of death (Japanese)