Cassie.
Posted: 2004-03-16 09:59am
Cassie.
The voice of the choir sings, high, haunting and perfect, and the sound is carried down on the air.
She moves, now, towards the tree, skipping gaily in that way so freely connected with youthful innocence. A young blonde girl no older, perhaps, than eight years of age, her locks plaited and swinging exuberantly. Dirt, in tiny clinging fragments, is flung up by her passage as it lets go of her shoes, unwillingly and invisibly. Crossing pavement, road and kerb, she moves onwards, her pace quickened by the growing presence of the proud vegetation in front of her, on this cold spring afternoon.
Over the pavement, through an opening in the gates she moves, and she is in the concrete-clad clearing. Surrounded as it is by rough iron fencing, paint peeling and rust acclimatising to it’s new location, it gives an impression of emotional distance. This is a cold place, speaks the crudely-engineered iron, the pocked concrete and the half-hearted breeze. A place where warmth and fusion of hope and joy only once existed, but does so no longer.
And so the young girl slows to a walk, and saunters forwards, dainty shoes clicking faintly over the hard surface, and peers at the tree.
It is, by all accounts, worn. This dying vestige, this article of grain, root and vegetable glory long passed, now emanates nothing but age. It’s branches thin, spindly and divisive, they split and twist along their length, combining angular regularity with the tattered and jaded chaos so prevalent of the old trees.
But she looks upon it differently.
This is no mere plant, to her own eyes. What is to the eyes of a passer-by a remnant of times past is transformed by her emotions into something separate and special.
Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity,
And cleanse me from my sins.
The choir continues, and the ever-resplendent tones go on, staining the air with faint, temporary, beauty. The tones of Miserere, in their questing to the external and eternal, reflect her own feelings, mirrored almost exactly.
For she, in her innocent, tiny, precious existence, quests internally, questioning the thoughts of her own mind.
This tree, she knows, is special. She does not know why.
She places a tiny gloved hand up and out in front of her then, and touches the bark of the trunk. Rubbing her palm up and down and from one side to another, she moves and touches lightly, aiming to save the fragile material of her woollen gloves from harm at the ancient and grizzled skin of the tree.
Pulling her errant hair back over her ear with one hand, against the best efforts of the wind, she approaches the tree and walks around it slowly, moving the glove of the other hand with her and feeling as faint tugs on the material signal the grasp of the bark.
And there, halfway around the old trunk, lies the sign she is looking for.
It lay there in hard, angular letters carved into the bark. Kept there by the slow and inefficient healing powers of this tree, they exist as a message, carved in an old vegetable injury, their edges discoloured and faint now.
Cassie.
And at seeing this she stands, watches and smiles. Smiles against the wind, the grey and distraught clouds in the roof of the sky and against the mournful tones of Miserere. Extending her hand, she places her gloved fingers over the letters of her name, aiming, perhaps, to pick up by touch and some extra-sensory inspiration what mere vision could not manage.
She hugs the tree then, grinning widely, her hair aflutter in the wind, and is happy.
This tree is, indeed, special. She racks her memories then for what is available, but finds little.
Looking to the side, she sees something else, refreshingly distracting. A crow, landing from a short flight from the roof of some nearby house, alights on the ground. Its wings flap briefly, in that misleading clownish act of precision flying performed entirely by instinct, and the creature is on the concrete, hopping awkwardly from one foot to another. In it’s beak is some small miscellaneous object, which it drops. Pecking the small thing urgently, it gives up on that approach and scoops it up once again into it’s beak, apparently trying, with intermittent gulps, to eat it in one go.
Stepping forward to greet this strange creature, Cassie merely startles it as it turns, looses a strangled squawk, and flies away, object in beak. She views the departing animal, black wings against a mixed grey and blue backing, and allow her eyes to divert, inevitably, to the building that seals one end of this quiet square.
It is a church, or was one. The architecture, in sloping tiles and vertical stone, thrusts against the sky, aiming to catch any fleeting contact with the god that had abandoned it in years past. Windows, framed in ornate and chipped stonework, are mixed. Some stained-glass, iridescent and startling in their faded beauty, kept carefully in prime condition, they are teamed with ordinary windows. Cheap replacements for long shattered works of ceramic art.
Make me to hear thy joy and gladness,
That the bones which thou has broken may rejoice.
The music moves through her, and she paraphrases it’s meaning from that high, beautiful, Latin as it goes, guiding her eyes to the steeple of the building.
