THE CROSSING OF LIGHT

The first sound was wind. Not the common kind that paces a shoreline or rattles a window, but a living wind that seemed to stand up inside the sky and lift the sea with it. Daniel had spent enough nights on the water to know when a storm meant trouble, and this one had the look of a thing intent on finishing what it started. The horizon had been a clean silver line when he cast off. Now the line was gone. Sky and water shook hands and became one great, heaving body.

He checked the tiller, tight as a fist. The small boat climbed a slope of water, slid down the far side, and climbed again. Rain came as if a door had opened above him, cold, hard drops that stung his cheeks. The boat’s bow hammered and shuddered. Somewhere beneath the noise, a thought rose up that had been rising for years, so familiar it might have been breath: Lord, if You’re there…

It wasn’t eloquent. It never had been. Daniel remembered the other times it came, the night his father didn’t answer the phone, the morning the job was gone, the afternoon he sat in a parked car, hands on the wheel, unable to make himself step inside the house he no longer owned. He had always liked water because it told the truth. It didn’t pretend you were stronger than you were. If you kept your head, listened, and respected its moods, it generally let you come home.

Tonight, it felt like judgment. The wind shifted and the boom swung; the line whipped his arm and bit. His fingers went numb. Lightning ran its bright knife across the clouds and for an instant the world was bones and light. He saw the wave then, higher than the rest, its back curved and its crown torn to ribbons, coming in a way that allowed no negotiation. He tasted salt and rain and a coldness that felt personal.

The prayer changed without words. The mouth of the heart opened. If You are…He never finished it. The wave broke. There was sound and then there was none. The body knows a kind of holding that is surrender. The world narrowed to a bright point that was not pain and was not fear. It was absence of weight and the end of resistance. Daniel felt himself moving and held, as if carried by something that did not need hands.

When the brightness let him see again, he realized the wind had turned gentle. The rain had changed its mind about being rain at all and settled into something like cool light brushing his face. He lay on his back, and the surface beneath him was firm, smooth as if polished, and warm.

He sat up. A river ran past, clear as breath drawn at dawn. It moved with purpose; its surface broken by small standing waves where it curled around shallow stones. But the water was not blue or brown. It was the color of what light might be if it became water. It carried a brightness within it that did not glare but welcomed. He saw his reflection and flinched because his face was not the tired, gray face he had been wearing those last years. He looked unburdened, as if someone had lifted a pack from his shoulders while he slept.

He stood. The shore was not sand. It was something else stone like glass, pale and faintly luminous, warm beneath his bare feet. When he turned to look for the boat, there was no sea, no storm. There was a city not far off, and the word city was too small. Walls rose in the distance with a softness that confounded their height. Their color changed as he watched, white to honey to the faint green of first leaves held up to the sun. Gates stood open and each gate looked like a pearl made into an entrance. The streets that led from them shone like sunlight walking.

“Daniel,” said a voice at his left, and he did not startle, not really. Somewhere deep he had been expecting to be expected. The speaker was a man or looked like one. He wore no uniform Daniel could name, no badge that told him what to do. But there was purpose in him as there is in wind before it lifts, and gentleness like the unfurling of a sail. His eyes held the river’s clarity.

“How do you know my name?” Daniel asked and heard with surprise that the fear had no place to stand inside the question.

“I am a messenger,” the man said. “You have been known for longer than you have known yourself. Come.”

“Am I,” Daniel began, and then the old habit rose, and he looked down, as if this would be the moment when the truth would hurt him. “Am I dead?”

The messenger smiled in a way that refused cheapness. “You have crossed.”

Daniel looked again at the river. It made a sound like laughter in the distance, a quiet laughter: water over stone, and the stones themselves pleased by it.

“Where is this?” he asked.

“The city whose builder and maker is God,” the messenger said, as if the simplest sentence had found its perfect time. “The river you see flows from the throne of God and of the Lamb. Would you walk?”

They walked.

The path was not marked because everything here was path. The ground yielded just enough to his steps as if it had been made with walking in mind. They passed trees whose leaves trembled as if speaking together, green from a root that did not exhaust itself. Fruit hung at eye level, varied as seasons, all seasons at once. A fragrance like rain on stone came and went. Daniel reached out and a leaf brushed the back of his hand; warmth moved through him the way a song will move through a house and change the meaning of its rooms.

“The leaves,” the messenger said, though Daniel had not asked, “are for the healing of nations.”

Daniel nodded and did not know he had wanted to cry until he felt the desire go out of him and leave something clearer in its place.

“What nations?” he asked.

“All that you have known. All that have been broken and mended and broken again. All those that tried to make a name and forgot the one given them. Healing is not an event here. It is air.”

They entered by an open gate. The walls were clear; he could see through them and yet they were not less present for being transparent. He looked down and what he saw was not merely ground but a depth of clarity, as if the street was made of something that once was gold and then had remembered what it was before gold and found itself more itself than ever. It held him. It delighted in being walked on. The city was not noisy and yet every silence was full.

