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A quote: “And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth.” ~~ Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
I’ll start with a story …
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I wake up in the dark, a small sliver of star-filled night sky visible through the curtains.
There’s a small warm body curled next to me under the quilts.
“Bad dreams, hon?”
“No gramma. Questions.”
“More, sweetheart?”
“Too many?”
“No! Never stop asking. Never ever.”
I feel her relax and snuggle closer.
I know my son would rather I not talk to the kids about Before. The time where I slept with sounds of traffic outside and my curtains closed against streetlights and digital billboards.
She needs to ask, I have to answer, and we all need to never forget.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
Cameron says: The nightmares are back and as vicious as ever. I wake up coated in sweat and shaking for an hour. The cabin is very isolated and no one can get here without me knowing about it.
But they find me and torture me in my sleep. I blow the dust off the lantern that grandma left here. “No shadow can stand the light,” she said.
I put it in the window and light it. An instant later, I hear screams from the shadows as they are driven back. Never knew that quote was literal. I’ve been sleeping well ever since.
Tonight was warm enough to leave the windows open, to let the perfumed breezes from the sapa trees pass through the house and freshen spaces musty from winter. Set a lantern on the sill and the sparkle-flies would gather there rather than enter in search of electric sources.
From here I could see the screen of the local flit-in. It brought back memories of youth, of sitting in the cockpit of one or another boyfriend’s flitter and watching the show projected onto the smoke trapped between two force-fields rising into the sky. Of course none of my various beaus could muster the necessary insurance for flight, so we were confined to watching from the ground, looking up at the bottoms of flitters hovering at better vantage points as much as we were looking at the screen.
Tonight they were showing a movie set in ancient times, when humans were still confined to the surface of a single planet and had only steel and steam to distinguish themselves from bees building honeycomb and beavers building dams. This scene was on the deck of a ship, as its captain was bringing it around and ordering his crew to lower the nets on the advice of the man who had just come aboard.
The captain pulled the steam whistle and his Number One pulled the lever to begin winching their catch aboard. In minutes it was clear the load was too much for the winch, that they would succeed only in stripping the gears and destroying their equipment.
My mind went back to a long-ago Bible School lesson, the story of the miraculous catch. Our teacher had been an excellent storyteller, enough to bring to us the excitement of an unexpected catch after having spent the night fishing without success. But this movie really brought home to me just how primitive things were in those days, with nets woven of fibers rather than the delicate force-nets and nano-sorters that are used by the vessels that travel the cloud-seas of our world, descending to the hydroxyl layers to capture biocompatible creatures for our tables.
Navig8r says: I wasn’t sure if I was awake or dreaming, but the sound of chimes seemed to clear things up. I looked. Sure enough, there was a grandfather clock chiming midnight. I must really be awake.
“Rip Van Winkle awakes. You’re with friends.”
“Good to know.”
“The interrogators had you drugged when we raided the prison camp. Any idea how long they had been holding you?”
“Months at least. Last clear memories were summer. Unless someone moved Orion without his permission, it is winter now. I was drugged almost from the start, so no awareness of time. What year is it?”
Dupin says: The stars shone extra brightly through the window, but then the moon wasn’t up yet.
That was the reason, of course. Too early for him to return.
She put some wood in the hearth to keep the stew at a simmer. Not enough to scorch, oh no. He wouldn’t like that, and it would ruin the leftovers.
She’d already eaten, and it was nearly time for bed. He’d always said the fishing was good in the dark of the moon.
She put a lantern in the window for him to find his way home.
Perhaps tonight, he would come home.
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