by Patrick Cabello Hansel
Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,your old shall dream dreams,and your young shall see visions. Joel 2:28
Yes, there is a difference between dreams and visions, but the miracles and the catastrophes they portend can be hard to distinguish.
Angel and Luz had a vision of creating a new family, one not chained to the trauma of their past, one based in the twin angels of love and justice. They still occasionally had dreams of the terror they had faced, but with the support of spiritual guides and each other, they were seeking to learn from their fears instead of being swallowed by them.
Brian Fleming had stopped listening to his dreams a long time ago, and thus his vision had become warped by the three angels of greed, violence and humiliation. All he could see and all he could want was power. Not power to create, but power to control, to coerce, to dominate. He wanted Luz to submit to him, as he had forced her to do when she was a young teenager. But Luz had discovered a strength beyond fear: the love she had for Angel, Angelito and Lupita.
The two men on horses were not a dream, as little Angel had wondered. They weren’t exactly a vision either, but an invitation to see into the past. What you saw depended on what you longed for. They were twins, and if you knew the legend of Mateo and Marcos Kelly Hidalgo, you would know that both Luz and Angel were descendants from their line. You would know that they were born in the swale two years after the Civil War. And you would know that many believed Mateo’s ghost still haunted the land our four time travelers stood on.
What you see is often what you get. What you see beyond the eyes of seeing depends on what you are searching for. Luz and Angel saw their ancestors, and the tangled webs of their families’ histories. They instinctively moved towards the two riders. Brian Fleming saw his ancestry as well, but not the blood he shared with those who came before, but with the blood that had been spilled by his ancestors.
His vision — if that was what it was — shook him to his core. So as soon as the train came back in the other direction, he sprinted to it and hopped on board the caboose as it sped by. He and the train raced off into the eastern fog.
Angel and Luz shouted in his direction “Where is our baby?” They wanted to run after the train and the man who had taken her, but the fog grew deeper and stranger. They were about to despair of ever finding Lupita, of ever returning home.
But there was another child of the earth who saw the two men on horses, a child who was just coming into a deeper kind of seeing.
Their little boy, their little Angelito, grabbed his parents’ legs, looked up and said “Don’t worry. I think these two men can lead us to little sister.”
And so our little family, missing one quarter of its love, slowly walked toward the two strange men.
To be continued…
