11th Part

The hermit remembered his second burden on the way to the mountains. He'd begun to lose focus, to think only of finding the sea, but the little girl reminded him of his daughter, which reminded him of the mountain, which reminded him again of the young man with his strange request.

It became very important to the old man that he get rid of the second soul. There were fewer people on the road now, and fewer houses to the left or right, but whenever he met anyone he tried to cajole them or bribe them or beg them to take the weight off him.

"I can't go to the sea with this other soul on my back!" he'd cry, clinging to the strangers' shirts. Most of them looked concerned, but no one offered to help. It was his own damn fault, they thought, for taking such a heavy burden in the first place.

He began building fires at night, hoping indefinitely that they would bring help. Perhaps he expected ghosts to emerge, and like moths dance around his small blazes, offering to take what he could no longer carry, offering to relieve him of his unhallowed bundle. But no ghosts came, and no one would take the soul off his shoulders.

One night he tried to remove it himself. He took out his knife, and pared away at his shoulders until he was too tired and sore to keep at it. Eventually he had to bandage himself up and forget about losing the soul, abandon the project as a lost cause. It made him very sad, and very afraid, and yet there was nothing he could do about it.

So the mountains got bigger, and the man's hope of ridding himself of the soul became smaller, until he found himself climbing the mountain like a mountain goat in trousers whose sadness is that of two men, and whose head is full of fears and doubts and trouble.

He climbed and climbed and climbed, and eventually the sea filled his thoughts again, but he couldn't forget the young man's soul altogether as he'd done before. He could only hope the sea was strong enough to bear it and him toward another shore.