People moved along the street and their faces, when they turned, laid their welcome on him as if it were a cloak he had forgotten he owned. He recognized no one and felt recognized by all. A child ran past and stopped and laughed up at his face as if she had been waiting particularly for him to arrive so she could be precisely this glad. Her laughter got into his bones the way warmth does after a long cold. She vanished around a corner still laughing.

“Is this… forever?” Daniel asked.

“Yes,” the messenger said, and then, because yes is a large word, added, “and also now.”

They came to a place where the buildings fell back, and the streets stepped aside to make room for a square wide as fields. People gathered there not because they had to but because they wanted nothing other than to be in that wanting together. In the center a fountain threw water into the air where it stayed longer than water usually stays as if time were some surface it could rest on. The spray made a mist, and the mist made a faint rainbow, not high and not proud but low enough to touch with a hand if one desired.

In the distance, no, not distance, because distance here behaved like a well-trained animal, the light changed. It brightened and then, rather than forcing him to look away, it brought his eyes into a new capacity. The messenger inclined his head and Daniel followed him down a broad way lined with trees that were not named by any botanical Latin but by delight. The air was sweeter. Somewhere someone sang and the song had no edges; it did not begin and end but was always arriving, always here.

When they came to the place, Daniel knew it was the place even before his mind told him so. A throne stood, and through it and from it came a light that seemed to be the original of all light that has ever tried to be kind. There was no sun. There was no need to look for the sun. The light itself knew him. He did not have to brace. He did not have to shrink. He did not have to pretend.

He fell to his knees because some gestures are older than teaching. The ground met him as if it had been keeping that exact spot open for his weight since the first day anything was.

“Rise, Daniel,” said a voice, and the voice was not loud, and yet nothing else remained to be called a voice when it spoke.

He lifted his head. A man stood near the throne, and the word man again seemed a garment borrowed for a moment from a smaller closet. Scars marked his hands. They were not angry scars. They were not wounds that asked to be pitied. They were like doorways opened and never shut.

“Lord,” Daniel said, and when he had said it, he knew that he had been saying it from one angle or another his entire life, even in the seasons when he would have sworn, he was mute.

Jesus came nearer. His face was… The mind wants analogies: morning, bread, a long-absent friend at the gate with his hand lifted in greeting. All those things were true in their way and yet all of them were shadows of this truth. The eyes found him and held him, and in being held, he learned for the first time what being seen means when love is the one who is looking.

“You were with me,” Daniel said, and it came out as a confession and a wonder and a child’s report all at once. “In the storm.”

“In every storm,” Jesus said. “When your father left this world, and you thought the world had left you with him. When you could not sleep because the numbers would not add, and you thought the future had no room for you. When you stood by the door of a house you no longer owned and could not make your hand close on the handle. I was with you.”

Daniel wanted to say I believe, and I did not know, but words seemed, in this exact moment, to be excellent servants and poor masters. He bowed his head and the old habit of shame tried to rise and then failed for lack of air.

“You have questions,” Jesus said, and smiled in a way that made the idea of hiding ridiculous.

“Yes,” Daniel said. The word arrived without anxiety. “All my life I carried them like stones in a pocket. What happens to those I hurt? Did I do anything that mattered? Why did I feel alone even when I wasn’t? What could have been different if I had been different?”

Jesus did not answer as a lecturer answers. He lifted his hand and, like a man who has always had time enough, touched Daniel’s shoulder. Not weight. Presence. Questions that had built rooms inside him and demanded rent suddenly opened their windows and the air came through.

“Look,” Jesus said, and Daniel looked.

He saw a woman at a kitchen table in a small apartment, her head in her hands. He did not know her, and then he did: the cashier he had once thanked by name when he noticed the name pinned crookedly to her vest; the afternoon had been bitter and customers had been sharp, and he had said with a sincerity he did not usually permit himself, Thank you, Alina, and looked at her as if she were not a function but a person. In his seeing he saw that she had left that day with a slightly different weight in her chest, and because that weight had shifted, she had gone home and called her sister, and because she had called, the sister had come, and because the sister had come, a decision was delayed long enough to be reconsidered.

He saw a man on a bus raise his eyes and find another pair of eyes across the aisle and, for once, not look away. He saw hands put to ordinary use: repairing a hinge, untangling a child’s kite string, carrying groceries up three flights because the elevator was out. He saw nights when he had prayed without believing anyone could call what he did prayer, and how those poor words had been received as if they were perfect and carried like precious things into a treasury where nothing rots.

He saw the harms too, and the way mercy moved like water in a desert, quiet, relentless, changing the meaning of the ground.

“None of this excuses sin,” Jesus said, “and none of it erases consequence. But I have made a way. I have always been making a way. The river you heard in your bones when the water came over your head was not the sea’s end but this river’s beginning.”

