DAY THREE

O Cosmic Birther of all radiance and vibration,

Soften the ground of our being and carve out a space within us

where your Presence can abide.

Fill us with your creativity so that we may be empowered

to bear the fruit of our mission.

Let each to our action bear fruit in accordance with our desire.

Endow us with the wisdom to produce and share what each being needs

to grow and flourish.

Untie the tangled threads of destiny that bind us,

as we release others from the entanglement of past mistakes.

Do not let us be seduced by that which would divert us from our true purpose, but illuminate the opportunities of the present moment.

For you are the ground and the fruitful vision,

the birth power and the fulfillment,

as all is gathered and made whole once again.

- LEO GOODFELLOW

11

MOTHER

SATURDAY 19 DECEMBER 2021 - 5:55 AM

I cracked an eye. What the fuck? It had been years since I woke up this early without an alarm or the incessant ringing of something.

I took my coffee out onto the porch. I sat on what my grandmother called the daybed: an iron-framed single bed with a firm mattress against the porch wall. A brightly coloured crocheted blanket and equally bright scatter cushions of various sizes covered the bed. It made a cosy nook.

Gran would read to me here. She would bring me a new cushion and book every December holiday. We didn’t realise how precious books with actual paper would become. I settled into the embrace of the twelve cushions and watched the sun begin its crawl across the sky.

I would read to Thando and some of the village kids back then. I loved it. I read way above the average for my age. This was probably due to not having what Gran called an idiot box in the house. This memory triggered another, and my small eight-year-old body rested in the enclave of her arms.

“How does it feel in your body, child?” I closed my eyes and scanned my body. I hadn't done this in years. Something stirred in me. Some forgotten place, deep inside, began to shift.

Another memory surfaced: me and Thando, and all the kids used to do Yoga with Gran on the lawn. Yoga. Fucking Yoga. Someone at work invited me to do hot yoga recently. I laughed in her face. I would rather die than sweat and breathe in a heated room full of people. To be clear: I always felt this way, virus or no virus.

Despite this, I suddenly knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that deep breaths, deep, deep breaths were my way out of where ever the fuck I had been for the last twenty years.

MAIDEN

SATURDAY 19 DECEMBER 2012 - 5H55

An interdimensional cyber-terrorist was on the loose, and I was going on holiday with a kid I barely knew.

Fikile switched the radio on: “Our CNN correspondent has this to say: the 40 calibre gun stashed under the driver’s seat slipped backwards on the car floor, right into the reach of Patrick Price's twelve-year-old son, Jackson. This is how he obtained the weapon with which he gunned down classmates and teachers in his Orlando Secondary school today. In other news, seventeen people died in an avalanche at a popular ski resort in the Swiss Alps. ” Will and I exchanged glances, knowing there was much more than a kid finding a gun under a seat.

Eleanor switched the radio off, gesturing to Fikile that she was on a call. Neither Fikile nor I protested. Fikile and I made eye contact through the rearview mirror and smiled. We drove the rest of the way with Eleanor chattering incessantly on her Wearable, doing what she called troubleshooting so we could have a ‘nice holiday’.

I got on with reading the book I found on the Peaceman porch about having a sixth sense. Mr Peaceman was thrilled that I expressed an interest in it and was very happy to loan it to me for holiday reading. Look at me, all old school, reading a book with paper. Also, I had at least one extra sense!

“Wow.” Said Will, looking out of the window a couple of hours later. “It’s beautiful out here!”

I closed the book and watched the landscape change. It was beautiful. How had I missed this? I felt Her presence take shape between us in the back seat: Truth. Will was aware that something had shifted in the atmosphere too.

“This land is relatively untouched by the globally predominant move towards technology and development,” I said.

“Oooooh, are we playing tour-guide tour-guide.” Will enthused. I stared at him. He seemed impervious to my need to know it all.

“Gran says she never regretted moving here when people forget to be human."

“Forgot to be human.” Will nodded thoughtfully. “Sounds like something my parents would say.”

