by T. Wyse
Her mother cut in finally. “It seems these are something of a discovery, so more likely than not we shall be celebrating after we deliver. What better way to celebrate than with you little one? It would be like old times, just the three of us. We could do whatever you’d like there once we have completed our business.” She leaned in, smiling broadly. “Lots of time to think on these things.” She nodded.
“Just like old times.” Her father mirrored the smile, his breathing returning to a gentle glow.
“Just like old times.” Her mother agreed, softly radiant.
Just like it was, before being more than an urban legend, before itchy uniforms and novelty band aids. Before friends and drama not understood, before unwritten letters hanging over her forever. Before lakes and pools.
“No.” She whispered, and it echoed in her own ears. “No, I can’t. I want to stay. I’ll talk to her tomorrow, I’ll tell her I’m not going to the cottage, but I’m going to stay.”
“Really?” Her father caught the words, apparently surprised.
“Of course it’s fine, whatever you’d like is fine.” Her mother reassured softly.
“Are you sure?” He leaned his head to the side gently, his brow furrowing. “We…We’d really like you to come.”
Oddly her mother didn’t scold him for that forwardness.
“Yes.” Amelie nodded crisply, and the look on his face dissolved, though his breath betrayed a little wavering sadness.
“Ellis will be here by the evening tomorrow. I’m sure he will be glad to see you again.” Her mother nodded, then went back to her food.
It was as simple as that it seemed, and they left it there. Amelie took her plate and her leave of them. It felt good, felt like there was glowing steel in her lungs, but as she retreated to the stairway she wondered just how much of it was truly her doing, and how much had been the suggestions of her friend.
The cursor sat there flashing on the prepared page. Nothing. She had retreated to her mother’s study, tucked away on the second floor, and sat there with only the omnipresent walls of boxes surrounding her.
Amelie thought back, of meeting Tabaka for the first time. “She wanted to say hi, but was too shy.” Victoria’s smile, half true, her intentions kind but always coiled to strike.
Tabaka, always shy, her soft spoken manner so reminisce of Amelie’s mother. Her eyes were so wide, so bright, so curious and attentive. She had always been quiet, always observing, but without that impending judgment that Victoria held.
She was pretty, like Victoria, and Amelie had envied that. Hers was a much softer beauty though, a more fascinating exoticness to it. Tabaka had been a transfer student, the daughter of an ambassador on leave, their home in faraway India.
“I wanted to…” The words appeared finally, but the message unclear. “Wanted to apologize?” perhaps “Wanted to say”? She didn’t know what the words were, didn’t know what they were supposed to be. Was she supposed to be angry, betrayed? Sorry?
She remembered being invited to Tabaka’s house, of meeting her family. It had been an overwhelming night where she had spent more time with the exuberant family than the girl.
The cursor flashed. Nothing.
Then finally there was the memory of Tabaka’s admission, that she had befriended Amelie out of the request of her parents so that they could meet the girl for themselves. Not betrayal or anger then, only confusion still.
“I…”
“I don’t know what to say to you.” Were the only words that flowed onto the screen. “I don’t know how to make this right because I don’t know why it’s wrong.”
She deleted the ugly letters, letting the blinking cursor devour them from her sight.
This was the simple reality of the lonely little girl while she walked the earth: clumsy, confused, and bewildered by a world where every interaction was a struggle. A blank cursor, trying to search herself for the words to say, and always coming up with the wrong voice, or nothing at all.
She looked at the stranger before her, strategically faded jeans clinging to her hips, a multicoloured t-shirt that hung high enough that her navel peeked out. The only thing that truly betrayed it was her was her unleashed hair, writhing freely like a self-playing harp in the cooling wind of the oncoming night.
Eyes dear, eyes. It was always a struggle with mirrors, of allowing her mind to accept the conflicting duality of the surface, smooth and flat against the wind’s touch and yet bearing a false world within upon her strained eyes.
Turning from side to side, copying what she had seen Victoria do so many times while shopping for clothes. Victoria had helped her pick this set, and many others, and for what it was worth she didn’t feel the stranger looked bad in them.
There was however that tell, that alienness in the mirror. The way her shoulders slouched a little too much unless she made an effort to raise them, the nervous and trembling movements. The stranger looked like a lanky and dirty goat attempting to be some kind of angora sheep.
She held her breath in, hoisted her shoulders, arched her back, and for a single moment the stranger almost looked ‘normal’, almost looked ‘right’ in the clothes.
She collapsed onto the floor in a furious bout of itching. The jeans clung to her hips like stinging barbs, choking her skin away from the air. She tore furiously at her legs but the denim simply added a tickle to the itching.
Finally she caught a look at herself. She saw a wretched beast in a pile on the floor, one step from gnawing her own legs to alleviate the itch of mange. It was enough for the evening. At least she had tried again, she assured herself as she closed the cover over the mirror again sealing the portal into that illusory world.
Amelie lay there in the darkness, fake angora coat shed for the soft covers of her bed. The search abandoned for another night, the burden shifted to tomorrow, or perhaps another day far off. The mobile above flowed with the cool breeze of the dark, a cradle for the child of the wind.
