Free Only Good Men Deserve Yesterday by Arno Le Roux Page A

still hadn't moved. He held his
wrist up against his ear and smiled at the surreal silence.
Ascending slowly to his knees from the lotus position, and then
with great effort he rose his feet, he loosened the wrist watch
completely and stared at if for a brief few short seconds before
pulling his right arm back as far as his aged old muscles allowed.
As the watch was hurled out the open window and flew, time strated
anew. Time disappeared into a nearby cloud that enveloped the
ancient monastery. The old monk slowly made his way to the adjacent
room to light a fire and all the while a wide grin pushed his
wrinkled old cheeks aside. He commenced his reward for his opus in
the form of a well-deserved pot of strong tea.
     
    In
France, in what seemed to have been a monsoon-like gush of never
ending water from the heavens, dressed in a brown robe, a soaked
old man looked down expecting his bare feet to be washed by the
cold torrent flowing past the shop fronts. His brown leather
sandals gleamed up at him through an inch of hasty passing
rainwater. He was soaked to the bone at 3am outside an electronic
shop window, staring slightly bewildered at the mute news
presenters on the long row of new Samsung Flat Screen TV’s. The
eye-blinding bright red and yellow alternating flashing neon signs
which lit up the words “low interest”, “cash discount” and “two per
customer”, were the furthest things from his mind. The lights
almost induced an epileptic fit that he felt coming on and that he
thought he outgrew when he was fifteen. But he wasn't shopping for
a special, actually never did. The man found himself staring at
unfamiliar that was rolling out in all directions around him. He
didn't know where he was and he was absolutely starving. Starving
and the overpowering absent sense of belonging would have been a
terrible reality to deal with for most people. As hungry as what he
was, and knowing he didn't belong, his loud bellowing laugh bounced
off his wet reflection in the shop window. Water bounced playfully
off his shaved bold old head in all directions and he looked
straight up into the black sky and surrendered to the heavy rain
that washed his face. His smile under the oddest of circumstances
was almost permanent.

Chapter
1
     
    November 17th, 2018. A glorious historical day that superseded
all other days greeted not only South Africa’s rainbow nation, but
even the hostile nations divided up over many time lines. In South
Africa, not even the results of the last few seconds of the
hysteria of the 1995 Rugby World Cup, or the “peace had dawned”
feeling of the April 1994 elections could successfully compete with
the collective national racing heartbeats of the excited nation.
For what had been maybe the first time in history on a global
scale, varied skin colours, race, different, and even opposing ways
of worship and political ideologies didn't matter at all. It all
joined the plane where bias judgemental Facebook posts resided. The
forgotten suburb named irrelevance...
     
    In a
number of countries a multitude of nuclear reactors were about to
go online as the world was fixated on the gigantic bright-red
digital clocks that were counting down from 2 minutes. It had been
too long that the desperate world anticipated a solution to
progressively deepening and devastating electricity crises to
finally end.
     
    The
almost hypnotic excitement served as proof of man's unity in the
face of a daunting future. As long as man had hope to cling to, and
a possibility of a better tomorrow, he could inch forward into the
abyss like he always did.
    Apart from the ghost towns where large factories; which were
eventually also plundered for their remaining fuel reserves, and
homes which had run out of fuel for their generators, only small
solar panels, too weak to power anything larger than a home geyser,
was as close as mankind came to power. But on a national and
international scale there was one single other modern marvel. It
was