Framed and silhouetted by hidden sunlight, it juts upwards against the air; a guiding hand, now frozen, too long having acted to cast believers’ eyes skywards, to the heaven which they would one day aspire to enter. It is now a silhouetted shadow, testimony to architecture and hidden stonework. The spire climbs up, ending in a single point upon which, not a cross, but some tiny rag had adhered. Perhaps a small flag of minor importance, or perhaps a simple rag, caught by improbability and snagged on the metal.
She squints further, looking down the spire, the steeple and their marks of sculpted awe, cast in stonework, and her eyes fall at last onto a window.
This window, clear glass rather than the stained glass of it’s more expensive brethren, is open, cast outwards by some crude device. From it flows the music; the choral complexity of Miserere, bringing with it the taste of sadness and supplication encoded in the tones of the choir.
And in the window is a man.
She looks up, directly meeting the stare of this man as he stares down at her, and for that brief second there is recognition, tantalisingly dancing for just a moment before escaping.
His face is drawn, his features grey and resigned. Heavy eyebrows curve down, framing eyes which have seen too much, networked at the corners by crows feet. The face is old, and colourless receding hair covers what little else the light is sufficient to throw detail on.
She waves at the man, but he does not respond, instead continuing to stare down at her, his expression distraught, lamenting some secret tragedy.
She knows this man, she is sure, but not as he is now. He looks too old, his features too grey and wrinkled, his air too tarnished with experience. He should, she feels, be younger than he is, but she does not know how she knows this. The hole in her memory nags once more.
The man keeps staring and she stares back, puzzled at the lack of recognition of this haunting, familiar, unfamiliar visage and it’s knotted, heavy brows. Puzzled at the lack of links in her memory, of the tree, this man and this place.
-All but the music. The music she knows, and it is divine.
Create in me a clean heart,
And renew a right spirit within me.
She looks upwards again, past the clean aged spire, past the translucent clouds loaded with unspent moisture, brooding on their watery constipation, and stares into perfect blue.
Contrails network the sky, hemming it in. Travelling in abstract, geometrical precision, computer-controlled flightpaths as a rule across the heavens, they own the sky, running their own errands in their swarming masses.
And past the jet-powered hordes and the skipping, skimming hypersonics, technologically tapdancing over the atmosphere, is a second sun. It burns and casts it’s brilliance, lesser than that of the true sun but still significant, down at the uncaring ground.
And as she stares, glancingly, at it, it glimmers, tiny pinpricks of light and brilliance scintillating from it’s curious artificial surface.
This is the Array; the second sun. A constellation of orbital mirrors, it beams it’s reflected radiation down over the cold English cities, warming them in this future dystopia, now that the dead Gulf Stream is no longer capable. A passive courier for energy, it steals the light from some African territory, that the cities of the North might remain livable.
She does not know this.
All she knows, staring up at this heavenly wonder, at a sky transformed by technological innovation and the imaginations of swarming humanity, is perplexity. All she feels is loss, with the abandonment of her old, comfortable sky for this thing of arcing contrails and cold stellar brilliance.
This place is not hers, but it should be.
The wind gusts again, aiming to charm a shiver from her small, fragile form. She pulls her coat in around her and looks into the wind, feeling in reddened ears the private howl of the gust playing at her earlobes. It dies away.
And, straining on the edge of perception, is another sound. A honking, squawking sound she knows; that of geese and ducks making their presence felt.
She is elated at this discovery and runs, then, out of the square and onto the road, blonde hair dancing behind her as she moves toward the sound.
The sound, she knows, comes from the lake. –A tiny scrap of parkland in the city, greenness among walls of brick and concrete, it is her own personal place of beauty. Ducks and geese, encouraged by passers-by, would swim ashore to meet the kindly people throwing them breadcrumbs and tidbits, gobbling up their share greedily and with a great fuss. Their lair was a central island, isolated in the middle of the lake, in which they squabbled and honked among themselves within a thick display of tree and thicket; a miniature wood all their own. She had long wished to visit that island, somehow, to see how the birds, unseen by the old people on their park benches, lived out their lives.
And as she runs forward, down the road and around corners, paying no heed to the possibility of traffic, she thinks of the lake, with it’s wonderful familiarity in this world of age and chrome-knitted skies. She knows that if she can find this one comfortable place, all the strangeness will go away. It has to.