There was a lullaby in it too, tucked away within the ugly things, broken things, and dirty things. Three wind chimes hung, singing their songs close together, in a funny kind of harmony.
They were something that strangers thought to give her. People couldn’t understand the beauty she saw in her baubles, so instead they gave her wind chimes. The majority of them were the simplistic tube designs, purchased as afterthoughts and out of manners. Those ones slept in her closet, wrapped in that red fabric that stank of mummified apricots, and would only be taken out should the gifter ever visit them.
Oddly, or fittingly, enough it was her three friends who had given the chimes that resonated enough to find a place in her mobile.
From Victoria, almost an afterthought of a family vacation to Japan. It was a small glass chime, an overturned bowl with a tiny rubber mallet upon a paper string, so fragile and fleeting that the paper had worn just by the pressure of the winds upon it. It sang only one low note, deviating only in rhythm as it desired.
From Amanda came a somewhat ugly thing crafted by her own hands but absolutely beautiful in intention. It was a set of metallic stars with tinkling bells inside of them, three vines dangling from an upper crest of a moon. Their voice was demure, tinny, but gave a sparkling chorus upon the tiniest gust.
Finally the third, from Tabaka. It had arrived after the falling out, after the apology, a weighty package sent from overseas. It was a set of bells on a single string, the kind that hung in the ancient temples of those lands. The tones were deeply pensive, and slow to chime, they seemed to fill the room to echo into every corner of her little world.
Their voices intermingled, their voices clashed, their voices sang her to sleep soothing her anxious mind.
Who do I want to be? The low near monotone of rubber on glass.
Who should I be? The tinny stars trembled so far away.
Who… she fell into slumber to the deep chorus of the bells, the question unasked. “Who do they want me to be?”
2
The Wa
ve
Amelie had sworn to herself sometime in the remaining moments before sleep that she would use the day for productive things, things Amanda would perhaps fall short of feeling proud of, but at least measuring to acceptance. That resolve lingered in her heart until the breakfast table, where they had eaten almost entirely in silence. It seemed as if that brooding weight had infected them. Their breaths were that familiar monotone at least, giving her a measure of comfort that the argument had faded away.
With only cursory words they left her for the day, a kiss stolen from her mother while Amelie strained to read from a textbook, a gentle grasp of her shoulders from her father as they crossed paths early in the morning.
She didn’t see them off in any real sense, focusing on the pair leaving in the car, her sight tracing the wind’s pathways to see it drive away until it was lost to even her most intense concentration.
Perhaps four breaths ignited in her lungs and dimmed before her resolve was washed away by the breeze tickling at her hair. Sweet and warm, clear and strong it flowed playfully through the circuit of the shutters, the mobile’s chorus trembling with life.
She found herself leaning against the slats, letting the wind wash over her, to untangle her worried hair, and inevitably to draw her out and upwards. She took her backpack with her in a lingering thought that surely she could collect homework from Amanda later, and speak to Victoria as well.
The slippered foot intruded upon the mountain face once again, but the brooding dread grew with each landing, chasing her inevitably upwards and outwards once more. Four such attempts came and went until she simply gave up on treading the world below, instead rising high above where the air cycled chill and fierce.
High above the world, Amelie allowed herself to go limp and simply be carried by the winds above the town. “Home” was the simple name of the town, it had a more traditional name perhaps some hundred years ago but it had even faded from the signs welcoming visitors. Home was at the foot of two forked mountain ranges both breathing chilled air in a focused path, and high enough that heated thermal air rose from the west. This created an ever cycling vortex of wind in the city and above it, and served as the perfect playpen.
Laying completely limp and with the world spinning wildly below her, everything melted away. Though the wind ripped at her ears, howling and tearing and pulling her, there was silence. Though the air chilled her breath, decorating her face with impending frost, it was a soothing warmth. Though she spun violently and completely uncontrolled, it was a gentle cradling.
All doubting thoughts, Amanda’s nagged tones, all duties and responsibilities bowed before the thrashing winds. All desires, the whining demands of Victoria, all drive to go on were moot. All dread, pressure, and expectation were irrelevant in the ever cycling vortex.
When her ego finally returned to the surface and she again took control of the sails the sun had retreated low into the west. Focusing downward, she recognized the mouth of the city below. Time remained to meet with Victoria again, and Amanda too, but dulled from her indulgence Amelie’s mind was back to a simpler more childish time and she wasn’t willing to give up the feeling. She surrendered to that excuse, and flowed above Home with a lazy half interest.
For the most part the cities were one and the same. Dark grey and black, striped and crossed with yellow dotted rivers of asphalt running through them. The houses were in neat squares though the sizes and dimensions varied a little. The towering buildings of the business districts of the city offered little of interest in vision, yet the drafts and currents that wafted upwards and around their sides were fascinating to her even now. She largely avoided the industrial areas, their belching smokestacks staining the wind for quite a distance around them. Her perceptions allowed her to avoid the majority of the vile air as its movement upon the winds was something easily visible to her. Their currents were unique, certainly, but their company was still repulsive.
