NINE MINUTES

NINE MINUTES

(A moving story from Botswana)

There she is, the baby antelope still covered with remnants of her mother’s placenta and amniotic fluid on her back, just five minutes after coming out of her mother’s womb, just see her running already.

She has no time to waste on suckling and feeding, nor on cuddling or cooing. She is running as if she was born to run, though only six minutes old.

She has no time to be vaccinated, learn how to talk, spell, or multiply or divide. It is simple math: the kid antelope has to hit the ground running, no matter that she had seen the sun over the savannah for the first time only seven minutes ago.

She has no time for conditioning or tactical training, or to undergo psychological tests or lessons on the proper breathing techniques.

There she is, chased by one of the fastest creatures on earth  the cheetah, yet the young antelope in her minute of adolescence speeds up like a top class runner. She can outrun and outfinesse even the current world record holder, regardless of the fact that her hoofs have barely touched the ground for the past eight minutes.

At the beginning of the ninth minute of her life, this already grown up antelope is running so fast that one might think that she already knows how to fly. She has no time to meditate on the meaning of life: she will leave that to those that might stumble their way to the ninth decade of life. All she does is run, five meters behind her mother. She doesn’t have time to think about death, either: it’s a topic for those that have forgotten how to live. At the end of the ninth minute of her life, she can freely say that she has spent her whole life running.

Тranslated by Milan Damjanoski

AuthorVladimir Martinovski
Translated byMilan Damjanoski
2019-12-27T11:48:56+00:00 December 18th, 2019|Categories: Prose, Literature, Blesok no. 129|0 Comments