The road pounding at the soles of her feet, her breath jarring in her chest, she rounds a final corner and it is there. The park and the lake, in all their sentimental glory, stand in front of her.
True-to-form, the water laps patiently at concrete verges. In tiny wavelets, it crosses the breadth of the lake, interrupted only by the swimming forms of geese and ducks, towing graceful V’s through the water. People walk along the path around the lake and, although no breadcrumbs or scraps are thrown, the birds hop out of the water and move, squawking and honking, around the feet of these pedestrians. The central island positively glows in verdant green, despite all the influences of the season, and the sound of frolicking waterfowl comes from within those healthy wooden boughs, hidden from sight.
It is wonderful.
But, she reflects as she stands there and gazes at it all, it isn’t right.
The water is too smooth, the wavelets too regular and identical. The V-waves produced by the swimming birds are too geometrically perfect, lacking the complexity they should rightfully possess. The trees and bushes were altogether too green and healthy for the season. Even the birds themselves moved and walked with a strange gait, as if controlled by something not entirely used to their form.
And, turning away slightly, she sees the real image as, devoid of illusion, it leaps into the corner of her eye.
-The water is stagnant and dark. Few waves form at it’s surface and it gleams unhealthily. The concrete verges are scuffed and dirty, rubbish and filth coating the ground. The central island…
-The central island is but a mound of soil, studded by the corpses of dead trees, fallen or decayed. There is no pretence and mystery to it now, as no greenery exists to hide it’s grim reality from her. There are no birds anywhere.
She turns back to face it again and the illusion reappears, now that she views it directly, of clean water and happy ducks.
Heartbroken, she flees the scene. With the breaths of cold air stabbing at her lungs and the concrete pounding at her feet, she scrunches up her eyes and pretends it didn’t happen, keeping her gaze forever away from the sky overhead. She feels as if a centre of her world has been torn away and replaced with something rotten.
Rounding a final corner, she returns to the square and stops, panting and exhausted, in front of the tree again. Overcome by strangeness and the holes in her memory, she slumps down against it’s aged trunk and sulks, daring the wind to blow again in her face. It doesn’t.
Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation,
And uphold me with thy true spirit.
It is all so wrong!
She remembers this place, this life and this tree. She remembers the church and the lake. She does not understand why it is so different suddenly; why the sky is a plaything for technological dancers, why the church, the fence and the pitted concrete is all so old and why the lake and it’s glorious calm is now nothing short of illusion.
She looks into the sky and a thousand orbital mirrors mock her confusion.
Standing up, she turns around to the tree again and walks to it’s rear and that single name, scratched into it’s surface.
Cassie.
Her name, torn exquisitely into bark with great care. Someone had taken time over the letters, she could see, and despite the transformation of age that had assaulted everything else, that was clear and evident. Someone had loved her enough to sign her name here, encased in time for as long as this tree would hold onto life.
Someone…
She searched her tattered memory, hard, and realised that there was someone.
Someone had talked and played with her here. She could remember his presence, comforting and right, by her, looking over here all the time to ensure that she did not come to harm playing.
She could remember this tree, a rope wrapped upon a lower limb, with a tyre attached to the end of it. She remembered sitting in the tyre, and he would push her, allowing her to swing gently back and forth, leaning backwards and hanging on to experience the thrill of the game.
She remembered walking with him, as he towered over her and strode with slow measured strides, allowing her to keep pace, around the lake. He would hand her bread to throw to the birds, and would tell her the names of all the different types.
He had always been there for her, this person. She had never known her mother, but she had always had him, caring for her and watching over her. He had sent her to school and comforted her that first day when she cried and refused to leave him, telling her it would be all right. Whenever he was around, she knew she was safe.
But she cannot remember his name, nor what he looks like!
The tragedy of her scattered memory aches the most right now, as she casts her eyes down to the ground and tries to pretend that it doesn’t matter, that it will all be fine and that everything will go back to normal if she just pretends it is.
But it isn’t and she can’t. She is stuck in a strange place, familiar but changed, with no point of reference save for her name on a tree, with no ability to remember how things got this way, and without Him.
Above her the branches creak and grind softly against each other in the wind and she looks up, to see another bird. A pigeon, staring down at her, as puzzled by her presence as she is by everything else. It shuffles sideways and repositions itself, before fluttering it’s wings, as if shooing her away.
Bringing her eyes back down, she sees only the word, Cassie, and feels a sudden strong sense of revulsion.