Daniel could not bear the tenderness and found that the tenderness could bear him. He wept. The tears here behaved according to a different physics. They did not shame. They washed. When he lifted his head again there was newness where grief had been living rent-free for years.

“Come,” Jesus said.

They walked, and walking here did not tire. The messenger had stood far enough back to give space and now came forward again, content as a friend who had brought a friend to another friend’s house and watched the introduction go well. They crossed a bridge the river itself had made by deciding to be narrow here long enough to be stepped over. On the other side the trees lifted their leaves as if in applause and a fragrance rose that reminded Daniel, impossibly, of the kitchen on a winter morning when he was five and someone, he loved had put cinnamon in bread.

“What now?” Daniel asked, not anxious. The question was curiosity with its fear sheared off.

“Now you belong,” the messenger said. “You always did, but now you know it.”

“Will I forget?” Daniel asked. “The storm, the weight, the way I felt small?”

“You will remember without pain,” Jesus said. “You will give thanks without regret. You will worship.”

The word worship had sometimes sounded to Daniel like the name of an obligation. Now it sounded like what lungs do when you step outside, and winter has broken, and the air is young.

Music rose, not from a stage but from everywhere, to meet a silence that had been waiting for it. Voices gathered like water gathers from a thousand small streams and becomes a river that can carry ships. Daniel found his own voice among them with the ease of a man finding his own name in a crowd and realizing the one who calls it loves him.

They came at last to a height from which he could see much and not all, because all is a word that has its proper place and its humility even here. The city’s light lay over everything like blessing. Far below, the river ran on, and he saw that it did not run out. No corner was unvisited by it. No gate was closed. The light did not cast shadows that hid anything. It made a softness where edges had once been knives.

He thought of the boat and, to his surprise, found no ache there, only gratitude. There are storms that end a life and storms that end an era. The sea had been both a teacher and an unmasker. He loved it still and bore it no resentment. It had told him the truth, and the truth had handed him to a larger Truth.

“Daniel,” Jesus said, as if beginning and ending his name at once, “welcome home.”

The words did not echo because they had nowhere to bounce. They went in.

What followed was not a ceremony with a program. It was life. He ate and the food was like honesty. He walked and the ground greeted his feet. He spoke and was understood. Others spoke and he understood. He learned songs that seemed to have been written by the day itself. He stood by the river and put his hands into it and lifted them and the water ran off shining and he laughed without embarrassment. He sat beneath a tree whose leaves made a sound like a promise kept. He remembered faces and found them.

He thought of Alina and the hinge and the kite string and the door he had not opened, and all of it stood in the light and did not wither there. He looked for his father and felt no panic at not seeing him yet, because time here held everything without hurry. He rested in a way he did not know the verb to rest could contain.

Once, in the gentleness of a later, he turned to the messenger.

“What is your name?” he asked, realizing suddenly he had not asked and that here names were not tools but gifts.

The messenger’s smile had the humor of someone who delighted in timing. “Each of us has one,” he said, “but I am content that you know me.”

Daniel laughed. “That seems like a very you answer.”

They stood together watching as a group of children chased one another around the base of a tree whose trunk was wide enough to be a room. Their voices braided. One child darted away and ran straight to Daniel and took his hand without asking because asking was unnecessary now and pulled him into their game. He ran, and when he ran, nothing hurt.

Later, as light shifted into another kind of light, as it does here without becoming dark, the city hummed like a hive in which bees rest well and still make honey. Daniel sat with Jesus at the water’s edge. This was possible now: to sit with Jesus without counting minutes or fearing he was using up some other, more important person’s allotted time. The river put its small hands on the stones and the stones were pleased.

“Thank You,” Daniel said, and it was the easiest thing he had ever said.

Jesus’ hand was warm where it rested on the ground. “You are welcome,” he said, and it was the largest thing Daniel had ever heard.

A breeze came, and in it the faint scent of something he could not name and did not need to name. The leaves moved. Far off, a gate admitted more arrivals. The city widened, and still, it did not strain.

Daniel looked down at his hands. They were not the hands that had trembled on the tiller. They were capable, open. He lifted them, palms up, in a gesture that had once meant I do not know what to do and now meant I am ready for whatever you give.

“The storm,” he said softly, tasting each word without bitterness, “is over.”

Behind him, the city breathed with him. Before him, the river kept singing.

Above him, there was no sun. There was no need.

He leaned back, home in a way that made the word home feel young again, and watched the first breath of forever keep arriving, keep arriving, keep arriving, like light over water when the night finally quits and morning, unhurried and certain, takes the whole horizon for itself.

Jill Harris is a short story writer whose work has appeared several times in Adelaide Literary Magazine. She enjoys exploring a range of themes and voices, always with a focus on character and emotional depth. Jill lives in Cadillac Michigan.