The outskirts of the city were little different. The zig zagging roads that lead up the sides of the mountain were something of a funny sight, but they were simply roads. Beyond the exits a ways the small ponds of miniscule green were replaced with larger lakes. The dotted green and orange of fruit orchards, the golden fields of wheat being gently tickled by the wind below, these were what the country was. The mock rivers of roads were there still, but they were a more honest brown, a narrower flow of grey and black.
She pierced the vortex of Home, and went out on a retreating exploration of the winds beyond. The winds of the country were gentler than the almost urgent ferocity of the cycling bubble of Home. They varied from the soft fragrance of fruit trees and grass to the pungent reek of manure and rotted earth.
A larger black river with numerous lanes cut a wide ditch into the world below and she decided to follow it, turning right. Her path would meander like this a while but stray no further from her home this day, she resolved.
She practiced with her eyes often, surveying the finer points of the world below as it passed, and she had become somewhat good at picking things out. Something was odd this day though, something subtle, subconsciously nagging her the moment she had decided to follow the highway.
What was it that felt so strange? She wondered, squinting at the world below. Traffic passed both ways, one side had the advantage of a congestion-free flow the other seemed to hobble along in a frustrated slink. There was generally an accident or construction or such that clotted the flow, and her human curiosity expected the scene to present itself shortly.
It was however no accident, no human construction.
She perceived it finally, and it grew from subtlety to an overt alarm with a terrifying quickness. The cars below, the ones in the faster lane, were driving erratically. They tore past each other much faster than even the cars on the highway's artery were oft to do, and did so in such a reckless manner. The effect became more pronounced, and finally was driven to reality with the veering off of one of the cars into the ditch. The unharmed driver staggered out, paused a moment as to collect something from inside, and began running with a mad urgency in the direction which the car had been driving.
Apparently knowing more than Amelie, the cars in the lane she followed thinned to almost nothing with a novel quickness. She had crossed an overpass where it seemed every single car in her lane was attempting to dismount itself from the track it was stuck on, and to go in random directions up and over. A trickle of oblivious cars followed the road still under her.
She rose higher, thinking to see smoke, or some sort of grand blockage in the road. She flew high enough onto the winds that the air was thin in her lungs, and the chill bit at her open eyes. Her sight was still clear, but her vantage simply was not adequate to see far enough into the horizon, to pierce the veil of the curvature of the earth and see what was coming.
She felt it first in the wind. The air pushing her forward seemed to lose whatever resistance it previously had endured. In fact she could sense little air moving against her at this point. This realization allowed the looming dread to catch her even this high up. That oily dread finally sparked as she scanned the horizon and saw what they ran from.
It was first a kind of halo as if a second, much larger sun was about to rise. The illusion abated quickly as the thing approached, the faint halo rose upwards and became a crescent wall. It was a brilliant burning red, shining like tiny polished scale, and rising with a horrifying quickness. The bottom was still not visible, and the thing's top seemed to stretch upwards into the ceiling of the world, ushering away the familiar blue and white.
She was high enough to see its width, or at least to grasp its scope. The edges of the wall extended past the point that her eyes could see, curving into the horizon. The thing was coming with an impossible speed, faster than a hurricane's winds, but one she was unable to gauge properly. The thing seemed to hold an illusion, its shimmering scales had parted in a meshing pattern, leaving the image of a brown horizon behind it.
It approached and
Amelie’s mind brushed aside the shocked hope of it being an illusion. The perverse ruby rain rose from the ground stripping it of everything and fell lazily towards the sky, gorged on whatever strange nutrition it had gathered.
That dread burned hot in her chest, the fading wind behind her doing nothing to cool the flames. A rare feeling, like nausea or a vicious cramp came over her. She needed to land, now. There was no way over the oncoming storm, and for the first time in her memory she craved the comfort of solid ground beneath her feet and, perhaps a solid roof above her head.
Whatever it was it was close and getting closer; a fact not lost on the drivers below. The panic in the road became twice as pronounced at once, all of the metal creatures madly trying to turn their directions in opposition to the oncoming calamity.
An overpass. She had once met a storm in the open like this, the visage of a sky darkening tornado. The people had huddled under the overpass, her parents had pulled to the side of the road to join them. It had been protection from the wrath of the wind then, but would it be enough now?
No, it wouldn't, that primal cramping feeling whispered. She needed to flee to the mountains, to one of the caves carved by antiquity’s passing. She needed to seal herself in there and never look back, not even for a second.
It would have to do, the dread disagreed with her mind, and for the first time she could ever recall the wind simply sputtered out to nothing. She floated gently towards the ground, stunned by the sudden blankness all around her. It was utterly chilling, the only thing visible on the wind was her own frame cutting through the air, the piercing of her shoed toes against the stilled breath of a panicked world.
She passed the upper layer of the overpass, descending past numerous abandoned cars. The red wave was looming ever closer.
Her slippers touched the ground, a frustrating few feet away from the sheltering shade. It took her entire concentration not to stumble. The hard gravel of the road’s shoulder nipped at her feet through her soft shoes, making every labored step a punishment. Cars screamed by, ignoring any dictates of speed or courtesy, their artificial wind blowing into the pouches she had forgotten to close in the frenzy, each dragging her away from her goal.