For in this strange and altered world she once knew, among the age, the planes and the illusion of the lake, this is her only point of anchor. An anchor of just a word, scratched into the bark of a tree just as aged as everything else.
-If everything else is illusory, why not this tree as well?
She stands back and scowls at the vegetation, fearful that she might be right, showing that this last anchor is just as changeable as everything else. She shakes her head from side to side, viewing it through the corners of her eyes, like the lake, in an effort to see the illusion and hoping she wouldn’t.
It remains a tree.
She leans forward and moves her gloves over it’s surface, roughly. Fibres twist and snap, snagged by the bark, but she ignores them, searching for some evidence, for some tiny indication that this tree is not what it seems to be. Again she finds nothing out of the ordinary, and as she takes her hands away more threads come loose, embedded in the twisted bark.
Above her, the contrails keep flying and the second sun keeps burning. It is all too unreal, and the new sky continues to mock her and jeer.
What then? She thinks. What is real here and what isn’t?
Scowling deeply, her eyes framed by the formation of tears, she draws back a foot and kicks the tree. Her shoes crush briefly at the tip and she takes her foot away, a numb ache in it. A patch of moss on the bark has been scuffed, but little more has been achieved. She brings her leg back and kicks again, then again and again, lending her grief to her motions. The tree remains standing, yielding nothing to her save for scattered remnants of moss and dirt to her shoes. Tiny particles drift downwards, catching the frozen light and scintillating briefly as they float earthwards. The scintillation reminds her of the second sun and it’s inexplicable shimmering, and that in turn reminds her of the rest of the strangeness all around.
She scowls, behind tear-rimmed eyes.
With one last, furious, movement, she draws back her foot and kicks again, only to scream at the pain as her toes cry out in agony.
She collapses back and sobs at it all. -At the loss of her memory, at her surroundings, at the pain and at the loss of Him. Her tears streaming down her face, she manages just to see the pigeon, disgusted at her grief, take off and fly away, leaving single feathers falling; a testament to the event.
And her name, Cassie, writ in bark, standing proud and permanent against the changes of the world. A last reminder written by that person who had been a father to her for so long, who she could no longer remember or recognise amidst the fog of a mind not working as it should. It remained there and it’s message was forever constant and unaltered, it’s comforting presence now serving merely to highlight the swimming of her mind by contrasting with it’s own careful ageing. It’s message certain and unswerving against her grief and confusion.
She stood and ran from the tree and the square then, limping and crying, and the music in it’s closing verses followed her out, as her outline blurred and vanished.
The old man watched, eyes drawn and saddened.
-------------------------------------------------
From the window he watched her leave. He saw her run and cry down the road and away until, horribly, her image corrupted and blurred, shimmering into nothingness as if she never was.
Cast me not away from thy presence,
And take not my holy spirit from me.
The music, unbidden and not thought of, continued it’s tones, exporting purity to the occasion. He let his head slide down, supported by his hands as his elbows rested on the window pane, and looked down, his mouth a thin, sketched line. His eyes blank.
And he thinks of loss.
His mind wandering to the usual grim topic, he thinks of her and laments this sick travesty, this repetition of torment for the sake of his own sentiment.
-But to one day be able to call her name again! The thought was a drug.
Outside, hidden machinery stirred and light coalesced onto a point.
Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, Lord;
My tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.
The cloud of light sharpened and took form. He knew what was coming.
Walking across the room to the old, archaic CD player, out of place in this age of technological wonder and ceaseless decay, he pointed a finger to flip a button.
Have mercy upon me-
And the music ended.
Returning to the window, he looked on sadly as the cloud of light and detail took form and began to move. Once again, a young blonde girl, no older than eight years of age, ran across the road and into the square, the simulation repeating by itself.
It is Cassie, once again. Rather, it is a simulacrum of her, constructed as best as could be expected from the intelligent machines that rule this age. She moves across the road and kerb, minute particles of dirt slipping from her tiny simulated shoes, and approaches the tree.
This tree that, long ago, she had played on and around.
This tree in which he had carved, in those last dreadful days, her name, to last eternally, as he knew she would not. -In those last distant days before she had disappeared from his life forever, grasped by unjust mortality.
She looked up at him quizzically then, and he longed for the day in which the simulation, -in which Cassie-, would one day smile again in recognition of his face.
He turns away, footsteps echoing in the sudden silence of the room as he left the window.
