Chapter 1 - The Garden of Despair
Bitter Roots
The first rays of sun snuck into her bedroom, diffracted into rainbows by the large panes of beveled glass. Somebody had left one of the large French doors, the ones that led into the garden, open, and the breeze that blew in brought with it the scent of the night rain.
Cimmy smiled and rushed to her feet, noticed that she’d fallen asleep in the gown she’d been wearing the night before, and was surprised to notice that the delicate silk fabric wasn’t wrinkled. She loved that dress, blushing with the color of ripe apricots, and wore it often; she loved its simple cut, devoid of frills and embellishments, which blossomed amply at the waist to form a full circle, perfect for twirling. One strap had fallen off her shoulder and she instinctively adjusted it, while she tried to remember where she had left her sandals the night before. She couldn’t remember which room it was, nor did she care.
She’d taken them off because she couldn’t run in them, or dance in them the way she wanted to, and in the process rediscovered the feeling of soft grass under her bare feet, and the rush of the water around her ankles during the torrential rain.
She opened the other pane and stood in the doorway, her back against one of the wide wooden jambs, looking out into the garden at the clear puddles that had formed, here and there, in the gravel path, after the rain. The morning sunshine touched them gently, stirring glimmers and sparkles, almost like a dare to bring Cimmy out into the open.
The latter giggled, delighted by this game nature was playing with her, and rushed out, barefoot, into the garden, splashing in puddles and getting drenched from above with the remnants of the night rain that the wind brought down from the tree canopies above.
The garden was very large, but Cimmy knew it well, because she had spent her whole childhood in it. She rushed past the tall sages and bent her head, without even thinking about it, when she walked under the arbor, where the roses were in full bloom. She had the wild canes of the climbing roses tangle in her hair more than once, and by now she could bow her head just enough to avoid them, even with her eyes closed.
She wandered past the tall lilies, which reached above her head, and whose dark, pollen laden stamens stained her fingers when she brushed her hands against them.
Behind them, the umbels of milkweed welcomed hosts of butterflies, which were stirred into flight by the light breeze, only to descend quickly upon the bright orange flowers again, in search of nectar.
The narrow gravel path ended abruptly into the main alley, which was wide, covered in flagstones and lined by linden trees.
Cimmy walked in the shade of the trees, breathing deeply the sultry perfume, her soles tickled by the moss and flowering thyme which was growing between the stones like a soft living carpet and yielded its spicy fragrance under her feet.
She felt the breeze from the pond and picked up the pace, eager to reach her favorite hiding spot before the rain started again, she could tell from the dance of light and shadow on the path that a second installment of the downpour that had fallen overnight was about to start at any moment.
The gazebo was out on a narrow strip advancing into the lake, strip which broke down towards the end, into a path of stepping stones, surrounded by the water, and Cimmy jumped from one stepping stone to the next with the agility of a mountain goat.
She jumped into the gazebo just seconds before the rain started again, with booming, rolling thunder and bolts of lightning, thick as ropes, dancing above the trees; the rain fell hard and fast, drumming on the roof, and crumpling the placid surface of the pond with a myriad of ripples.
The hem of her dress was drenched and heavy, and had turned three shades darker, but Cimmy didn’t care.
She sat down on the round bench that surrounded the post in the middle of the gazebo and gazed into the distance at the heavy clouds which were moving very fast, dropping their watery load over the heads of the cattails, and on the fleshy petals of the water lilies, and sifted it down through the tree canopies until only a sprinkling of water drops reached the ground.
The warm air over the pond turned into mist in the cool rain, and its soft white blanket padded the water plants, and the stepping stones, and Cimmy’s bare feet, while she sat there, watching, mesmerized, the intricate movements that made it feel alive, somehow, while she breathed deeply the scent of the rain, mixed with the overpowering fragrance of wet gardenias and orange blossoms.
Such was the beauty of Cimmy’s garden, and how proud she was of it! It was the most beautiful place on earth, she thought, this walled garden of hers, this heavenly shelter in the middle of existence, this place where everything was flawless.
She stretched out her cupped hands, and they were filled in an instant by the fast falling rain, and she drank from them eagerly, to appease her thirst.
She then jumped out in the rain, from stepping stone to stepping stone, shivering and giggling, and ran through the fruit orchard, stirring the wet dirt between the trees and filling the lap of her dress with peaches, whose ripe skins were almost the same color as her wet dress was now, as the rain kept falling, thick and heavy, from above.
She couldn’t even remember how many times she had made her way through the peach orchard, hundreds, thousands maybe, to find the dirt path that weaved through the wildflower meadow and led back to the house.
During sun baked summer afternoons, the meadow was covered in the bright eyes of chamomile and chicory, but not now, when the flowers had shut themselves tight to keep out of the downpour that was pounding their sappy stems and releasing their fragrance.
The young girl was about to reach the flagstone path when the rain let up and the sun started shining immediately, making every drop of water sparkle. Tiny birds, thrilled by the plentiful water, gathered in flocks to bathe in the puddles, boding good weather.
Cimmy wasn’t in a rush to get to the house, but her feet carried her back to the garden in front of her bedroom, just by the power of habit.
She reached the little herb wheel, with tall anise growing around the fountain at its center, and there she stopped and sat down on one of the old garden benches, basking in the sunshine, to allow her gown to dry and to munch on a peach, in the peace of this plant realm of scent and wonder, surrounded by bees and butterflies, and the smell of the heated herbs.
Clouds passed overhead, playing with the sunlight, on, off, and on again, enticing the birds to sing louder, until their collective chirping drowned all the other sounds.
A baby rabbit, a cottontail, jumped at Cimmy’s feet and startled her, and then turned abruptly, to distract potential predators, and vanished behind a shrub.
Cimmy got up to take a look at one of the garden patches, which had not been planted yet, and spent a few minutes in front of it, trying to determine whether she should grow chives or dill, and she couldn’t help notice that the thyme seeds that she had carried on the soles of her feet had already started to sprout in her footsteps, making the whole decision process obsolete.
She sighed, resigned, when she saw it happen, and allowed the garden to decide for itself, hoping that there wasn’t too much sunshine in that particular spot.
She picked a few handfuls of purple pods from the pole beans, which were laden with flowers and fruit, all donning the same noble color, and smiled instantly at the sight of the huge squash flowers, whose cheery orange matched the brightness of the summer morning.
She looked at the pepper patch and regretted not planting the more colorful varieties, the purple, yellow, orange and red ones, and her thoughts seeded the fertile dirt, which bore fruit immediately, to accommodate them.
