a short story by yours truly

Ema watches the field with an unfocused gaze and the gray skies blur with the gray ground and the gray ground blurs with the gray water. Ema prefers to look at this world with her eyes out of focus. She finds it less bright, less garish. Funny when it’s already so dull.

A sliver of wind slips its way through the air, and Ema’s long, black hair is tugged quickly upwards like a fish caught on a hook. Ema wonders, briefly, if her hair would rather join the wind than be tethered to her head, and she understands if that is the case; flesh is rather restricting.

It’s the time of day in which the moon and the sun are both visible on the horizon. It’s like a waiting queue with only two people or a merry go round. One goes up, the other goes down, and so on and so forth. Ema likes the rhythm of it all, and she used to track the moon’s phases on her little calendar. Now she doesn’t need to track them on the calendar; she has them memorized.

Another shape is on the horizon too. A slender figure, slowly making its way around the earth. Ema blinks. It’s still there. She fastens her grip on the wooden handle of the net she holds and lightly but confidently makes her way towards the shape, careful not to startle it. Her footsteps are heavy, and yet they hit the ground without emitting a sound. Only the dead grass acknowledges her motion by flattening its lifeless self against the earth.

Ema comes up in front of the shape. There is always this moment, right before…she hates this moment. It is the moment when she locks eyes with the creature, and its eyes are so big and brown and confused. Someone help me, it says, and Ema wishes she could, but she has not been given the net to bring the creature to safety. Or, she has. Has she? What is safety?

She raises the net above her head and with a singular swift motion, the net falls onto the creature and it whimpers silently. Ema drops the net handle and it lands on the ground with a soft thump. She reaches in between the soft netting to scratch the creature behind its silky white ears, and it leans forward to sniff her, and Ema steps back. She must never let the creatures get too close. There are many worlds in which one can exist, and the creatures and Ema are meant for different ones. This is only a brief period of crossing over.

The creature elicits the sound which the wind makes; a whistling noise of sorts. Ema squeezes the creature’s neck to dislodge the stale air stuck there, and the creature wheezes, but Ema knows soon enough it will realize that it isn’t breathing anyways and it has no need for the oxygen. She looks away from its eyes, open very wide, from its mouth, open just slightly, but she can’t escape its frightened gaze. She can feel its eyes watching the side of her head, silently begging her to stop.

To the end? Asks the wind, it asks every time all the time. Or the wind is the creature, or the creature is the wind, maybe. Here in the field everything works together in harmony, and it is a very dissonant harmony but Ema finds it beautiful and painful in its own way.

Let’s go now, Ema says to the creature, and she tightens the net and it transforms into a little ball of stars around the creature. It looks at peace now; a curious sort of peace. Its eyes are no longer very open, but they still watch all. And they watch her. And she looks away.

The gray field’s gray grasses sway and dance to tuneless melodies; Ema hums along. The creature pads silently, the stars twinkle. Maybe she will boil water in the kettle later, in case she gets a visitor, which happens occasionally. For those times Ema retrieves her large and final box of Fortnum & Mason, a sampler of black teas from the last time she went to London (a very long time ago). The smells remind her of the funny accents and the busy streets. She smiles at the thought, and the creature responds with a soft and silent whistle that Ema can hear in the shape of the wind.

At last they reach the End, and Ema searches for the place where the grey comes from. Like mist she can see it seeping out slowly from somewhere far away and she knows she could leave, maybe, if she tried hard enough. She does not want to. This is where she belongs.

We’re alike, she tells the creature. It sits down in its little bubble, listening. She knows it doesn’t hold the consciousness to agree with her and that makes her feel comforted and sad at the same time.

The creature wags its tail. She imagines it wagging its tail in the same way for a child, for an old person, for a rodent worming its way up a tree. You miss things? she asks the creature. She doesn’t wait for a response that it isn’t capable of giving. Me too, she concludes and the gray seeps out from the other world. Me too.

At the End she always takes a few moments of silence before letting the creatures move on; she thinks they probably prefer it this way. While all creatures are different most of the time they do not like to transition very quickly, so Ema thinks that it is maybe a form of respect to them to let them take their time. They can sniff the small white flowers, and the flowers can sing them lullabies in their sweet, honeylike aromas that are so light you don’t notice until you lean in close.

Ema would love to reach out and scratch the creature behind the ears again, but it would cause them both pain.

Ok, she mutters to it softly. What is it, exactly? In the field, it is everything; the gray. Ema is not it. Ema has always put a distance between herself and it, which is why she does not know of the way the flowers smell. The moon is far enough away that she can learn its faces, and yet even then it feels a little too close sometimes. Uncomfortably close. Millions of miles of distance between us, says Ema to no one. The creature knows what she means, Ema likes to think, even though it is not true. Ema lets out a small laugh.

She loosens the net and the creature slowly slips from under its starry mesh. Ema touches its short fur for a second. She feels as if she must do it. A form of apology, she tells herself. She does this with every creature that passes through.

She guides the creature into the End, and it turns back to her, and Ema turns away from it. We are both of yesterday, she says to the flowers but not about the flowers. The flowers stay still and silent. I hate being of yesterday.

The wind whistles in response: if you are of yesterday, how do you continue into tomorrow?