And he thinks of loss.
The voice of the choir sings, high, haunting and perfect, and the sound is carried down on the air.
She moves, now, towards the tree, skipping gaily in that way so freely connected with youthful innocence. A young blonde girl no older, perhaps, than eight years of age, her locks plaited and swinging exuberantly. Dirt, in tiny clinging fragments, is flung up by her passage as it lets go of her shoes, unwillingly and invisibly. Crossing pavement, road and kerb, she moves onwards, her pace quickened by the growing presence of the proud vegetation in front of her, on this cold spring afternoon.
Over the pavement, through an opening in the gates she moves, and she is in the concrete-clad clearing. Surrounded as it is by rough iron fencing, paint peeling and rust acclimatising to it’s new location, it gives an impression of emotional distance. This is a cold place, speaks the crudely-engineered iron, the pocked concrete and the half-hearted breeze. A place where warmth and fusion of hope and joy only once existed, but does so no longer.
And so the young girl slows to a walk, and saunters forwards, dainty shoes clicking faintly over the hard surface, and peers at the tree.
It is, by all accounts, worn. This dying vestige, this article of grain, root and vegetable glory long passed, now emanates nothing but age. It’s branches thin, spindly and divisive, they split and twist along their length, combining angular regularity with the tattered and jaded chaos so prevalent of the old trees.
But she looks upon it differently.
This is no mere plant, to her own eyes. What is to the eyes of a passer-by a remnant of times past is transformed by her emotions into something separate and special.
Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity,
And cleanse me from my sins.
The choir continues, and the ever-resplendent tones go on, staining the air with faint, temporary, beauty. The tones of Miserere, in their questing to the external and eternal, reflect her own feelings, mirrored almost exactly.
For she, in her innocent, tiny, precious existence, quests internally, questioning the thoughts of her own mind.
This tree, she knows, is special. She does not know why.
She places a tiny gloved hand up and out in front of her then, and touches the bark of the trunk. Rubbing her palm up and down and from one side to another, she moves and touches lightly, aiming to save the fragile material of her woollen gloves from harm at the ancient and grizzled skin of the tree.
Pulling her errant hair back over her ear with one hand, against the best efforts of the wind, she approaches the tree and walks around it slowly, moving the glove of the other hand with her and feeling as faint tugs on the material signal the grasp of the bark.
And there, halfway around the old trunk, lies the sign she is looking for.
It lay there in hard, angular letters carved into the bark. Kept there by the slow and inefficient healing powers of this tree, they exist as a message, carved in an old vegetable injury, their edges discoloured and faint now.
Cassie.
And at seeing this she stands, watches and smiles. Smiles against the wind, the grey and distraught clouds in the roof of the sky and against the mournful tones of Miserere. Extending her hand, she places her gloved fingers over the letters of her name, aiming, perhaps, to pick up by touch and some extra-sensory inspiration what mere vision could not manage.
She hugs the tree then, grinning widely, her hair aflutter in the wind, and is happy.
This tree is, indeed, special. She racks her memories then for what is available, but finds little.
Looking to the side, she sees something else, refreshingly distracting. A crow, landing from a short flight from the roof of some nearby house, alights on the ground. Its wings flap briefly, in that misleading clownish act of precision flying performed entirely by instinct, and the creature is on the concrete, hopping awkwardly from one foot to another. In it’s beak is some small miscellaneous object, which it drops. Pecking the small thing urgently, it gives up on that approach and scoops it up once again into it’s beak, apparently trying, with intermittent gulps, to eat it in one go.
Stepping forward to greet this strange creature, Cassie merely startles it as it turns, looses a strangled squawk, and flies away, object in beak. She views the departing animal, black wings against a mixed grey and blue backing, and allow her eyes to divert, inevitably, to the building that seals one end of this quiet square.
It is a church, or was one. The architecture, in sloping tiles and vertical stone, thrusts against the sky, aiming to catch any fleeting contact with the god that had abandoned it in years past. Windows, framed in ornate and chipped stonework, are mixed. Some stained-glass, iridescent and startling in their faded beauty, kept carefully in prime condition, they are teamed with ordinary windows. Cheap replacements for long shattered works of ceramic art.
Make me to hear thy joy and gladness,
That the bones which thou has broken may rejoice.
The music moves through her, and she paraphrases it’s meaning from that high, beautiful, Latin as it goes, guiding her eyes to the steeple of the building.
