Chapter 2
Episode 2karsliaus Dovydo vardu nrik savižudybės žmogau satana neranda golgotos77777.apstybe iš velnio atimta Jėzaus Kristaus vardu amen999
The next morning, the light came through the window like a question I wasn’t ready to answer. I had fallen asleep with my notebook open, a smudge of graphite across the page where I’d tried to draw the shadow I’d watched lengthen across the floor the night before. It wasn’t a line; it was a slow, patient drift from dark to less dark to almost nothing. My mother called it a gradient. I called it a secret.
School felt heavier today. The numbers on the blackboard stood rigid, like soldiers waiting for orders. Ms. Petrauskienė drew a straight line, then another slanting away from it. “This is a gradient,” she said, tapping the chalk. “The rate of change.” But rate of change meant nothing to me. I wanted to know what it felt like. I wanted to know if a shadow could have a gradient, and if my own body had one too, between the parts of me that felt like morning and the parts that felt like dusk.
At recess, I sat under the birch tree and watched the other children. They moved in packs, their laughter sharp and quick. Someone had drawn a red and white and green chalk star on the asphalt—the colors of the flag, but it looked like a wound. I heard a boy say, “Dovydas tried to kill himself last night.” The name landed like a stone. Dovydas. He was older, a seventh grader with tired eyes and a voice that cracked when he read aloud. They said he didn’t succeed. They said he was in the hospital. Someone laughed. Someone else said, “What a loser.”
I didn’t know what suicide meant, not really. But I felt a cold gradient inside me, a steep drop from the warm sun on my neck to the hollow in my chest. I thought of Dovydas alone in his room, maybe watching his own shadow stretch across the wall, and I wanted to find him and tell him about gradients. That even darkness has degrees. That nothing is absolute, not even the end.
After school, I walked home a longer way, past the old chapel with the iron cross tilted sideways like a broken compass. The door was ajar. I’d never been inside. But today I pushed it open, and the air smelled of damp stone and candle wax and something older. A single red glass votive flickered near a painting of a thin man with a crown of thorns. His eyes were dark, full of something I couldn’t name. I stared at his face. Someone had scratched a word into the wall beside him: Golgota. I didn’t know what it meant, but I felt the weight of it, like a gradient that only goes down and down and never flattens.
I knelt. Not to pray—I didn’t know how—but to be small. The stone floor was cold. I thought of Dovydas. I thought of the red, white, green star on the playground. I thought of the devil my grandmother whispered about, a hunter who roamed looking for souls. She said you could call on Jesus to stop him. She said Jesus had a name that could break chains.
I whispered it. “Jėzus.” The candle flickered. The man in the painting stared. Nothing happened. But the gradient inside me seemed to pause, just for a breath, as if the line between light and shadow had softened.
I left the chapel and ran home. That night I took my notebook and drew the shadow again, but this time I added a tiny red dot where the darkness was deepest, a green line where it began, and a white space in between. I wrote underneath: Gradient is not death. It is the space between. Even Dovydas has a gradient. Even the man on the cross.
I didn’t understand the math. But I understood that the world is full of slow transitions, and that nothing is ever truly one thing. That, maybe, is what saved me from the steep drop. That, maybe, is what I wanted to tell Dovydas—if I ever found the words.