From brideb@efn.org Sat Jan 25 15:53:31 1997 Date: Sat, 25 Jan 1997 10:45:37 -0800 (PST) From: Deborah Bryan/Brian Cochrane To: ftp@etext.org Subject: Cranberry Winters - issue 7 ...---***Cranberry Winters***---... (hidden faces) Issue 7, Decembre 1996 ---------------------- - A River of Thoughts, words from the editor - _Storyteller_, a story - _When Tomorrow Comes_, a poem - _Windows_, a story A River of Thoughts 8 Decembre, 1996 For your sake, I am fighting off the urge to tell one of the worst jokes I have ever had the displeasure of hearing. Aren't you lucky? Life has been difficult for this editor/student over the two months since the last issue of Cranberry Winters. I was laid off of work while attempting to cope with my first term at the University - a blessed combination, I can assure you. I am still searching for work, but know that with my wonderful combination of talents, skills and ability to smile and ask, "Did I do _that_?" I'll have found one by the time you read this issue of the magazine. (This applies only for those reading the magazine four months after publication...) Remember when I mentioned that I was considering printing an issue or two of Cranberry Winters? I had a job then... But, really, I will be printing a one-year anniversary issue in February. I will charge a dollar for this special, if that, and will put quite a bit of effort into it - graphics and the whole shebang! Drop me a note if you would like a copy of this special issue. Ah, back to studying for those cursed finals! Rings circle my eyes and the side of my face is imprinted into the pages of texts that have had the pleasure of my sleepy company. Being a student is such a joy - I don't know what I'd do if I had a life! I hope you enjoy this issue of Cranberry Winters. Do share it with your friends... Deborah Bryan, 18 Cranberry Winters editor _Storyteller_ 4 Septembre, 1995 It looked at her through its one eye, questioning. "And how is it that you have ended up here, so far from your home?" It hurt her to think again of her former life, one that she had been forced to leave behind but could not forget. "May I show you the images?" she asked it, the sexless somewhat- human. She knew of their quiet language of the mind, the reason for the crowded yet silent streets. She was lucky to have found one who could speak at all - much less one who spoke her language. It made the initial exchange easier for her; she had never spoken mindwise, as was the way with these people. Now here was a being who would make it easier for her - one who would explain things without anger when she was going slowly, having a hard time understanding. "Of course, friend." It offered a hand to her, a hand that she accepted without a thought. She grasped tightly as she thought of the beginning of the end of the person she had once been, the person Geri who she had given up. "This is where it begins, this right here..." her voice trailed off, and she let the buried images flow forth once more. --- Here, an image: a child on a swing in the night. Back, forth, back, forth - her hair flies about her face, and she laughs merrily. She swings and swings and swings, until she is high up in the air. She launches herself from the swing now, falling, falling, falling. Just as she is about to hit the ground, she launches up into the air, shoots past the trees all around her. Her mother gasps from below, and calls to her. "Geri, come down this moment!" There is horror in her voice, and also anger. So little Geri falls down out of the sky, the laughter gone from her face and her mind. She lands gently on her feet and runs to her mother, who grabs her arms and pulls her toward her. "Never do that again, Gerin, never!" Geri looks down at the ground, but her mother pulls her face up once more. "They'll take you away from me, girl." Geri nods, and puts her head against her mother's chest. Blackness. The first memory - so small and yet the cause of so many misfortunes. --- It looks at her with compassion, and she sees understanding in its sole eye. "You could fly," it says in a tone that reflects this understanding it has found. "Yes, but that isn't all..." She pulls its mind to hers once again for the few memories she can muster here, so close to the end. --- Many years pass in these few moments; there is no need to focus on these memories - they are irrelevant, only distract from the story at hand. Here, another memory: she is seventeen now, on her way home after a hard day of school. She looks beautiful, and tired. She has been studying, and studying, and studying, making sure she does not lose her status as head- of-class. There are dark purple and blue shadows under her eyes, but there is a smile on her face. Two more days of testing, and then a break. It is a small break - five days, only - but enough time to take her mind off of all the matters of schooling. Here she is at the house now. She pulls the door open, steps in. It is quiet. She finds this odd, but nothing worth a second thought. "Mother? Mother? I'm home now." She hears no answer, and pauses for a moment in her ascension of the stairs. There is a tinge of worry in her voice now; her mother is always home for her when she has arrived, always has something waiting for her at the top of the stairs. "Alright, Mum. So