Satisfied, Cimmy turned around on her heels and was about to return to the house, when a familiar voice shrieked through her beautiful landscape, ripping huge tears in its fabric and making her choke with dust.
“Cimarron!! Curse the evil moment that spit you into this world to burden my life! Wake up, you useless cockroach! Are you waiting for the sun to raise you? There’ll be no food tonight, so you know, we only feed those who work to earn their keep!”
The door slammed behind her, reverberating in Cimmy’s head like the sound of a trap closing. She sat up carefully, wincing because of her bruised ribs, and coughed up the dust that was filling her nose and her mouth. They haven’t seen water in months, and on the barren patches of thirsty dust, creased by deep cracks, crooked and swollen around the edges like scars, nothing grew anymore, not even weeds. Only the scraggly tops of bitter roots, whose sharp and ravenous filaments grasped onto the dirt so desperately that people worked their hands raw straining to pull them.
She’d been born to this place, Cimmy was, to this garden of despair, bitter and filled with harshness, this place where she was lucky to be fed and begrudged for being born, the place that hope forgot.
Nobody understood, and Cimmy least of all, where that heavenly garden of her dreams came from, for surely there was no way she could have seen anything of the sort, or even heard stories about it.
Nobody in the community had ventured past the tall walls of their garden, if one could call it that, in generations.
When she was very young, Cimmy had tried to describe the pond, and the peach orchard, to siblings and friends, and got a vicious beating for her trouble, so she learned to keep her imaginary garden to herself.
She slept on the dirt floor, right next to the door, a place that was drafty during chilly nights and where the door hit her in the back every time somebody went in and out of the room they all shared. It was hours before the sunrise, but everyone else was already up, trying to get to whatever roots they could find before the others came and picked them clean. Cimmy got up too, dusted herself off and went outside.
She was still trying to get the powdery dirt out of her mouth, but behind the crunchy, mineral bitterness that settled in the back of her throat every time she swallowed, she could still taste the peach she had enjoyed earlier in her dream.
Chapter 3 - The Garden of Angst
Drought
That night Cimmy dreamed of her garden again, and of the rain. She walked the gravel paths in her dream, checking on all of her favorite flowers, and enjoyed the breeze that brought the scent of the water lilies from the pond. When she woke up the next morning, she knew, before she even opened her eyes, that her life had changed again. For one, she was indoors, and the mattress she was lying on was a lot more comfortable than the thistle stalks she was used to.
Tears welled up in her eyes, behind the eyelids she kept defiantly shut. She didn’t want to be in a world where Fay was gone. She didn’t want to be in a world where all her art was gone. She kept her eyes closed and waited, stubbornly, for this world to go away. Nothing happened.
“Aren’t you going to wake up?” a voice addressed her, from very close by, a voice that Cimmy recognized as Josepha’s and whose sound brought up an instant bout of nausea.
“Oh, God! I’m back here! Please don’t let me be back here again!” her first thoughts sank into her heart, drowned in despair. “And what on earth is she talking about? Don’t tell me she cares for me now!” Cimmy thought, as her revolt rose through the many layers of her psyche, ready to erupt at any instant. “I wonder what she wants. Just when I thought I had enough reasons to wish for death!” She kept her eyes closed and waited.
“Your breakfast is getting cold,” the voice continued.
Now Cimmy was curious, because getting breakfast at all, not to mention having it cooked and served to her, was pure fantasy. She opened her eyes and the first thing she saw was Fay’s snout, very close to her face. The rat had left its tiny box, lined with straw, which Cimmy assumed served as his bed, to nuzzle curiously at her face and figure out why she wasn’t awake yet.
“Fay!” Cimmy burst into tears of happiness and relief, and hugged the little rodent almost to the point of choking.
“God didn’t waste any brains on you, girl, that’s for sure!” Josepha mumbled under her breath, because the image of Cimmy hugging the rat was too much for her to process.
“Well, at least some things have stayed the same,” Cimmy thought, a little more encouraged. She put Fay down, to the rat’s great relief, and started looking around to see what the universe had in store for her now. All around the room there were art pieces, hers, she assumed, hanging from the ceiling, lined up against the walls and covering every table and shelf surface. She didn’t remember creating any of them, and they didn’t look familiar, mostly because they were made of a material she didn’t recognize.
Josepha had left the room, but there was a bowl of steaming food on the corner of the table, some sort of green seeds, broiled, which Cimmy shared with Fay. The rat sniffed at them, reluctantly, and after he reassured himself they were acceptable food, he devoured them ravenously. The seeds were large and weird shaped, and a little mushy, Cimmy noticed; she finished the bowl and went outside to clean it.
The field was plowed, and there was no thistle in sight, instead the land was divided in neat little patches, all planted with different crops, spanning the gamut from grains to trees. Somewhere in the middle there was a plot of legumes, which Cimmy recognized as her breakfast, and some of the patches lay bare, a wasteful and strange occurrence in their world.
“There she is, finally!” Bertha announced her presence from afar, and all the eyes turned to her, filled with reproach. “Don’t we all wish we could sit all day long carving chairs and bowls, instead of breaking our backs behind that wooden plow day in and day out?”
“Especially now, with this drought upon us,” Josepha replied, looking at the sky, anxiously, for signs of clouds. There weren’t any, just the unrelenting blaze of the sun projecting from clear blue. “I don’t know what we’re gonna do if it doesn’t rain soon!” She turned her eyes to Cimmy, who was still trying to get her bearings in the unfamiliar surroundings, and whose confused expression suddenly irritated her. “You go right ahead and not care, girl. Don’t even give the rest of us a single thought, you selfish brat! See if you can eat them bowls if our food runs out!”
Cimmy’s first reaction was to get upset, because she’d just about had it with Josepha’s blabber, but since the tension in the community was so intense she could feel it in her gut, she turned all of her attention to figuring out how long had they been in a drought. First of all, that explained the empty parcels in the field; there weren’t too many of them in relationship to the rest, so she guessed the drought hadn’t been there for too long.
“What can we do?” Bertha looked at the sky, helpless, then sighed, wretched, and got up to head for the fields. “Make sure you finish those bowls. How long are you going to take with those? I break my bones in the field all day. The least I can expect is to have a bowl to eat from when I return in the evening! Useless goose!”
“What is a goose?” Cimmy asked herself, and before her attention shifted again, she saw them in her mind’s eye, wobbling about aimlessly, in a hopeless pursuit of grass and bugs. “Oh!”