Framed and silhouetted by hidden sunlight, it juts upwards against the air; a guiding hand, now frozen, too long having acted to cast believers’ eyes skywards, to the heaven which they would one day aspire to enter. It is now a silhouetted shadow, testimony to architecture and hidden stonework. The spire climbs up, ending in a single point upon which, not a cross, but some tiny rag had adhered. Perhaps a small flag of minor importance, or perhaps a simple rag, caught by improbability and snagged on the metal.
She squints further, looking down the spire, the steeple and their marks of sculpted awe, cast in stonework, and her eyes fall at last onto a window.
This window, clear glass rather than the stained glass of it’s more expensive brethren, is open, cast outwards by some crude device. From it flows the music; the choral complexity of Miserere, bringing with it the taste of sadness and supplication encoded in the tones of the choir.
And in the window is a man.
She looks up, directly meeting the stare of this man as he stares down at her, and for that brief second there is recognition, tantalisingly dancing for just a moment before escaping.
His face is drawn, his features grey and resigned. Heavy eyebrows curve down, framing eyes which have seen too much, networked at the corners by crows feet. The face is old, and colourless receding hair covers what little else the light is sufficient to throw detail on.
She waves at the man, but he does not respond, instead continuing to stare down at her, his expression distraught, lamenting some secret tragedy.
She knows this man, she is sure, but not as he is now. He looks too old, his features too grey and wrinkled, his air too tarnished with experience. He should, she feels, be younger than he is, but she does not know how she knows this. The hole in her memory nags once more.
The man keeps staring and she stares back, puzzled at the lack of recognition of this haunting, familiar, unfamiliar visage and it’s knotted, heavy brows. Puzzled at the lack of links in her memory, of the tree, this man and this place.
-All but the music. The music she knows, and it is divine.
Create in me a clean heart,
And renew a right spirit within me.
She looks upwards again, past the clean aged spire, past the translucent clouds loaded with unspent moisture, brooding on their watery constipation, and stares into perfect blue.
Contrails network the sky, hemming it in. Travelling in abstract, geometrical precision, computer-controlled flightpaths as a rule across the heavens, they own the sky, running their own errands in their swarming masses.
And past the jet-powered hordes and the skipping, skimming hypersonics, technologically tapdancing over the atmosphere, is a second sun. It burns and casts it’s brilliance, lesser than that of the true sun but still significant, down at the uncaring ground.
And as she stares, glancingly, at it, it glimmers, tiny pinpricks of light and brilliance scintillating from it’s curious artificial surface.
This is the Array; the second sun. A constellation of orbital mirrors, it beams it’s reflected radiation down over the cold English cities, warming them in this future dystopia, now that the dead Gulf Stream is no longer capable. A passive courier for energy, it steals the light from some African territory, that the cities of the North might remain livable.
She does not know this.
All she knows, staring up at this heavenly wonder, at a sky transformed by technological innovation and the imaginations of swarming humanity, is perplexity. All she feels is loss, with the abandonment of her old, comfortable sky for this thing of arcing contrails and cold stellar brilliance.
This place is not hers, but it should be.
The wind gusts again, aiming to charm a shiver from her small, fragile form. She pulls her coat in around her and looks into the wind, feeling in reddened ears the private howl of the gust playing at her earlobes. It dies away.
And, straining on the edge of perception, is another sound. A honking, squawking sound she knows; that of geese and ducks making their presence felt.
She is elated at this discovery and runs, then, out of the square and onto the road, blonde hair dancing behind her as she moves toward the sound.
The sound, she knows, comes from the lake. –A tiny scrap of parkland in the city, greenness among walls of brick and concrete, it is her own personal place of beauty. Ducks and geese, encouraged by passers-by, would swim ashore to meet the kindly people throwing them breadcrumbs and tidbits, gobbling up their share greedily and with a great fuss. Their lair was a central island, isolated in the middle of the lake, in which they squabbled and honked among themselves within a thick display of tree and thicket; a miniature wood all their own. She had long wished to visit that island, somehow, to see how the birds, unseen by the old people on their park benches, lived out their lives.
And as she runs forward, down the road and around corners, paying no heed to the possibility of traffic, she thinks of the lake, with it’s wonderful familiarity in this world of age and chrome-knitted skies. She knows that if she can find this one comfortable place, all the strangeness will go away. It has to.
