And as The Stranger walked into town, the townspeople looked up at him standing on the hill. He carried with him an aura of illumination, and the townspeople, who had lived so many years in darkness, were blinded by the brilliance that emanated from him; their pupils dilated, and the sky behind him burned a fiery orange. The sky blazed so vividly, that the stranger became a mere silhouette. As he stood on the hill, outlined in darkness, many townspeople believed him to be a God, but most thought him a devil, and they hurled large stones at him until he fell dead on the ground.
The sky turned grey and stormy, like it had been for some many years before, and the townspeople grew silent as they approached the stranger, but their fears were quickly eliminated when an old man called out, “He’s just a man,” and they soon saw that the old man was right, The Stranger looked like an ordinary man.
“He was no devil,” one woman remarked, and the old man said, “But he was certainly no God, either.” All of the townspeople agreed, so they dug a shallow hole and buried him, and no one ever wondered about the brief illumination that The Stranger had brought to their town.
Alex Odom is currently pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at Longwood University. He is a founding member and Prose Editor for Picture Postcard Press (www.picturepostcardpress.net). His fiction has been published by Six Sentences and will soon be published by Boston Literary Magazine. His plays have been performed in the U.S. and Canada, and a small selection of them have been published by One Act Play Depot (http://oneactplays.net/odom.html).
