Red Sky: Chapter 24
My memories had turned into dreams. No longer did I consciously remember the past. It visited me at night while I slept. After months of living in hell, it becomes difficult to imagine there was ever a time that was pleasant, when someone loved me, when I didn’t have to fight for survival every waking second.
I was lying with Aya on the front porch swing of her cabin. The rain falling down around us, the tapping of drops on the roof serving as musical accompaniment to the sound of our heavy breathing as we fell in and out of sleep. I woke up from the nap unconsciously humming a tune from childhood.
“The lemons fall off the tree,
The apples fall off the tree.
The wind blows strong.
The rain falls down,
But one stayed on for me.
One stayed on for me.”
It was a silly little song that would get stuck in my head. I sang it to myself. I thought I sang it to myself. It must have been out loud because Aya heard me. She blinked away the dew in her eyes. “We used to sing that in school,” she said, then yawned and stretched her arms. I looked at her strangely. The song was an obscure one and we had grown up on opposite sides of the continent. I thought it unlikely she would know it as well.
“When we sang it in school,” she continued, “we would sit in a circle and the teacher would walk around passing out lemon and apple candies from a tiny wicker basket and when we reached the end of the song, she would stop and magically produce a real lemon and a real apple. It surprised us every time.” Aya smiled at the thought. “She would give the apple to the student she stopped at and the lemon to the next student after that. When it was me it felt like I had, I don’t know, won the lottery or something even better. It was like a warm hug from your mother, an indescribable feeling of joy.”
“That’s exactly the way we did it at my school,” I said.
“And as we were singing,” Aya continued. “I would try to slow down or speed up as we got near the end, hoping the other kids would follow my lead so she would stop on me!”
“Me, too,” I said excitedly. We both spontaneously started to sing. “The lemons fall off the tree, the apples fall off the tree….” We formed a chorus as her dog Bandit joined in, howling from inside the cabin. When we finished we both laughed. She kissed me and smiled.
And then I woke up.
It was a sweet memory that never happened. The song was real. I learned it as a child and my teacher did pass out little candies and real lemons and apples, that much was true. Sometimes I would even hum it down in the mine while Max and I worked. But I never sang nor hummed that song when I was with Aya and she never brought up such a memory with me. Yet somehow the memories of that tune and my memories of Aya combined in my dreams to make a stronger impression than most of my real childhood memories. I could have sworn we sang that song together as we lay on her front porch underneath the rain, yet I know they are two separate events from two separate times in my life.
That dream reoccurred every few weeks during my first year on the red moon. Over time it would continue and become more complex. Aya’s cabin would morph into my grandmother’s cabin and dreams would become memories once again.
There is little difference between the two cabins in my mind. Aya’s cabin could quickly become my grandmother’s. No walls would have to be moved. No rooms would need to be added or subtracted. The elkhead over the doorway was the same in each. They each had the same square table in the kitchen with four chairs arranged symmetrically around it. They both contained one bedroom, which was located in the back of the cabin, and had a bathroom with old-fashioned plumbing where you waved your hand to flush the toilet.
My grandmother’s cabin felt like she had purchased Aya’s cabin and redecorated it. The walls were bare in Aya’s cabin and there was very little furniture, it had the familiar bareness of an unused luxury purchased many years ago and then cast aside for newer diversions. My grandmother’s cabin, however, was cluttered with the detritus of years of collecting that was done for a much bigger place. She fit a mansion’s worth of objects in those three medium-sized rooms.
It’s possible the two cabins were nothing alike. Maybe I confuse them because I only visited my grandmother’s cabin once. I was five-years old. Five-year olds aren’t very good at remembering architectural details. My mother had passed away a couple of years earlier in the plague of ’33. My father thought it was important for me to visit so I could get a sense of my family tree on her side. I write all of this now, but such things mean as little to a five-year old as architectural details.
We approached the cabin through a long winding road that took us through a crowded forest to a circular clearing. I remember being surprised that my grandmother lived in such an isolated place by herself. There were no neighbors, no manmade structures of any kind within sight.
When we reached the front door, my father turned to me. “Be on your best behavior, she is a very fragile woman.” He knocked and a voice told us to enter. I don’t remember my first impressions of her as my father placed me on the couch then disappeared leaving the two of us alone. She sat a couple of meters away from me in her favorite rocking chair. An antique clock with its hands permanently stuck on 10 o’clock was on the wall behind her. Pink and green and yellow candies with sugar sprinkled on them were enclosed in glass bowls on the table to my right.
My grandmother looked down at me like I was a foreign object accidentally included amongst her familiar possessions. I looked back up at her with complete incomprehension. A wasp entered through one of the open windows unnoticed by anybody but me and flew up to the vaulted ceiling far above our heads. It rested on one of the beams. I had never been stung before, so at the time I didn’t think to be afraid of it. It was like a tiny little bird to me. I was fascinated by its long yellow and black tail and its transparent wings that fluttered so effortlessly as it made its way from one beam to another. If it had been within reach, I would have stretched out my hand to touch it.
My grandmother let out a stifled cough and my attention returned to her. She was still staring at me, as fascinated by my presence as I was by the wasp’s. She didn’t ask me any questions. She started telling a story from her childhood. “When I was young like you, my family lived in the center of Merdin.” My eyes involuntarily wandered over to the candies on the table beside me, hoping she would notice my interest or, perhaps, absent-mindedly look away so I could pounce and steal a few.
“My mother’s family, your great-grandmother, had several houses throughout the city. Cecil’s grocery store and the Philomena Restaurant, do you know them?”
“He hasn’t ever been to Merdin, Ethlyn.” My father informed her from the kitchen where he was making sandwiches for lunch.
“That was entirely our land. We had a dozen servants and my mother would host great parties every weekend. Admirals and ambassadors and other great men and women would attend. The foreign dignitaries would bring exotic food, like chimch and klimt. Have you ever tried klimt?”
I stared as blankly on this question as I had on the first.
“The Crimani Ambassador brought the most delicious pastries. He was such a marvelous looking man, very distinguished with a black mustache and so many medals on his chest. You could get blinded by those medals.”
I marveled at how old she looked. I suppose everyone looks old to a five-year old. Her gray hair was thinned on the top of her head to the point that a young boy would notice. Her hands were twisted in upon themselves like talons or claws. This made it difficult for her to pick up the mug of tea that was beside her. She would use both hands, cupping the sides of the mug as she brought it to her mouth. Her teeth were not hers, my father had told me that. Her hips and knees weren’t hers, either, he told me that as well. One of her eyes and one of her shoulders had been replaced, too. She walked with a cane. Despite all of the advancements in medicine, there are still some things about old age that only a cane will help.
At the time, I was more concerned with that wasp and those candies than my grandmother and her stories. The visit lasted a few hours and then we left. I received a card from her on my next birthday and that was the last of our communication. She died when I was eleven and I don’t remember a funeral. My grandmother is more a vague dream than a real person to me. The memory of lying with Aya on the porch and singing the apples and lemons song is more real and visceral than that visit to my grandmother’s cabin. Sometimes, when I would lie in bed awake at night on the red moon, as I stared into the darkness above, I believed that Aya really knew that song and my grandmother was only a dream.