The road pounding at the soles of her feet, her breath jarring in her chest, she rounds a final corner and it is there. The park and the lake, in all their sentimental glory, stand in front of her.
True-to-form, the water laps patiently at concrete verges. In tiny wavelets, it crosses the breadth of the lake, interrupted only by the swimming forms of geese and ducks, towing graceful V’s through the water. People walk along the path around the lake and, although no breadcrumbs or scraps are thrown, the birds hop out of the water and move, squawking and honking, around the feet of these pedestrians. The central island positively glows in verdant green, despite all the influences of the season, and the sound of frolicking waterfowl comes from within those healthy wooden boughs, hidden from sight.
It is wonderful.
But, she reflects as she stands there and gazes at it all, it isn’t right.
The water is too smooth, the wavelets too regular and identical. The V-waves produced by the swimming birds are too geometrically perfect, lacking the complexity they should rightfully possess. The trees and bushes were altogether too green and healthy for the season. Even the birds themselves moved and walked with a strange gait, as if controlled by something not entirely used to their form.
And, turning away slightly, she sees the real image as, devoid of illusion, it leaps into the corner of her eye.
-The water is stagnant and dark. Few waves form at it’s surface and it gleams unhealthily. The concrete verges are scuffed and dirty, rubbish and filth coating the ground. The central island…
-The central island is but a mound of soil, studded by the corpses of dead trees, fallen or decayed. There is no pretence and mystery to it now, as no greenery exists to hide it’s grim reality from her. There are no birds anywhere.
She turns back to face it again and the illusion reappears, now that she views it directly, of clean water and happy ducks.
Heartbroken, she flees the scene. With the breaths of cold air stabbing at her lungs and the concrete pounding at her feet, she scrunches up her eyes and pretends it didn’t happen, keeping her gaze forever away from the sky overhead. She feels as if a centre of her world has been torn away and replaced with something rotten.
Rounding a final corner, she returns to the square and stops, panting and exhausted, in front of the tree again. Overcome by strangeness and the holes in her memory, she slumps down against it’s aged trunk and sulks, daring the wind to blow again in her face. It doesn’t.
Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation,
And uphold me with thy true spirit.
It is all so wrong!
She remembers this place, this life and this tree. She remembers the church and the lake. She does not understand why it is so different suddenly; why the sky is a plaything for technological dancers, why the church, the fence and the pitted concrete is all so old and why the lake and it’s glorious calm is now nothing short of illusion.
She looks into the sky and a thousand orbital mirrors mock her confusion.
Standing up, she turns around to the tree again and walks to it’s rear and that single name, scratched into it’s surface.
Cassie.
Her name, torn exquisitely into bark with great care. Someone had taken time over the letters, she could see, and despite the transformation of age that had assaulted everything else, that was clear and evident. Someone had loved her enough to sign her name here, encased in time for as long as this tree would hold onto life.
Someone…
She searched her tattered memory, hard, and realised that there was someone.
Someone had talked and played with her here. She could remember his presence, comforting and right, by her, looking over here all the time to ensure that she did not come to harm playing.
She could remember this tree, a rope wrapped upon a lower limb, with a tyre attached to the end of it. She remembered sitting in the tyre, and he would push her, allowing her to swing gently back and forth, leaning backwards and hanging on to experience the thrill of the game.
She remembered walking with him, as he towered over her and strode with slow measured strides, allowing her to keep pace, around the lake. He would hand her bread to throw to the birds, and would tell her the names of all the different types.
He had always been there for her, this person. She had never known her mother, but she had always had him, caring for her and watching over her. He had sent her to school and comforted her that first day when she cried and refused to leave him, telling her it would be all right. Whenever he was around, she knew she was safe.
But she cannot remember his name, nor what he looks like!
The tragedy of her scattered memory aches the most right now, as she casts her eyes down to the ground and tries to pretend that it doesn’t matter, that it will all be fine and that everything will go back to normal if she just pretends it is.
But it isn’t and she can’t. She is stuck in a strange place, familiar but changed, with no point of reference save for her name on a tree, with no ability to remember how things got this way, and without Him.
Above her the branches creak and grind softly against each other in the wind and she looks up, to see another bird. A pigeon, staring down at her, as puzzled by her presence as she is by everything else. It shuffles sideways and repositions itself, before fluttering it’s wings, as if shooing her away.
Bringing her eyes back down, she sees only the word, Cassie, and feels a sudden strong sense of revulsion.