So, she was professing a craft. It felt so strange to her that the community would just allow her to remain in the village, just to make them chairs and bowls, while they went out into the fields, that at first she didn’t believe her luck. She grabbed a piece of wood and started carving, with hands so sure she knew this couldn’t be the first time she was doing this. The bowl started taking shape slowly, as if the thoughts she was churning in her head at the same time were in fact molding the wood in her hands.
She couldn’t remember if she ever told anybody about the rope, but it didn’t seem reasonable, since a quick glance had informed her there were no cultures that could produce the fibers for it. She worked, with automatic gestures, deep in thought, while Fay squirmed inside her pocket now and then. Around noon she got thirsty, and she walked around the village in search of a water bucket, but she couldn’t find one anywhere.
“Where are they keeping it?” she asked herself, getting more and more parched by the minute? After half an hour, she abandoned her search and retreated in the shade of the rough shed to finish up her bowls.
The long row of people returned from the field in the evening, dusty and tired, and looking a lot more worn than they did when they left in the morning. They formed a queue and waited patiently while Josepha dug up a jug from the entrails of her house and distributed equal rations to all the people in the queue. When she was done tending to those working in the field, she turned to Cimmy, annoyed by what she perceived as ill willed defiance, and asked in a raised voice.
“Don’t you want water, girl? Do I have to fetch that to you, too?”
Cimmy got up and received her water ration, no more than half of a bowl, and she drank it eagerly, to soothe her parched throat.
“That’s right! Chug that down like it’s nothing! Don’t even dream you’ll get more until tomorrow.” Her voice softened as she watched the sky with worried eyes. “There’ll be even less of it if the heavens don’t show us mercy anytime soon.” She then remembered she’d left the airhead with a task to do when she left in the morning, and yelled. “Where is my bowl?” She grabbed it from Cimmy’s hands and went inside her house, morose.
“This isn’t good,” Cimmy thought. Why don’t they try to get outside the wall? There seemed to be water there, judging by the moist fruit Fay had brought her. It wouldn’t be hard at all, she thought, now that they had wood, and, apparently, a carpenter, to build something that would allow them to go over the wall and back. She wondered what would happen if she brought this up with Josepha, and planned to talk to her the next morning, when hopefully the latter would be in a better mood.
“Get past the wall?!” Josepha screamed, outraged. “It’s not enough that we have to carry your load for you. Now you’re trying to get us killed too? Don’t you know why we built the wall in the first place? Don’t you know what lurks behind it? What deadly, evil, bloodthirsty creatures? We coddled you too much, and this is our punishment. Like it’s not bad enough we have to put up with that rat you call a pet, like any God-fearing person would ever consider something like that, now you have time on your hands to think us all to our deaths, you lazy ingrate! I curse the moment I first laid eyes on you!”
“Here we go again,” Cimmy thought, not too upset by the elder’s outburst, which, she knew from her own experience, was coming, at least in part, from the suffering of a parched throat. “Oh, well, at least I can say that I tried,” she continued her mental ruminations, and planned to figure this out on her own as soon as possible. “I’m not dying of thirst just to prove her right. I know there is water behind that wall.”
The task was facing two immediate hurdles: she had to find the time to build and hide the contraption and she needed to sneak out in the field, to a place where she could climb the wall unnoticed.
She was very excited about the project, and she planned the contraption in her mind, to the last detail, while she tended diligently to the bowls and chairs she was supposed to work on that day.
The thought of being able to see that fairy land beyond, which she knew was lush and fertile, filled her heart with joy and excitement, and she didn’t even notice when she finished her alloted work for the day, when suddenly, terrible pangs of guilt brought her back to reality.
“Who is giving you water, my little friend?” she looked at the rat, which, in all fairness, didn’t seem to be suffering at all. “Where does he find water to drink?” she asked herself, when Fay climbed out of her pocket and disappeared into a hole in the ground, which was very close to the wall. He reemerged half an hour later with a red berry in his mouth. He placed the little offering in Cimmy’s lap and stared at her until she ate it.
“Or maybe I can dig,” she smiled at the sudden revelation, as she watched the long file of tired villagers return from the field.
Dig
The idea was implemented the next day, when Cimmy spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to dig through the drought hardened dirt with a wooden shovel, a feat which brought with it a feeling of gratitude for being allowed to stay in the village, and not having to go out into the field, to do this every day.
She kept at it for a while, wondering how deep she would have to dig to get below the wall footing, but after she reached about two feet down, the heat and the thirst exhausted her and she had to go back to the shade of the shed, where she remembered she had work to do. She worked without interruptions until she finished her daily quota, and at the end of the day, she figured she should go check up on her project. Imagine her shock when she found the hole filled with water about one third up.
“Maybe I don’t have to get to the other side of the wall after all,” Cimmy thought.
She tasted the water; it was murky and had a strong mineral taste, not altogether pleasant, but under the circumstances, she couldn’t afford to be choosy. She drank to appease her thirst, trying to ignore the crunchy dirt that got caught in her teeth and hoping that the following morning most of the particulates would sink to the bottom and the water would be clear. She was very excited and wanted to tell somebody about it, but then she realized that she would have to provide an explanation for the hole in the ground, so she bode her time pondering alternate versions for it. She could hardly wait until the next morning, when, to her great distress, she found the hole dry.
“Just my luck!” she mumbled through her teeth, annoyed she’d gotten her hopes up for nothing. She went back to it later that day, after her work was finished, to see if she could continue digging her way to the other side of the wall, but the hole was filled with water again.
“This should go over well,” the girl sighed. “Try telling Josepha that I discovered water, but it only appears at a certain time of day.”
The thought of telling somebody gnawed at her, and she couldn’t resist it, so she decided to share with Rahima, who could use some good news, but made her promise not to tell anybody yet.
The easiest way to keep a secret is for only one person to know it. Rahima told her mother, who told her sister, who told her friend, who in turn distributed the news widely throughout the village. In the morning, everybody was on pins and needles to get details on Cimmy’s “discovery”. The latter dragged her feet reluctantly to the hole, which she knew for a fact would be dry at that time of day.
“Serves us right to put any credence in the words of these two airheads,” Josepha frowned at Cimmy and Rahima, who were looking for a place to hide from the public shaming. “What makes you idiots think you can dig for water with your hands when the rest of us haven’t seen a well that wasn’t dry in months? Do you think all of us are dimwitted, and we prefer to catch rain in barrels and suffer from thirst when we could just dig a hole in the ground with our own hands? How deep is that, a couple of feet? Ech!” she made an exasperated hand gesture and left, with the crowd following closely behind.