“She has little to no tech in the house at all," I said, longing for the bag of gear I usually brought with me. I had a bag, but it was full of notebooks, pens and several other books taken from the Peaceman home. Will and I had to produce a school project to cover our lie. Yay.

“Brilliant, we will be safe then." Said Will.

Fikile’s eyes flickered to us in the rearview mirror. I made that weird face people make when trying to be cool, but they most definitely are not being cool.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

I tried to gloss over Will’s response. “She has a super old and outdated cell phone, not even smart. She’ll put off having a Wearable for as long as possible!”

“Dude, my parents will love her. They are totes anti-Onboards and Wearables? Not a chance! Which is fine, considering the state of things.”

Eleanor’s eyes flicked towards us in the side mirror. Will was rubbish at keeping things on the down-lo, which meant he was not good at lying. This should be a good thing, but right now, not so much.

“She has a Nokia 3310, practically prehistoric,” I said. We both laughed, and I got into the rhythm of my story. “She only uses it for phone calls and regularly swaps out sim cards that are just as ancient.”

Eleanor smiled, shaking her head. Crazy old bitch, floated from the front seat. Wow. I knew they weren't best friends, but that was intense.

I carried on. “We leave messages, and she calls back.”

“No way!” laughed Will.

"Way!" I laughed, feeling oddly smug about what a nut job my Grandmother was. “Eleanor thinks she’s paranoid and a little crazy and made that up.” I saw her crack a tiny smile in the side mirror. She was still listening! Her mouth went full smile as she thought, She’s going to lose her shit when I tell her I’m putting Regan and I forward for the Onboard trials!

“I’m getting an Onboard?” I yelled! Eleanor spun around and glared at Fikile.

Fikile shrugged, refusing to take the blame.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Eleanor backtracked. “Gran would go crazy.”

Damn, right Gran would go crazy. Will’s eyes had gone very wide. I carried on, “Gran doesn’t even have an old TV. She calls it the idiot box!” I laughed, slapping at my thigh.

Will laughed, “The idiot box! Ha ha. I love it." He said, but I could tell that was not what he was thinking. I didn’t want to intrude on his thoughts, so I just looked out the window to revel in my good news: I was getting an Onboard!

It was that second that I realised that Truth had left and Will was not the only one that was rubbish at keeping things on the down low.

MOTHER

10:10 AM

Something shifted in the atmosphere. I looked around the porch and the grass rolling towards the forest and the beach. A peculiar sensation took shape around me. The air sharpened as if a camera lens focused. This sensation was familiar and recent.

I turned my ear to it. It sounded like there were hundreds of birds in the nearby trees. A moment later, three squawking crows arced over the field. One landed on the gutter above me. The second landed in the apple tree, and the last landed on the bedpost. The third one squawked at me.

The breeze lifted my platinum on-purpose hair from my pale brow and the dream catchers we made as children danced in the sunlight. I smiled. My heart lifted, and I felt more than the sun beckoning me.

I stepped off the porch and lifted my face and hands as if in worship. I turned my palms this way and that, literally trying to soak up the sun. I closed my eyes, shrugged off my sweater and held my pale eczema-dappled arms up to the sun like an offering, and it was good.

I could feel my skin, my solar panel, juicing me up from the sun. I lifted my face, closed my eyes, and breathed deeply.

I time-travelled again: I couldn't tell you what they were singing, those happy Methodists, but nine-year-old me, stood in a ray of sunshine that broke brilliantly and breathtakingly through the grimy window of the church I had gone to with my friend after a sleepover.

I swayed in the beam of light and experienced an almost palpable sensation of being hugged by an invisible being. A warm glow spread from the centre of my chest. Like this moment right now. If the sun had arms, they would be holding me in the warmest embrace.

