Girl On A Rock

You wake nestled in your sleeping bag. Sleep slowly leaves.

Dawn slithers in beneath the tent’s entrance, followed by a wisp of the mountain ranges’ eager heat. You inhale deeply, “Gunna be a hot one today,” you predict, rolling over to Reece and Grant when there is no response, but your tent mates’ sleeping bags lay empty and open.

Some how they managed to leave the tent without waking you - not bad.

You crawl out of your cocoon and pull on nearby shorts, and face the new day.

The entrance’s zip races to the tent’s apex and you step out into the dust - - And immediately sense something wrong. You look around, trying to isolate the anomaly. Then you realise – it is not a presence that has put you off, but an absence: not a single voice, nor any human movement. You turn three-sixty, hoping for someone to make themself known – but there is no one.

You half-jog between the scattering of tents, past the campfire clearing - yet still, no one.

They have abandoned you. You are alone.

You turn the corner around the trailer. Breakfast is set out in front of you, ready for fifty hungry campers.

You begin to laugh - a rich, full laugh that lasts for several seconds. With it, you turn in circles, arms outstretched.

“Jokes over - you can come out now,” you shout. Yet the only words you hear back are your own, echoing throughout the steep valley, followed by the sharp, clear, crisp lonely squawk of an eagle from high above hovering alone on a blanket of thermals.

The peaks of the mountain ranges on either side close in.

Run, shouts a voice in your head. But where? You demand.

The echoes of your laughter die away. Replacing them - a gentle whisper calls you.

You turn, searchingly – but still no one.

You do begin to run - in a direction guided more by gut feeling than your ears.

You halt abruptly on a bank overlooking the waterhole – for that is where you see her, sitting on a rock in the midst of the water hole below.

You hop from boulder to boulder to the waters’ edge and make your way along the shore, the pebbles laughing beneath your feet. When you are a few paces away from the rock, she looks up and around to face you and you remember her.

How could you have forgotten her?

The gently rippling water reflects the morning sun onto her face and bare arms. Her sock-stuffed shoes wait patiently at the shore. The water laps lap against her calves beneath rolled-up 70s pants. Scruffy blond hair protrudes from under a red baseball cap.

“Hey there,” she smiles.

Placing your shoes beside hers, you waddle through the water to the rock and sit besides her, taking her delicate hands carefully in yours.

“What am I doing here? What’s happened to everyone?”

She tells you, and you remember that you are remembering for the dozenth time; and she speaks patiently, her hands now holding yours, easing your fears, while she stares at you with eyes far older than her face. Your heart slows, and you feet uncurl, and you breathe deeply once more.

With her help you remember again all the times that she has come to you, and every time that you asked the same questions you ask once more, and you know that you will ask her again, every time, for the rest of your life.

“They took them all – again; but not me.”

“But not you,” she echoes. You look around, to the brightening sky, to the ridges of the mountains, their reds, and oranges, and greens surfacing. You notice her smiling softly, and you realize the absurdity of what you are doing. “But they will be back – soon – don’t worry.”

“I’m not,” you reply, surprised at your own words. “I know they’re safe.”

She looks down, smiling, distant - and then quickly takes your face in her hands.

“I want you to remember this,” she tells you, and you hear for the first time a quiver of anguish, almost lost in the melody of her voice. “But I know you can’t.”

“But I remember for now.” They took them you think, staring at her, but do not say. Those who took you (how many lifetimes ago?) as their native informant, to search out those whose unshaped minds they might begin to understand – while I, I am their beacon, also a betrayer of my kind, leading the way. Like a tagged animal, whose drugged herd is scooped up, studied, and then deposited back in their beds, to awake in ignorance. Except me - the one they reward with this gift of sporadic remembrance, while they go about their business; and I let them.

For I could scratch a name in the side of my arm, carve the earth with a pictograph, tattoo pages with this story, in the hope that something will breach the surface of my second mind, in their sight, when I awake - but I don’t.

She looks away, and you study her profile, scanning it desperately for a fragment of meaning. You take her hand. She looks up, surprised, now scanning you, and you pull her gently from the rock, off into the shallow chill of the waterhole. At the shore, you pass her shoes to her, and then climb into yours, and without a word, you set off towards the foot of the valley wall, the two of you: here and now – at least for now.

You awake, and crawl quickly from your cocoon out into the blinding light. Figures form amongst the morning, you hear laughing, talking. Grant approaches the tent entrance, grinning at you, a bowl piled with Weet-Bix in hand.

“Sweat dreams, princess?” he asks, passing you the bowl. “No peas under your air mattress, I hope?” You take the bowl appreciatively, and set it beside you as you pull on your sandals, grinning back.

“I slept brilliantly, thankyou,” you tell him honestly, standing up beside him and shoving a bowl of cereal in your mouth, open mouth grinning as you chew. He slaps your back and you set off towards the trailer together, to join the others.

-- Ash Hibbert