“Rahima,” Cimmy whispered to her friend, “I told you not to tell anybody!”
“I only told my mother in confidence,” Rahima excused herself.
“Your mother is somebody,” Cimmy replied.
“How can this be? I saw that water with my own eyes. I drank from it,” Rahima looked puzzled at the dry well.
“That’s why I told you not to say anything. The well goes dry in the morning.”
“So the water will fill in later in the day?” Rahima asked, filled with hope.
“Most likely. I’m not completely sure. That’s why I told you not to tell anybody.”
“But not even my mother?” Rahima asked, eyes wide with genuine surprise.
Cimmy abandoned the expectation that her friend would follow the logical reasoning behind her request, because in Rahima’s world, her and her mother’s mind were one and the same.
“Look!” the latter exclaimed, excited. “The hole is filling up!”
They drank and took some of it back to the village in a bowl, as proof. The entire community gathered again around the little hole, now filled with mud, hopeful but still in disbelief.
“Maybe we should start digging wells again,” one of the villagers suggested, and everyone agreed.
The next morning, instead of going into the fields, the villagers gathered and started planning the digging of wells; they made assumptions about how much water they would need, and about how much time the digging would take, and how many people should be working on any one well, and they spent the next month doing nothing else.
They dug, and they dug, and finally they reached the aquifer, which was hiding, avariciously, more than fifteen feet down, and just when everybody was rejoicing and preparing containers to put the water in, it started pouring down rain.
“That was a month well spent!” Bertha blurted out, not sure yet whether to be furious or relieved.
“Well, at least we have water now,” Cimmy replied, against her better judgment. Bertha turned around, slowly, as if she’d seen her for the first time, and asked out of the blue.
“What were you doing digging a hole by the wall, anyway?”
“Oh, heavens me, here it comes!” Cimmy vacillated between surprise and dread, because in the excitement of searching for water, for an entire month she never once gave a thought to constructing a credible alibi for digging that hole.
Bertha continued.
“Did you try to get to the other side of the wall, you ungrateful goose? Didn’t I tell you that there were vicious monsters and unspeakable dangers beyond this protective enclosure?” She turned to the crowd, furious. “This one is going to end us all! Can you imagine if she finished her task and let goodness knows what in to imperil our lives?”
“But,” Cimmy wanted to justify herself, even though she had to admit that she didn’t really have any guarantees there weren’t vicious monsters on the other side of the wall, “Fay went past the wall and back, and he’s not worse for the wear!”
“The rat went past the wall?!! Where? How?” Bertha jumped anxiously, and upon finding the little burrow, she summoned: “Plug that hole! We may be in danger already. Who knows what sneaked in, what you, miserable brat, allowed in. How could you be so reckless?”
Cimmy tried to explain that whatever managed to get in, if anything at all, couldn’t be any bigger than a rat, and it was unlikely to pose a danger to the community.
“You are as ignorant as you are irresponsible! What makes you think that those creatures are like us? They could be able to transform themselves to pass through a crack in the wall, through the tiniest hole in the ground! You never really think about anything, do you?”
“If they are that resourceful, what’s stopping them from climbing the wall, or flying through the air, for that matter?” Cimmy wanted to say, but then realized it would be much better for her well-being if she didn’t.
“This wall is the only thing between us and certain death. You make sure to remember that, girl! If you ever, for any reason, decide to take it upon yourself to try to breach our boundary in any way again, mark my words, I’ll deal with you myself!”
“So much for the berries,” Cimmy thought, disappointed, while she absentmindedly petted Fay; the rat stared at her with worried eyes. “I know, my little friend,” she tried to comfort him. “No more berries for you, either.”
Open Waters
Of course, the rat, who wasn’t beholden to any of the community rules, dug itself another hole and went outside unimpeded, and since with all the rain and the new wells the harvest was bountiful, everyone had better things to do than follow a rodent around.
Fay brought back treats every time he went outside, and the treats were strange and wonderful, unlike anything Cimmy had ever tasted, even though now the food fare was reasonably palatable.
Some days he brought colorful berries, in many shades of yellow, black, rose, and blue. Other days he brought mushrooms, or delightful tubers. And other days, he brought Cimmy herbs she had never seen, and he made sure to never chew on them, to let Cimmy know they were not edible. She didn’t really understand what they were for, those herbs with fleshy roots the color of blood.
There wasn’t a single day that went by when Cimmy didn’t daydream about that fairyland behind the walls, filled with wonders she had never seen, and maybe wasn’t able to imagine, and every time she came back from one of these mental trips to dreamland she wished she’d been born a rat.
Fay didn’t have quotas, or traditions, or anyone to tell him what to do.
He didn’t even listen to Cimmy, right now it was more like she was listening to him, since the rat had taken it upon himself to educate her in the art of foraging and survival.
“I wonder what the inedible plants are for,” she often pondered.
“Are those weeds?!” Josepha snapped from behind her one day when she was so deeply immersed in the examination of a new plant Fay had brought, whose long filamentous roots looked like gold thread, she completely forgot about the world around her. She tried to hide the clump behind her back, but the gold roots caught the sunlight and glowed, like they had caught on fire. “Every time I look at you, you do something wrong. I can’t keep up with your nonsense anymore! You’re going to be the end of me. I’m exhausted just worrying about you! Give those here!” she grabbed the golden roots from Cimmy’s hand and threw them away. “Get back to work, you lazy nincompoop!”
“How come those plants never grow here?” Cimmy wondered, so used by now to talk to herself that she didn’t realize she asked the question out loud.
“You better hope, for your own sake, that we don’t find any of these growing in the field, ‘cause if we do, I know who to blame! Do you think we need more weeds to pull? Aren’t we breaking our backs enough already as it is to keep them from stifling the crops?” she became more and more agitated as she spoke, imagining nightmarish scenarios filled with giant weeds that advanced slowly and inexorably across the fields and choked everything edible in the process.
Cimmy put her head down and waited for the rant to be over.
“I wonder if I can replant those in a shady spot, the roots seemed intact, maybe if I water them, they will come back to life,” she continued her mental commentary in the background, this time without the soundtrack, which, as experience had proved, was completely self-defeating.
The problem was that she didn’t know anything about the outgrowth of those roots. What if they were invasive? Fay had made it clear they were potentially poisonous. What if their toxins leaked into the soil? What if somebody tried to eat them, somebody who didn’t know they weren’t supposed to? She agonized over the decision for days, during which fate solved the dilemma for her, withering the clump beyond the point where it could be revived.
