Pick a Word, Paint a Story #24

Hello everyone, this time I want to participate in a contest organized by @senehasa on "Choose a Word, Paint a Story #23." Following up on my previous post, I'd like to invite my friends @neyistar23, @sur-riti, and @xkool24 to participate in this contest.

The rain had just stopped. The odour of the damp earth blew from all sides of the little village in the hills. The sky was certainly not by any means clear: in places golden beams of light forced themselves through clefts in the clouds and threw patches of golden light on the ground. In the middle of the dusty road, his prints on it stepped into the ground going up over a small mound.

The footprints were small, child-size looking. Their pattern was not consistent — sometimes clustering closely together, sometimes spaced far apart. As if the owner was running and stopping and shuffling. Prints in the ground, with mud sprayed all around the grass.

His name was Dika. A crowd of villagers with mud-splattered hems of their pants. One of them was a nine year old boy, who would wander around the village for hours after the rainfall.

But that morning was different.

The tracks he was tracking were not those of another, but rather his own. He had done so deliberately, from his house at the village’s edge to the summit of a small hill. He wanted to know how the footprints were stamped in the mud, one after one, mixing themselves up with the mud and forming a silent story, to be acted out to the end between him and la nature.

At the top of the hill, Dika stood in thought. He peered down at the rice fields, stretching off below. The wind was blowing softly, ruffling his wet, curling hair. He then turned to look back at the dirt path he had left behind. The footprints ran like a life story — tracing his brief trip on a damp morning.

“These prints… they’re memories,” Dika whispered.

He remembered his father, who used to walk him on the same path. His father was gone. But Dika does remember when they laughed together, ran around in the drizzle and sat together at the top of a hill to eat simple food.

Today, Dika was specifically walking the path that he had once walked with his father. Even though he sat alone now, he was aware that his father was there. In the sound of the wind, in the smell of damp earth and of course... in the footprints that gradually faded, soaked in morning dew.

Footprints will indeed disappear. Rain, time or the steps of other people can wash them away. But for Dika, what is left behind is more than just a mark on the ground — but a mark on the heart. And that will never go away entirely.

And he wrote on the ground the name of his father with his finger. With that, after a short time, he rose, smiled, and went home. Putting a new footprint on top of an old one. A sign that life moves on, but memories live on in every footstep we made.