you took the day off..." Geri drops her things on the chair by her door and leaves her room. "Mum?" She thinks she hears something from her mother's room; she moves to the left of the bannister. "I know you're here, Mum," she says with a grin. "You've not done this for some time... Hide-the-Mum. Hmph." Geri passes now a memory within a memory: when she was a little girl, she had been very fond of sending her mother off into the depths of their house, and going in search of her. She was very good at this game, always found her mother within a few short moments. "Okay, Mum, I know you're in here." She pushes her mother's door open and turns away. "Oh, no! Mum..." She turns back to her mother's room now, looks straight on at her mother's body, lying on the floor covered in blood. A hand grabs at her arm from behind. There is a cold voice, a man's voice. "Geri; how pleasant. I'm sure you don't remember me, but I'm your father. Daddykins." Geri forces herself from the man's grip, turns violently toward him, away from her mother's corpse. "No, you can't be... Mummy left him behind, a long time ago." The man smiles, but Geri can see he is not happy. He is a man who has not been happy for a long time, perhaps a man who has never known what happiness is. His hands snap out and catch her wrists quickly, grasping her there outside her mother's room. He grins. "It doesn't matter. At any rate; we have been searching for you for a very long time. Now we've found you, and we can kill you." "Kill me?" Geri spits out violently. "For what? I've never done anything worthy of such judgment..." She tries to pull from this man's grip but can not; he is by far the stronger of the two. "But you can _fly_," the man who moments before has claimed to be her father puts a deadly emphasis on the last word, and Geri can hear the scorn. Geri has the instincts of a killer; the instincts of her ancestors, who once all had flown, and fought, and hunted together when things had not been so easy. She knees the ugly, grim man in front of her, sees the others climbing the stairs. For last measure, and to make sure that he does not recover in time to catch her, she kicks him square in the face. There is a wet crunch as blood falls from his face, and he backs into the bannister, falls. Geri turns, runs into her mother's room, steps over her mother's body with a feeling of unbearable sadness - it has all come to this. She knows now that she will not be coming back, not again, not ever. Her mother's body will be tossed into some rotten hole in the earth and forgotten about. She smashes her mother's closed window, jumps up on the sill. Without a moment's thought, she is dropping from the window - dropping, dropping - now she rises, once more above the tress. Even in the years since she has last flown, the memory has not escaped her. No memory escapes her; this is also one of her many gifts. She closes her eyes and thinks bitter thoughts now. These are not her gifts - they are her enemy, her curse. Why had she not been born like all the other children, the ones who could not fly, were happy to walk on their two feet, or crawl on their hands and knees in younger days? Why not have been born earlier, before the jealous settlers had moved in, those condemned to miserable two-foot life? Such speed in the air; already she is leaving, passing the boundary of her country. She has no choice but to leave, has had no preparation, knows only a little of what to expect. Her studies remind her of what could happen to her if she stays - death by fire, starvation, slow decapitation, torture, anything - for the fact that she has killed, and now that she has flown. But her studies serve her well; she remembers the multi-colour maps of the two discovered countries well - geography was her strong suit. Geri flies for a long while, searching for some small break in the woods that would serve well as a place to sleep. At long last, she sees a meadow of sorts, and pulls down to the ground, landing softly with weary feet. --- "Many more irrelevant memories..." Geri explained as she rushed over piles of memories of a new country, a new life in a forest unfamiliar, with simple people who were content to giver her food and shelter in exchange for her occassional help. It nodded, and pulled the fragile Geri to it. Geri leaned her head against her newfound friend, feeling the warmth and kindness of its large body. It passed to her an image; Geri laid out in the bed that they sit upon now, at peace for the first time in so long a time. "Quickly," it warns. "I would like to hear the rest of your story; it is part of why I have helped you." A story-teller and a medicine man, and the most wonderful friend that Geri has had for years now. She forgot that her story was in exchange for something she has desired for a long time now, told the story simply to have someone to share at least a small part of her pain. "Hold on only a little longer, child." His presence is soothing. Her story is coming to an end. --- The memories begin again, the last time that the putrid images will play through her tired mind. Here, in the forest that has become her home: a man, a man unknown to her or her adopted family of sorts. He is much taller than the others of this country, taller even than her. "I know of you," he