“Maybe next time,” she consoled herself.
She couldn’t escape this nagging feeling in the pit of her stomach that she was missing out on something extraordinary. She couldn’t understand why the rat was bringing her all of those plants, but so far he had never brought anything that didn’t have a usefulness, and not knowing what their usefulness was didn’t seem like a good reason to dismiss them. On one hand, what usefulness could a plant possibly have if it wasn’t good to eat? The land, as it stood right now, bound by its untouchable boundary, was limited, and every inch counted; she couldn’t justify, even to herself, taking up a portion of it to grow something she didn’t know anything about. One didn’t grow something that was not good to eat, it was as simple as that. At times like these, she reviled that damned wall whose sacrosanct presence made any new discovery impossible, and which kept her from knowing the truth.
One way or another, she wanted to know. Maybe there wasn’t a great land of wonder beyond. Maybe there be monsters and killer weeds eating people alive, maybe there be dragons for all she knew, but she wanted to find out, because every time her sight was blocked by that wall she felt trapped. Surely there was a way to learn the truth without risking getting eaten by carnivorous plants, an obvious solution presented itself: the only thing she had to do was climb up high enough to see past the top of the wall.
Getting anywhere near the enclosure was sure to bring unspeakable wrath upon her head, so she started climbing anything else she could think of, anything she hoped would allow her a peek.
She climbed the trees in the orchard, and the roofs of the houses, but none of the above were tall enough to be of any help. Torn between curiosity and guilt, she became more and more withdrawn, and her recent habit of climbing trees certainly didn’t win her any favors with the community.
“She’s a lunatic!” Bertha commented, exasperated. “She’s going to damage those trees, I tell you, they’re not supposed to hold her weight. There is nothing that girl does that isn’t either absurd or dangerous, and it’s usually both! What in creation has gotten into her, climbing those trees at any time of day or night? Somebody should do something about that, don’t you think, Josepha? Before she does us harm?”
A ban on tree climbing followed promptly, which left Cimmy indifferent, since she already knew nothing in the orchard was tall enough to fit her purpose, anyway.
It seemed almost punitive, that boundary, more suited to keep the people in than keeping danger out. How would purposefully blinding oneself to the evils of the world improve one’s chances of prevailing against them?
If one is always in danger from things one can’t learn about, it follows, logically, that there is nothing left to experience but fear, and the most toxic kind of all: the fear which never subsides and can never be quelled, because it feeds on itself.
“What is it made of, anyway?” Cimmy continued churning her obsession, because it looked like the wall was built of large blocks of stone, and there was no stone quarry in the garden. The stepladder pattern made climbing it possible, at least in theory, so she immediately followed up on her idea, managing to ruin her fingernails in the process and taking a couple of tumbles that were sure to prevent her from sitting down for about a week. “You are not the boss of me!” she rebuked the wall before she turned her back to it, defeated, to go in search of another solution.
“Are you talking to the wall, Cimmy?” Rahima intervened softly, worried that her friend had lost her handle on reality.
“Aah...no. Sorry, Rahima, I didn’t see you. How long have you been standing there?”
“Long enough to see you try to climb that wall. Are you aware of what Bertha would do to you if she caught you doing this?”
“I have a fair idea,” Cimmy mumbled, upset.
“You know, I’ve been watching you the whole time, and you’re doing it all wrong. You have to find your bearings first, have a firm grip for your hands and feet, otherwise you’ll never make it to the top. Here, let me show you,” she said. She started climbing immediately, without hesitation and with an agility Cimmy would never have guessed her friend possessed. In less than three minutes, she was riding the top of the wall.
“Rahima, for heaven’s sake, take a quick look around and get down from there before somebody sees you,” she whispered as loud as she could, without being overheard, “I don’t want to get you in trouble! Rahima!”
“Wow!” was all that Rahima managed to respond, while she looked out into the distance, completely mesmerized by the sights beyond.
“Damn my clumsiness,” Cimmy cussed herself and her two left feet. Physical fitness had never been her strong point, and she never viewed this personal shortfall as a burden until now. “If I weren’t so uncoordinated, I’d be seeing that too right now.”
“What do you two think you’re doing?” Bertha’s voice thundered from behind her, sounding too shocked to start with the doling of punishment.
“Oh, God!” Cimmy gulped hard as she watched her friend come down from the top of the wall with the same agility she had exhibited climbing it.
There would be little point in describing the days that followed this event.
Suffice it to say that Cimmy and Rahima found themselves tasked with tilling the last portion of virgin land inside the walls, a portion which had been left fallow because the hard dirt, the rocks and the thick clumps of weeds and roots made cultivating it impracticable.
“I’m sorry, Rahima,” Cimmy mumbled, drowning in guilt.
“Don’t mention it. It’s not much worse than my usual chores, anyway.” Rahima looked happy. She had that hard to describe expression people get when they find meaning in their life, a strange look to see on a face so young.
“What is it like?” Cimmy asked, her mouth dry with anticipation.
“I... wouldn’t know how to describe it. It’s so green! It is beautiful, and lush, and it goes on for miles, all the way to the ends of the earth.”
“What do you mean, the ends of the earth?” Cimmy pressed, annoyed by the scarcity of detail.
“You’re not going to believe me if I tell you,” Rahima hesitated.
“Try me!” Cimmy insisted.
“There are open waters out there, Cimmy,” Rahima whispered, as if she was afraid to acknowledge what she’d seen. “Large sheets of water, going far into the distance. There are so many of them, hundreds, maybe even a thousand, and they all seem to end abruptly at an edge that’s far out into the distance. I don’t know if the water is flowing into a void back there, because there isn’t anything you can see past that edge. Nothing but sky.”
She stopped to give Cimmy time to process the image she’d just described, complete with the edge of existence, the place beyond which the land was no more.
“We are surrounded by water, Cimmy. It’s everywhere.”
Chapter 4 - The Garden of Apathy
Weeds
She woke up from her garden dream, late. There was no one around to prompt or chide her, so Cimmy assumed they have all gone out into the fields, but one quick look out the window informed her that everybody was still there. That wasn’t the only thing she saw. The world had shifted again, and she was in a different place now, a garden without walls.
Far out into the distance, she could see the waters Rahima was talking about, ending into nothing, as if they were falling off the earth.
She looked around the room to see if Fay was still there, and he was, dozing off on its bed of straw.She couldn’t put her finger on it, but had this strange sense of futility, as if everything worth doing and knowing had already been experienced.
