THE BATS OF BETHESDA

THE BATS

They have been there for a while. They hang like black fruits on the flawless ivory trunk. Considered as vile creatures like the rowdy assembly on the poolside of bethesda: cripples, lepers, blind men, everyone under the marble shade, including their specie are outcasts. They have automata tracking lens as eyes. It glares with burning pupils searing through the desperation that rises from unspoken sufferings. Every night since they've haunted Bethesda they would scatter sonar on the skies of the horizon as if calling someone from the void of the sea and the dessert.

They are on a mission.

BETHESDA AND ITS POOL

It is Jerusalem's welcoming committee. It perfumes the foul morning breath of its all-day-half-asleep citizens. Though clad by colorful stones and metals of pride, its stairs stinks an array of ill-forgotten unfortunates - the outcasts. Behind its quintuple pink porches is a gift and a curse, the famous Pool of Bethesda. Long ago there was an angel that popped from the clouds and stirred the tap waters of the pool and it never was the same for the outcasts.

Or was/is it?

HEALING 101

Anytime bubbles appear on the pool's surface, whoever dives in first will be washed away from his suffering, healed from infirmity, welcomed to the tiled roads of the city, received again by the family, cleared from the damnation of the eyes of a self-righteous religion. Healed.

But when did illness become a debasing factor for persecution? When did healing become a sorrowful conditional embrace of reality that is acceptance?

THE SUBJECT

What if you were a paraplegic? When the bubbles appear who would carry you if your family rejected you the burdensome vegetable? Paralysis is always an either way affliction.

The bats are on pry. Sonars rippling. Isolation is already a ripped-off curtain.

HEALING 102

..."I can't, sir," the sick man said, "for I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred up. While I am trying to get there, someone else always gets in ahead of me."

..."Stand up, pick up your sleeping mat, and walk!"

THERE WERE NO BATS IN BETHESDA EVERSINCE