says. "I can see who you are, and what." Geri stops with her chopping and looks up. "Really?" she questions without interest. Even here, hidden in the trees, she and her family have been visited by a stream of oddfellows, wanderers. "I am telling you to leave, Geri; men from your country have come here in search for you. Though we will not hand you over willingly to them, they are looking for you. They want to kill you, judge you. So do the people of this country. It is a game now, Geri; they are hunting for you." "Who are you?" Geri demands of this ragged blonde man. "A man very much like yourself, wanting to help a beautiful friend from a fate not suited to her." The man launches himself suddenly through the blanket of the trees, leaving her no time for questions. She hears this man from somewhere, she knows not where. "Hurry, dear one; I could come no sooner and they are not far." Now the man is gone, gone for good. She hears the sound of feet against the fallen leaves; she looks about in fear, drops her axe. Raising her hands to the sky, she mournfully departs from what she had hoped against all hopes would be her home for her remaining years, into the sky, where she believes she might always find relief. Many trees, so many that she can no longer tell one from the other. And then, a glimpse of something else, something not green, nor orange, purple, yellow. It is a tower; she has reached the third country. Her stomach is tearing apart, she is in desparate need of food. She meets with the ground again, lurches, falls to her knees. Her face rests in the many-coloured leaves of the autumn. She lays there on the ground for a long while, not able to think or to move. Then, a voice. "A child." She is rolled over, onto her back, where the humanlike creature may look better at her. "Ah, she has travelled." It brushes her dirty red curls from her face, nods. It can see in her pain, so much pain for a human so young. It is alone at this edge of the forest; it lifts her into its arms and carries her to a place not far away, on the edge of a village quite foreign to her. Here it gives her food, food such as she has never tasted before. She feels stronger, gives it thanks. She knows not to be frightened of this one-eyed near-human. When she wakes on her third day with it, she is met by the nameless one-eye who has helped her. She knows not what else to call it - she knows from her former studies that they do not have names. She can not deal with this, and so he becomes One-eye. "Child," he speaks fluidly, and grasps her hand. "I would like to make a deal. It is a very good deal; I would only like your memories, in exchange for something I think you have perhaps wanted for a long while." It floods her with calm, and she can see the deal that it desires is indeed very much to her benefit. "Agreed," she says, and closes her eyes. --- Geri puts her head in One-Eye's lap now. It knows the rest of the story; it is part of it. The medicine that he has given her - she can think of no other word to describe it - is affecting her strongly now. Her thoughts are slipping away from her, her memories, her being; all gone. At any other time, it might be frightening. But not here, not with One-Eye, her best friend of a lifetime and of only three days. "I'm here, little one, I'm here," One-Eye whispers, over and over, as Geri takes one last look at his pleasant face and closes her eyes one last time. --- There is a fire back behind this little house that was Geri's for a few short days, and a crowd of One-Eyes sits and watches, paying respect to the woman who it honours. The One-Eye that Geri knew holds out a hand; all murmuring stops. Here, an image of a young girl swinging... the crowd is quiet as the story begins. --- The One-Eyes pay their respect to the storyteller, and bow a final time to the two fires that have burnt out this night. --- The storyteller has done his job; this is the story that he will be remembered for, forever. He kisses the warm ashes, and is the last to turn away from this most beautiful, precious story. Her story is not lost; in this telling, she will be remembered forever, and her strength and beauty remembered by these people who she had never known, but who knew her more than anyone else had ever tried to. These people, these strangers, were in the end her family. _When Tomorrow Comes_ 29 Octobre, 1996 When tomorrow comes I will smile I will laugh I will remember but I will not be brought down by pain When tomorrow comes I will kiss yesterday goodbye I will wave at the future But my heart will be in the present _Windows_ 23 Octobre, 1994 As every other day that Brian walks by the house, he sees the girl staring out the window. Today, she looks out over the sky, her attention visibly drawn elsewhere. Brian wonders briefly who this girl is, and yet really does not care in the least. She is striking, this lonely girl who always is sitting at her window, but has no direct affect on Brian's life nor his plans for law school and marriage to (with an abnormally vivacious sex life, to be sure) Sarah Lee Blayton. So he walks by, awaiting football practise in a couple of hours. Brian would never think of playing football, yet a number of his friends do, and it's always fun to watch the coach scream. (Of course, Brian