Given her special circumstances that was a weirdly unreasonable feeling to have, because, for all she knew, she could wake up the next day to find herself in a completely different world, and still, the garden felt dull all of a sudden, and very small, now that she could gaze upon the vast expanse of the fields beyond it.
They were beautiful, those fields by the waters, just as Rahima had said, with their dense clumps of evergreens whose colors faded to blue and to gray into the distance, and with their endless wild meadows dotted by the bright splotches of poppies and chicory.
She wondered what would happen if she stepped beyond the boundary, now invisible, that separated their cultures from the wilderness, an endeavor which looked quite easy to accomplish now, because it didn’t seem like anybody would even notice she was gone.
“What on earth happened?” Cimmy asked herself, apprehensive of this strange apathy that suffused her surroundings.
She tried to talk to Rahima, who was too busy with her chores to notice her, and after she passed by a few other groups of people who also didn’t seem to acknowledge her presence, she had this sudden feeling that she must have become invisible.
Invisibility, Cimmy thought, could be beneficial on occasion, for instance when Bertha and Josepha managed to find her at any time, and grab her from whatever activity she was involved in to impose their will on her day, but it could be heartbreaking too, when even her best friend didn’t seem to notice her presence anymore.
She remembered that Rahima had toiled for many miserable days as a result of her wall obsession and gave her friend the benefit of the doubt, if only to realize a second later that the Rahima she was thinking about never existed in the current setting.
“So much for guilt,” Cimmy thought. “Or friendship, or anything else, for that matter.”
For a second she contemplated the fact that maybe God had brought her here, in this ever changing world where she didn’t belong, to punish her for the audacity of wanting a better life by means of random and unpredictable reality shifts.
She wallowed in self-pity for a while, until she remembered the bitter roots, and the cracked dirt, and almost dying from hunger, and had to agree that if this reality skipping game was meant as a punishment, it didn’t exactly accomplish the goal.
The fields were heavy with harvest, displaying an overabundance of produce: vegetables and grains, fruit trees and weeds, all growing together aggressively, in giant amorphous clumps inside which one couldn’t distinguish their beginnings or ends.
Heartened by her new outlook on life, Cimmy put Fay in her pocket and, still worried that somebody might see her breach the boundary and punish her, she made for the meadows.
Despite her unspoken fears, the world didn’t disappear the moment she stepped over the invisible line where the wall used to be; how strange it was, she thought, to remember a wall that never existed, and remember it in all its details, with Rahima straddling the top of it no less.
The meadow grasses were thicker and softer, nothing like the fields of grains Cimmy was used to, and tall, reaching up to her waist.
She waddled through them like through murky water, wary of the things that might lurk underneath, wondering what on earth she was doing there and still dumbfounded by the fact that the limits of her world, as she knew them, had ceased to exist.
She was immediately terrified of the new boundary, the one she could see in the distance, that place where the waters fell off the earth into only God knew what.
The water was very close now, preceded by a stretch of loose dirt which glimmered softly in the sunlight, and its large restless mass overwhelmed Cimmy, who had never seen so much water in one place before.
A weed wrapped itself around her ankle as she fought her way out of the meadow to approach the waters; its green rope dotted with tiny white flowers made her stumble. When she stopped to free herself from it, Cimmy looked across the field and was shocked to discover how tiny her village had become. She counted its miniature houses, which looked like toys now, and was flooded by an overwhelming sense of dread: more than half of the houses were gone. Furthermore, she noticed that it wasn’t just the water which seemed to be falling off the edge of existence, but the earth itself had vanished on the opposite side, and all the familiar surroundings that lay on top of it and which used to be her home had fallen into the abyss, never to be seen again.
Now Cimmy knew she was being punished. She curled up on the stretch of loose dirt next to the big waters and cried there for a long time. She cried the loss of everything she knew, her best friend, her family, even Josepha, strange as that may seem. She started wondering what she was going to do from now on, when an even more terrifying thought surfaced: what if, because she had ventured so close to the edge, the world gave way under her feet and she was hurled into the abyss too? Cimmy instinctively looked for something to hold on to, so she wouldn’t fall, but the soft tall grasses of the meadow didn’t look like they would offer much support.
She remembered Fay, crushed by the guilt of having to watch him share her bitter fate when they both got swallowed by the depths unknown, and knew it was her fault for bringing him here, in this land of dragons, to meet his end before his time.
It never occurred to Cimmy, in her distress, that the place of safety from where she’d supposedly taken the rat was now gone, and if anything, she had rescued it from disaster, but such is the nature of guilt and shame, they do not listen to reason.
The rat, on the other hand, didn’t seem flustered, despite the fact that, as Cimmy knew, animals have a keener sense of danger than humans; the girl expected him to be restless and utter anguished shrieks in expectation of the end of the world, but no. The rat yawned, bored, squirmed about a little in search of tasty crumbs to eat, and then, disappointed he had found none, ran back into the meadows.
Finding a rat in a wild meadow is about as hard as finding a needle in a haystack, a metaphor Cimmy was more familiar with, but she was determined to find Fay, who was, after all, the only thing she had left now that her world was lost to the abyss.
She combed through the meadows, far and wide, in search of her little pet, with total disregard for her safety, ready to risk everything to find him, and she did find him, eventually, in a small clearing in the meadow, gorging on ripe grass seeds. There she looked across the field again, and discovered with awe that her village, now complete and significantly larger than before, was back in its place. Everything seemed to be there, just as she remembered it; she started crying again, now for joy, that divinity in its mercy had deigned to forgive her and put the world back together the way it was.
She picked up Fay and rushed back home, to the village which miraculously grew larger the closer she got to it, so happy and relieved to be able to go back where she was safe, that she didn’t stop to contemplate the logic of her circumstances: if the village could be gone in one instant and back the next, there was no guarantee this wasn’t going to happen again, whether she was inside it or not, which placed the certainty of existence itself in doubt going forward.
When she finally got back home, she was hungry and tired, and emotionally drained from all the crying, and scared, and a little loopy, a blend that to Josepha looked no different from Cimmy’s usual expression.
The former was in a good mood and welcomed the girl with her usual banter.
“Well, if it isn’t Princess Lazybones who decided to grace us with her presence after a long, exhausting day at the beach. Your preciousness must be hungry from all of that laying in the sun doing nothing! Wait, let me fetch somebody to peel some grapes for you!”
It is interesting how life changes one’s perspective on things.