For in this strange and altered world she once knew, among the age, the planes and the illusion of the lake, this is her only point of anchor. An anchor of just a word, scratched into the bark of a tree just as aged as everything else.
-If everything else is illusory, why not this tree as well?
She stands back and scowls at the vegetation, fearful that she might be right, showing that this last anchor is just as changeable as everything else. She shakes her head from side to side, viewing it through the corners of her eyes, like the lake, in an effort to see the illusion and hoping she wouldn’t.
It remains a tree.
She leans forward and moves her gloves over it’s surface, roughly. Fibres twist and snap, snagged by the bark, but she ignores them, searching for some evidence, for some tiny indication that this tree is not what it seems to be. Again she finds nothing out of the ordinary, and as she takes her hands away more threads come loose, embedded in the twisted bark.
Above her, the contrails keep flying and the second sun keeps burning. It is all too unreal, and the new sky continues to mock her and jeer.
What then? She thinks. What is real here and what isn’t?
Scowling deeply, her eyes framed by the formation of tears, she draws back a foot and kicks the tree. Her shoes crush briefly at the tip and she takes her foot away, a numb ache in it. A patch of moss on the bark has been scuffed, but little more has been achieved. She brings her leg back and kicks again, then again and again, lending her grief to her motions. The tree remains standing, yielding nothing to her save for scattered remnants of moss and dirt to her shoes. Tiny particles drift downwards, catching the frozen light and scintillating briefly as they float earthwards. The scintillation reminds her of the second sun and it’s inexplicable shimmering, and that in turn reminds her of the rest of the strangeness all around.
She scowls, behind tear-rimmed eyes.
With one last, furious, movement, she draws back her foot and kicks again, only to scream at the pain as her toes cry out in agony.
She collapses back and sobs at it all. -At the loss of her memory, at her surroundings, at the pain and at the loss of Him. Her tears streaming down her face, she manages just to see the pigeon, disgusted at her grief, take off and fly away, leaving single feathers falling; a testament to the event.
And her name, Cassie, writ in bark, standing proud and permanent against the changes of the world. A last reminder written by that person who had been a father to her for so long, who she could no longer remember or recognise amidst the fog of a mind not working as it should. It remained there and it’s message was forever constant and unaltered, it’s comforting presence now serving merely to highlight the swimming of her mind by contrasting with it’s own careful ageing. It’s message certain and unswerving against her grief and confusion.
She stood and ran from the tree and the square then, limping and crying, and the music in it’s closing verses followed her out, as her outline blurred and vanished.
The old man watched, eyes drawn and saddened.
-------------------------------------------------
From the window he watched her leave. He saw her run and cry down the road and away until, horribly, her image corrupted and blurred, shimmering into nothingness as if she never was.
Cast me not away from thy presence,
And take not my holy spirit from me.
The music, unbidden and not thought of, continued it’s tones, exporting purity to the occasion. He let his head slide down, supported by his hands as his elbows rested on the window pane, and looked down, his mouth a thin, sketched line. His eyes blank.
And he thinks of loss.
His mind wandering to the usual grim topic, he thinks of her and laments this sick travesty, this repetition of torment for the sake of his own sentiment.
-But to one day be able to call her name again! The thought was a drug.
Outside, hidden machinery stirred and light coalesced onto a point.
Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, Lord;
My tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.
The cloud of light sharpened and took form. He knew what was coming.
Walking across the room to the old, archaic CD player, out of place in this age of technological wonder and ceaseless decay, he pointed a finger to flip a button.
Have mercy upon me-
And the music ended.
Returning to the window, he looked on sadly as the cloud of light and detail took form and began to move. Once again, a young blonde girl, no older than eight years of age, ran across the road and into the square, the simulation repeating by itself.
It is Cassie, once again. Rather, it is a simulacrum of her, constructed as best as could be expected from the intelligent machines that rule this age. She moves across the road and kerb, minute particles of dirt slipping from her tiny simulated shoes, and approaches the tree.
This tree that, long ago, she had played on and around.
This tree in which he had carved, in those last dreadful days, her name, to last eternally, as he knew she would not. -In those last distant days before she had disappeared from his life forever, grasped by unjust mortality.
She looked up at him quizzically then, and he longed for the day in which the simulation, -in which Cassie-, would one day smile again in recognition of his face.
He turns away, footsteps echoing in the sudden silence of the room as he left the window.
And he thinks of loss.
