1000 words from
Follow the Darkening Sky
What mortar holds her together despite her evaporating hope?
Hope?
Was it still hope if you could watch it dissolving slowly, irresistibly, like the foamy head atop a frozen mug of on-tap root beer at Mama Caterina’s Pizzeria? Or rather more like fierce hope held for so long now it is less hope than obsession? Codependency? Maybe. A demand anyway that the world dance to the score she wanted played?
Yet that isn’t right either, is it? Less the movement of a body dancing to a fixed law of the universe to which, puppetlike, she had no choice but obey, than someone who has fallen into a raging cascading river plunging through a mountain valley and using every ounce of strength to escape. Something she could not do. And did not even want to do even if she could. She was stuck in the torrent by her own devices.
She slid her e-mare into a smooth cantor, throttling the machine up the dirt trail to the copse where her father would be waiting amid the silent stones. Racing the rising moon, she hurried to make sure when the orb topped the horizon she would be in place. The trail following the small creek widened and hugged the algae encrusted shore of their neglected farm fishpond. She marked the soft glow growing appearing over the lip of the tree-covered hill for which she was aiming. She sighed and slowed. The full moon would soon crest earth’s rim, but it would be a while, no need to rush, she was almost there. Hurry up and wait, as her father often joked.
The early spring calls of the Boral chorus frogs singing in raucous jubilation even managed to manufacture a smile that brightened, if only a little, her star-lit eyes, nearly as wide as when she was a child and released to roam a summer itinerant carnival, which demanded nothing but attention to outrageous food and fun: games, cotton candy, arcade games, strange sights, sounds, and smells. She stopped her steed and listened to the singing anurans. Do frogs feel joy? Unlike, the child “Bree,” she’d been, as the adult Brenda she could not leave the question unasked. It had been a long time since she smiled, but she did now, thinking about that little girl with eyes bright who dared such questions.
As the path climbed up to the small patch of aspens, she remembered how her father would bring her to the pond to hear the spring mating calls of the frogs and to watch the nighthawks soaring above the pond and occasionally dipping down to snatch something from the surface. Father and daughter would listen to the voices of these small amphibians and these lovely night-birds in comfortable silences. Typically, he would then tell stories of growing up on this same bit of landscape that he inherited when his older brother did not come back from Vietnam. Her father knew every inch of the property that stretched about three miles square centered on a white frame house that they both grew up in—anchoring their lives in warp and weave of various fates.
The aspens were large and old. Black scars marring the phloem-rich green-tinged grey-white bark all the way up the trunk to where the high branches reached for the sun. She suspected these trees were a remnant of a much larger forest that had once covered much of their land before the arrival of the pioneers who had driven out the Native populations that had lived here for centuries before the colonists, including her ancestors, had arrived en masse, and cut the trees to open the land for pasture and crops. At the top of the little knoll, she found the neat little row of granite graves etched with names, some familiar like, those of her father, her paternal grandparents, and their parents, and some not arrayed in rows, including a scattering of graves with names of assorted children and others whose place her in family tree she had never bother to learn. But it was the three unmarked graves about 30 feet up hill from the others that her father had dug in secret shortly after her birth, and which would affect her family in ways that would define and redefine them for the next forty-five years—all her life. She looked at the three graves for a few minutes, then sat on a large aspen log she had placed there about ten years ago.
“Hi Dad.”
“Hey Bree,” she heard in her mind as clearly as if it were really him, “how are you holding up?”
“Not great, Dad. Got a minute?” she said.
“For you? Of course. Always. Are the frogs singing? It should be about that time of year.”“Yes. I passed them on the way up here and they were at full volume. Magical as always. I wish you could hear them. Can you see the nighthawks?”
“No. Being a shade is less fun than you might guess. Any luck getting in?”
She smiled as she answered, “No. Hey you being a shade could maybe you pop in there and see if there are any hints? Then you could come back and tell me what to do.”
Her dad’s guffaw was as full and rich. He knew how to laugh well, “I wish I could. I’m so curious myself.”
“Sure sounds like the next life is pretty bland. Did you ever look around for Cin?
“Lots of spirits here you know, so no, but I’ll keep an eye out.”
“I miss her so much, Dad. If you ever find her, tell her how much I still love her,” she paused, then: “And miss her.”
“Oh, kiddo, you know I will. Of course I will.”
“Thanks.”
She feels arms around her and she leans into her father’s ghosty hug. She sniffles a little but decides to keep pressing him for some help.
“So Dad, you always said to me, ‘If there was a way out there must be a way in.’”
“Yeah. Still hold to that.”
“I’m starting to doubt,” She looked back over at the three unmarked graves, “what if I wasted my life?”
“All lives are wasted. We never accomplished even a fraction of what we hoped or wanted to. There’s no escape from that I’m afraid. We never live up to a modicum of what we might have become. We have to ask over and over as we live, How might I live? Not how should or ought, ‘might.’ Make choices live with consequences and keep asking.”
She smiled, her dad using Cin’s words seemed appropriate right now.
“What do the scriptures say?” That was more like her dad.
“Not much about them,” she nodded toward the blank markers.
“I suspect that’s true. Unless you count Ezekiel, he was chalk full of space alien stories.”
She couldn’t tell if he was joking. She’d have to look it up when she got home. For these visits she brought no phone.
She gazed into the sky just in time to see a shooting star streak across the sky. She sighed. Should she wish on it?
This is the beginning of a near-future novel I’ve been working on for years. It’s the story about a found spacecraft, but it’s not really about aliens or alien abduction, nor is it even a proper science fiction. Its speculative elements are light. It’s more of a story about a family and the disruptions and disputes that follow the craft’s discovery. It’s about a Mormon family that finds something that doesn’t fit with anything they know and launches them into troubling paths of addiction, estrangement, and forgiveness. It’s about the breakdown of hierarchies, faith, and even meaning, so altering that requires taking all they once knew to a ground state. A place so uncanny they feel they’ve been set adrift. Yet, this new state is decorated with the remains of their old life in ways that mix the familiarity of well-worn beliefs with structural change so other as to be unrecognizable. It’s a story about getting so lost that even the existence of a map is beyond conceivability. A place off the edge of the given psychological cartography of such terror that even the overedge warning, “Beyond here there be dragons,” would be received as a comfort. 🕮