In the chill of the evening, as she cozied up next to the fire pit at the center of the village, close to Rahima, Cimmy thought the mere fact that she was still able to hear Josepha’s voice was a gift from above, and she started tearing up again, this time because of gratitude.
“Oh, would you stop your crying, for once? Every time I look at you, you’re crying about something! If you don’t stop right now, I’ll give you something to cry about! Useless lunatic!” Josepha retorted.
People who cried irritated her, because she found the habit to create unnecessary awkwardness and saw it as a sign of a weak mind and loose personal discipline.
“Why are you crying, Cimmy?” Rahima whispered in her friend’s ear, genuinely puzzled by the latter’s emotional outburst.
Cimmy didn’t answer, she just took in Rahima’s familiar countenance, now overshadowed by worry, and in that instant she found her friend to be the most beautiful creature God saw fit to place upon this earth.
Another wave of tears drenched the lap of her garment.
“I...just...,” she barely managed to utter between sighs, “am so happy to see you again!”
Rahima gave her a long, probing look, shook her head, and mumbled under her breath.
“You know, sometimes I wonder if Josepha isn’t right about you. You’re so weird you’re even giving me the creeps.”
The Good Herbs
Early in the morning, the elders had convened to discuss important things that needed done in the village, and in such situations, the youngsters were encouraged to make themselves scarce and not linger under foot to be in everyone’s way.
Cimmy in particular was eager to oblige and get lost in one of her unsanctioned activities, grateful not to have to explain herself and wallow through the unavoidable chastising that followed.
In this instance, she gathered her courage and went out to explore the outer limits again.
It is strange the way the mind works: meanwhile she had learned about the horizon and the curvature of the earth, a concept very hard to grasp in the face of seemingly contradicting evidence, but her heart was still pounding like a drum out of fear she would lose her village again, and listened to its own worries, justifiable or not.
The creatures of the wilderness had cut a dirt path through the tall grasses of the meadows, a path she decided to follow, just to see where it led.
“There is nothing here,” she told herself, trying to chase away the disappointment engendered by the unremarkable nature of the world beyond.
Ever since she had set her mind on finding out what that world looked like, she had imagined it a thousand times, and in her mind’s eye it was always miraculous, unearthly and extraordinary.
It had living waters, and treasures beyond belief, and even, at some point, she fantasized that once she got past the wall, immortality awaited her there.
“Is it all like that?” Cimmy continued her inner musing. “Do we all yearn and strive and dream and hope our whole lives to reach someplace or something that inevitably disappoints?”
In all fairness, the world beyond the walls was lovelier than anyone could expect, with its lush green meadows and endless waters, filled with an abundance of plants and wildlife Cimmy had never seen before, but she ignored them all, bogged down in her own drama, impervious to change and curiosity.
“Why am I even here? What is there to do here? It’s not like I haven’t seen weeds before,” she continued her brooding, looking around for anything out of the ordinary and getting more morose by the minute under the warm sun that made the flowers sparkle like giant gemstones and threw gleams and shimmers on the open waters. “Maybe Josepha is right. I’m pretty sure that’s what useless looks like. No wonder they never stop getting on my case. This is dumb.”
It is a law of nature that discovery always stumbles upon the discoverer.
You can look for something for twenty years, you can give it all of your attention, all of your love, every minute and every breath, and you will come up with nothing, thin air, while the entire world laughs out loud at the haughty fairytale that so evidently eludes you.
You will be derided, counseled, disapproved of, until whatever crumble of dignity you have left is completely gone.
Then and only then, when your spirit is so heavy with public scorn and a deep sense of failure and ridicule that you can’t look at yourself in the mirror without averting your eyes, that discovery, that prized quest you’ve dedicated your life to, sneaks up on you, so different from your expectations you can’t even recognize it, and you will avoid it like the plague, loathed to touch it, until fate has to literally beat you over the head with it.
Cimmy hadn’t yet arrived to this breakthrough moment, hers wasn’t discouragement, or a deep sense of failure, or even that surreal feeling of seeing everything you valued about your life slip through your fingers and dissipate, because one can’t rush fate, and it wasn’t her time.
She got boggled in the weeds in her garden of apathy, searching for something else, for something different, while failing to see the treasure in front of her eyes.
You don’t recognize treasure you haven’t seen before, because treasure is a social construct, not an intrinsic quality, otherwise every single one of us would constantly be in awe of every drop of rain.
Her social conditioning had always informed her that weeds were useless, just something that gave her more work to do and took precious space that could be used for crops. What did it matter if their roots looked like gold threads or their flowers were bluer than the sky?
In her absentmindedness she stumbled on a long and tangled stem that, given her current state of mind, she ruminated had been placed in her path on purpose, just to make her fall.
She was so upset she didn’t even get up from the ground, mad at existence in general and at her crashed dreams of a paradisaic garden in particular, and she stood there, sulking and refusing to acknowledge the scrape on her arm, which was slowly soaking the hard dirt beneath it with the slow drip of her blood.
“Great!” Cimmy restarted her ranting, exasperated. “That’s just great! Of all places to get hurt, it had to happen here, where I can’t find a rag to dress the wound! What am I going to tie this with? Weeds? Worthless waste of space they are, too!”
The village was too far away, otherwise she would have run back to find said rag and stop the bleeding, but in her current state she simply didn’t feel that it was worth the effort. The scrape was stubborn and wouldn’t stop bleeding, which was insufferably annoying, like all things in this life that you hope would end all by themselves but don’t.
“Yeah, now I have to worry about this stupid scrape. Oh, what’s the use!” she continued mumbling to herself, while Fay was staring at her with little beady eyes, confused about the drama. “Bleed out for all I care!” she cursed her wound, which refused to cooperate.
A subsequent assessment of the injury made her change her mind, so, still fuming mad, she started looking around for something she could use as a dressing.
The field answered her quest by graciously bringing to the forefront a variety of broadleaved natives, of which she picked one that looked sturdy enough, wrapped one of its large leaves around her arm and tied it with the dastardly stem she’d stumbled upon in the first place.
It took some effort to do it, too, because the sap vessels inside the stem were very long and almost impossible to break. She wrapped her arm the best she could and grabbed a handful of green twine for the trip back to the village, just in case her dressing came undone. She didn’t even notice the bright indigo flowers that were still attached to the long unyielding stems, and whose petals got ruthlessly crushed in the process.