attributes the coach's temper to sexual frustration.) At home, Brian greets his younger sister, gives her a noogie despite her protests, tosses his bag into his room, and departs. He first scrawls a note for his father -- "Pop - back by eleven. Brian." For years he has had a habit of walking through the woods after school, for a moment's peace and a moment's silence, and he has no plans of giving this up. So he crosses through his neighbor's backyard, not surprised to hear her customary threats about trampling her garden, crosses Almaden Street, and heads up the bike path until the branch at which he can simply turn and enter the woods. He wanders over a path that exists solely in his mind after years of roaming through the forest, and whistles. He remembers a statement his father once made, "your mother once told me that whistling was a sign of laziness." Brian wasn't sure whether she had meant it jokingly, or whether she had been serious. He didn't know his mother, didn't have a chance, really, after she died in childbirth, and didn't know what context the quote was taken in. He didn't let it bother him anymore, and let his mind wander once again. For whatever reason, he thought of the girl at the window, the one who he had never talked to, and probably never would. He wondered why he had never seen her outside of the old house, and why she would bother to spend so much time up there in an attic. As for Brian, his attic was a frightening place. No home up there for anything with the exception of rats, spiders, and rather interesting varieties of fungus and abnormal life forms that he was sure existed solely in his attic. At one point, he stopped, looked up. And much to his shock, there was the girl, sitting in a branch, surely not sturdy, observing him. Brian asked crossly, "What are you doing up there?" The girl made no comment, simply jumped down from her branch. Smiling impishly, she gave him a kiss on the cheek. "I want to show you something." Brian's first instinct was that this girl must be a bit off the whack. Of course, she wasn't altogether too horrible in the face or body, in fact rather beautiful, and he thought of what he might say to his friends. "You'll never believe who I got in bed ..." Then stopped to question himself as to whether any of his friends would ever have seen this girl. "Uh, yeah ... what?" The girl crouched down and started scraping dirt away from the bottom of the tree. Her skirt was getting rather dusty, but Brian had a feeling she already knew that. In a moment, Brian could see a dim light shining from the base of the tree, and his curiousity was aroused. He knelt next to this strange girl and peered at the source of the light. As the girl continued to scrape, the light shone more brightly. And then, so quickly as the light had appeared, it was gone. Brian peered at the girl, now looking at him, and asked, "what was that?" "Oh, just a trick. Would you like to see something real, though?" The ground broke open then, consuming Brian while all he could see was the girl, hovering slightly away from the opening. And then even that was gone, and he could see no more in the presence of such a blinding light. Brian openened his eyes now; he could see only a meadow. A number of people were gathered across the meadow, wearing festival clothing and making so much noise that his ears hurt even from his point across the meadow. He rose, slowly, and journeyed across the meadow. Immediately, a number of eyes turned toward him. The music stopped. With it, Brian stopped. "Who are you?" Brian yelled with frustration, met with smiles and a nod here and there. "Why, I am Death," said one young girl. "So, too, am I death," exclaimed an elderly man, waving his cane in the air. "We are all Death, you see, and we are pleased to make your aqcuaintance." Brian understood then that he was dead now, and joined in the festivities, feeling that there was nothing else that he could possible do. There wasn't even time to weep as the crowd encompassed him, and no time to say goodbye to the familiarity of life. "This is death, sonny. Y'll get used to it after a while. Just 'member, tho', it coulda been worse. Right now, ya could be peelin' taters. It wouldn't seem right bad at first, but after the first couple thousand years, ya'd get bored!" The old man clutched his stomach with laughter. "Boo!" shouted the little girl as she darted past him, and Brian wept. ----- There were a boy and a girl up there, playing some sort of game at the windowsill. Susan stopped for a moment to stare at them, and then hurried on when for no particular reason, the boy and girl turned their attention to her, and began to laugh. And laugh. And laugh. It was all they could do to ready themselves for their meeting with Susan at the river in only an hour. "Oh, just think of the fun she'll have!" cried the girl. Hand in hand they looked out the window. Brian paused only for a moment as he reached out, thinking of all the things that could have been. But weren't. -------------------- For information on Cranberry Winters, mail brideb@efn.org. To receive Cranberry Winters bimonthly, mail majordomo@efn.org and include the message "subscribe cranberry-winters (your name)" You can find my webpage at http://www.efn.org/~brideb/Deb/ Thank you for reading!