"Plans succeed through good counsel; don’t go to war without wise advice." Proverbs 20:18

Have a blessed Sabbath get some rest

If thou turn away thy foot from the Sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day; and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of Yahuah, honourable; and shalt honour him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words: Then shalt thou delight thyself in Yahuah; and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father: for the mouth of Yahuah hath spoken it. Isaiah 58:13-14

New Eyes. The car smelled like her, coconut oil and the faint chemical sweetness of relaxer that never quite washed off her hands. It was the smell of nine hours on her feet, of other women's heads built and blessed while her own went uncombed. To Samson it had always smelled like home. Tonight he barely noticed it. He pulled up outside the salon at 7:14. He always came at 7. She was always late. He never complained, fourteen minutes in a quiet car was nothing next to the years he'd promised her. He watched the salon door through the windshield and waited, engine humming low beneath him like something patient, her empty seat beside him.

Midday had its own weather inside Fitness Plus. Between the morning crowd and the evening one the floor emptied, and for fifteen minutes the long room belonged to the light. It came in low through the side panels and lay across the rubber matting like something poured and left to set. Samson sat on the end of a bench, rolling a towel slow between his palms. Roger stood near the mirror with the patch pushed up off his eye, because the glare panels were down and for once the brightness did not hunt him. They had been talking about nothing. The price of protein. A client who never came back. Then the room went quiet in that way midday rooms go quiet, and Samson looked at him, at the patch, at the small permanent half turn Roger kept between his face and any window. "You hear how mi get this?" Roger said, before Samson could ask. He had seen the question forming. "Mi hear say a accident," Samson said. "Car crash." "A car crash in it." Roger laughed, low, without much in it. "But the crash was the last thing. Mi nearly dead three time that one night, and only the third one leave a mark." Samson set the towel down. It was another gym, Roger said, years back, before this one. There was a girl who used to train in the afternoons, twenty four, from Jarrett Lane up in Mountain View. Pamella. She had a way of laughing at things that were not funny, only so she could lean in while she did it. For weeks it went on like that, the leaning, the brushing, the long looks held a beat past where looking ends and something else starts. She made him a promise. She told him plain what she would give him, in the corner by the dumbbell rack, and after that he could not think of much else. He knew where she lived. He knew what Mountain View was. But he was driving a white Probox in those days, and a white Probox is the most invisible car in Jamaica. He told himself he would go in like rain, fall and be gone, and nobody would notice him. That was the lie he carried up the lane at night, and the lie carried him all the way to her door. This is the part that needs no telling, because it tells itself: Roger did not go because he was foolish. He went because he had built a small arithmetic in his head where the want was large and the risk was a number he had decided to make small, and a man will believe his own arithmetic long after the figures have stopped meaning anything. He got what he came for. That was eleven o'clock or near it. He was reaching for his shorts, half thinking already about the drive home, when he heard the car. He felt it before he heard it, the way the yard light shifted, then the engine, then the gate. He looked at Pamella and her whole face had changed. It had gone from soft to something with no give in it at all. "A him," she said. "A mi man. Him just come." "Where him a work?" Roger asked, stupidly, as if it mattered. "Him a gunman," she said. "Him nuh work nowhere. Get under the bed. Now." So Roger went under the bed. Black shirt, black shorts, the dust of the floor in his mouth, his heart so loud he was sure it would give him up. He lay on his side, and through the gap he watched the door open, and he watched a pair of red and black sneakers come in and stop, facing her bare feet, the two of them close, talking low. Man and woman, sneaker and foot, a whole conversation he could only read from the ankle down. Then the boyfriend put his gun on the night table. Roger heard it touch the wood, that particular small heavy sound, and from where he lay he could see the dark shape of it up there, catching what little light there was. Then the bed sank. It came down toward his face, the slats and the weight of two people pressing the mattress an inch lower, and Roger pressed himself flat into the floor and shut his eyes and did not open them for a long time. Above him the bed worked and breathed and went on, and he lay in the underneath of it like a man buried alive who can still hear the feet of the mourners moving over him. He prayed to no one, then. That came later, and it did not last. He only waited, in the dark, with the gun on the table and the man between him and the door, until the breathing above him changed and slowed and at last became the long heavy breathing of sleep. It was three in the morning when he came out. . The boyfriend slept. Pamella's eyes were open in the dark, watching him go, and she said nothing. He did it the way you lift a sleeping child from a car seat, every breath held against the creak of the door, and he said nothing, and that silence was the truest thing that passed between them the whole night. His Probox was still there, down the lane, pale under a dead streetlight. He nearly reached it. Three men came out of the dark and stood around him. "Where you from. What you doing here". And Roger, who had a whole night of lies left in him but no strength to tell another one, stood with his mouth half open and nothing coming. Then a fourth one walked up, looked at him hard, and said his name. KC. They had sat in the same form room at Kingston College years before, two boys in the same khaki, and now one of them was whatever he had become in Mountain View at three in the morning and the other was a man who should not have been there. The old boy looked at him a long second. Then he told the rest, leave him. And he told Roger, low, go. Roger went. And here is the third time, the one that marked him. He drove out of that place like the place itself was burning, and at the bottom of the road there was a red light, and at half past three a Kingston man does not stop at a red light, he slows, he looks, he rolls. Roger did not slow. He did not look. He went through it flat out with his hands locked on the wheel and his mind still under that bed, and the car that hit him came in from the left, from the side. Two weeks in hospital. The eye never came back the same. It cannot take bright light now; the brightness goes into it like a wire and pulls a migraine up behind it, and so he wears the patch, and so he keeps his face turned that half turn from every window, for the rest of his life. When he finished, Samson was quiet a moment. Then he started to laugh, shaking his head, the laugh of a man who does not know whether to be amused or afraid for his friend. "You hear yourself?" Samson said. "Three time. The gunman, the gang, the crash. The Most High send you three letter in one night and you a tell mi like a story. Bredren, you fi drop to you knee and thank Him you breathing. You fi turn you whole life round." Roger smiled, easy, the old charm sliding back over his face the way it always did. "Mi go a church the very next Sunday," he said. "True. Mi sit down right inna the front." He shrugged. "But you done know how it go. Mi young still. Mi have mi time fi serve the Most High, when mi reach a certain age, when mi done live mi life little bit. Cyaa give Him everything when you young and have nothing fi look back on. Mi will reach there. Just not yet." Samson looked at him. There was a great deal he could have said, and he had watched most of it not land before. So he only shook his head, slow, and stood, and went back out onto the floor where the evening's first clients were already pushing through the door into the light. Roger did not move right away. He stood by the mirror with the patch up and the good eye open, and for a moment, just a moment, the easy face went somewhere else, and he stared at nothing, the way a man stares when a thing he has been outrunning finally draws level with him and keeps pace.

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."Ephesians 6:12