I felt a tickle on my left palm, still raised to the sun. I blinked, ready to wipe away the bug I assumed was there, but was delighted to see an enormous fiery monarch butterfly. I stifled a giggle of awe. It was in my hand! A second landed on the dreamcatcher, then another and another, their flames dancing in the wind. I glanced across the field to see hundreds of them setting it ablaze, fluttering and swooping in the golden light of the morning! A few cows made their way past the house. One of them wore a tinkling bell, and a murmur of a moo drifted towards me.

I spend so much time inside the maze of my mind and the haze of pollution. Being inside my body, feeling it move and breathe, was magical. This was the medicine I needed. For too long my breath had been tight and shallow in my lungs. I closed my eyes and breathed the sea air in, holding it, feeling my lungs expanding. Something around my heart softened.

Thousands of butterflies covered the porch. The three crows that had been around since last night adjusted themselves from their perches, wings twitching. Then I noticed the floor.

It and the entire wall framing the kitchen door had eyes. Geckos of varying sizes eyed me. In contrast to the furnace of flickering butterflies, they were perfectly still, a velvety mosaic, each beady eye focused on me.

The only thing that made it vaguely normal was the grazing cows and the bleating of a kid separated from its mother. Somehow I knew that every living creature, not just on the porch, was aware of me.

Just off the porch, as if I were inside a time-lapse clip of grass growing, a patch of grass grew a vivid green rapidly. It sprouted flowers, of at least three bright varieties, in a perfect circle, charming me into Wonder! It was peaceful. I was peaceful. It was Shalom.

I tasted the word in my mouth as if it were a fresh, flaky pastry, “Shaaaaaaaa-lom.”

“Shalom,” he confirmed as he materialised within that spot of vivid green, in a perfect circle of flowers. His skin was translucent, a silvery blue that gleamed in the sunlight. His Indigo hair swept back from a calm brow and a secure jawline. Ice-blue eyes emitted a contradictory warmth as they pressed into my very being. I looked up into his face. This time there were no tears.

MAIDEN

17H17

I looked up at Gran’s cottage, and my code raced. Tata waved at me from the ladder he was standing on, fixing a gutter, and I pulled my sleeves down, even though I knew it was under control.

Going down to the beach had never been on my radar before, but I was itching to shake off my shoes and get my toes into the sand, which was very weird. Very. Weird. My toes were to sand as oil is to water: never the twain shall meet, as Gran would say.

“That’s Tata,” I told Will. “Gran says he’s a magician and can literally fix anything.”

“Literally?” asked Will, raising an eyebrow in mock disbelief. I smiled, acknowledging his effort.

“Tata is Gran’s brother-in-law. He owns this land.” I had to give Will one thing: when he gave you his attention. He gave it. I thought about what Blue said about being powerful in the present. If this were the case, Will was a Ninja.

“Gran doesn’t think anyone should own land unless it’s the indigenous people of the land that govern it and take care of it,” I told Will. “She says that in the same way, people can’t own people, we can’t own land. But with a history stretching into eternity, it’s hard to figure out who got where first.”

Will nodded in agreement as he picked up a stone. He rubbed it and put it into his pocket.

“Tata has a house further up the hill,” I nodded. "Up past the house to the north. The Ocean is to the South/East." Tata climbed down from the ladder and they greeted each other in isiXhosa.

"Fikile’s family live in this area too. She leaves us in Gran's hands so she knows we won't go feral, then she comes back just before we go home," I explained before Fikile introduced Will to Tata, also in isiXhosa.

“Tata means father in isiXhosa, and Fikile means ‘she has arrived,” I explained.

"She has arrived!" Will pointed out.

Fikile rolled her eyes.“You’re a nice boy, William. Don’t tell bad jokes.” We all laughed.

There was a commotion as Eleanor started pacing and yelling at someone in Beijing. She gesticulated wildly. Will stared at her for a second before jumping to help unpack the car. But everything faded into the background as Tata looked into my eyes and grinned.

My code sprang to life. I tried to draw it back, but it was too late.

Truth filled up the space between us.

Tata bowed to Her as if he could see Her. Could he?

“It is time,” said Tata, smiling.