“What’s that?” Bertha asked, a crease between her eyebrows at the sight of blood. She was always furious with the children if they happened to get hurt, the main reason Cimmy had learned to tend to her bumps and scrapes all by herself and let no one else be the wiser. “You can’t help getting yourself into trouble, can you?” Bertha started the attack. “Do you think we have time to tend to your fever if that cut starts poisoning your blood?” she pointed to the offending arm, accusingly. “If that wound turns foul, I’ll let you rot!” she threatened. “Let me see! And you put that dirty leaf on it, too! I swear, sometimes I wonder if God doesn’t try to do the village a favor by getting rid of the likes of you!” she grabbed Cimmy’s arm and removed the improvised dressing on it before the girl had time to protest. The cut had completely closed and a sturdy scab was forming on top of the wound, to guarantee that no dirt was going to get into her blood and make it foul.
“How did you...” Bertha mumbled, confused, used as she was to see these kinds of incidents take a turn for the worse really fast. She examined the wound, which didn’t show any signs that it needed additional attention, and dropped Cimmy’s arm, half annoyed, half relieved. “I guess nobody can say the almighty wasn’t fair to you: He didn’t bless you with any brains, but dumped a load of luck on top of your head to make up for it. Now go, you’re keeping me from my business!” She turned around to leave, but changed her mind. “What in heavens is that mess on your shirt?” she pointed at Cimmy’s garment, which had turned bright blue in places, where the crushed indigo flowers had touched it. “Don’t hope for another shirt. This one was brand new. If you can’t wash off those stains, you’ll have to wear it like that.”
Cimmy washed it repeatedly for the next several days, but the blue was there to stay. In light of the disaster du jour, Cimmy had another heretical thought, the kind that had reliably gotten her in trouble since she had started taking her first steps into the world. A shirt that was stained blue was not acceptable, but if she managed to make the entire shirt blue, that would probably be alright. She wasn’t given to situational analysis, and therefore she did not contemplate the impact of being the only person with a blue shirt in a village full of tan ones, so she went back out into the field and picked a large bundle of the weeds with blue flowers, took them home and boiled them together with her shirt. Problem solved.
She was surprised to find a knotted bundle of threads at the bottom of the pot after she threw away the blue water, threads a lot softer and silkier than the scratchy thistle fibers her shirt was made of, and they were all bright blue, like the sky and the waters, and looked so beautiful that they didn’t seem to belong to this world.
There were no such colors and such softness in her world, and while looking at them and feeling their softness caress her fingers, she wondered whether she didn’t actually venture into that dream world of hers after all.
She spent all afternoon removing the bits of woody stem still stuck in the wondrous fibers, and then she unraveled the knots and split the sturdy bundles into thinner and thinner threads, until they were lighter than the breeze and so thin she could barely see them.
When she was done, she ended up with a lot of thread, so she stretched it on the loom and made a piece of cloth out of it, finer than gossamer and lighter than the breeze, a cloth whose color seemed to have been drawn directly from the sky.
Cimmy didn’t know what to do with something so beautiful, and feared she might tear the fabric if she tried to use it for a garment, so she wrapped it delicately around her head, unable to resist the impulse to show it off.
“More pointless things, I see.” Josepha admonished her at the sight of the sky blue gossamer weave. “So help me, girl, what did you do to your shirt?” she giggled as she noticed the shirt’s color. “At least that saves me the energy of having to look for you whenever you wander off into whatever la-la land you waste your time in. We can see you from the moon in that shirt.”
To Heal
"Are you sure it was the leaf?” Rahima asked, while stirring the pot of blue liquid to get the color evenly distributed through the fibers.
“I don’t know.” Cimmy scratched her head, unconvinced. “Maybe. It’s hard to tell.” She frowned and changed her mind. “What else could it be?”
“But why would placing a leaf on your wound make it better?” Rahima asked. “It doesn’t make any sense!”
“I know, I’ve been asking myself the same thing,” Cimmy pondered, working through her logical explanation out loud.
“Maybe some of the plant’s substance fused into my skin,” she said tentatively.
“That’s crazy talk, even for you,” Rahima shook her head, appalled. “There,” she grabbed onto her friend’s arm and held on to it. “Am I leaving part of my substance in your arm, too?”
Cimmy thoughtfully considered her answer.
“You are not actually going to answer that, are you?” Rahima protested, exasperated.
“Why would that be so hard to believe?” Cimmy asked, puzzled at the reaction.
“Because it’s crazy,” Rahima stated the obvious.
“Maybe it only works with leaves,” Cimmy walked back her hypothesis.
“Maybe it doesn’t work at all,” Rahima returned the more plausible response.
“Maybe not,” Cimmy relented.
They watched the pot in silence, stirring occasionally to prevent the color from settling on the bottom.
Cimmy eventually burst out.
“But, say, if it were possible, wouldn’t you want to try it? What’s it going to hurt? It’s not like you’re not hurt already!”
“Maybe I don’t want to spend three weeks delirious, hoping I don’t die from the fever. Who knows how those leaves might foul up your blood?” Rahima asked, concerned.
“How would they foul up my blood?” Cimmy continued the flow of logic.
“With whatever they might get inside your wound?”
“So you’re saying they can blend some of their essence into my blood?” Cimmy picked up the logical dissonance.
“Yes! No!” Rahima got all turned around inside her head. “You don’t understand!”
“How don’t I understand?” Cimmy continued, unrelenting. “Either it lends its essence to your blood or it doesn’t.”
“It’s not that simple,” Rahima protested. “We do know things that can turn your blood foul, but we do not know things that can heal your wound.”
“What’s the difference?” Cimmy went on, unperturbed.
“For one, I’ve seen blood turn foul. I haven’t seen a wound healed by a leaf.”
“Until now,” Cimmy corrected her.
“Until now,” Rahima agreed in principle. “If that’s what happened, that is.”
“What else could it be?” Cimmy restarted the logical cycle.
“What if it’s not and you could have made it worse?”
“What if my blood ran foul if I didn’t use it?”
“What if your blood ran foul because you did?” Rahima offered the gloom and doom alternative. “Besides,” she continued, frowning, “there is no way to verify that. Unless you hurt yourself again.”
“I’m not going to hurt myself on purpose!” Cimmy protested.
“Well, then we’ll have to wait for the next time you do it on accident and try to see if the leaf makes your blood turn foul,” Rahima continued in the most natural tone.
“Rahima!” Cimmy couldn’t believe her ears. “Remind me not to get on your bad side!”
“I’m just saying,” the latter replied, trying to appease her. “How else are you going to find out?”
“Maybe we can boil the leaves and drink the water, see what happens,” Cimmy continued, inspired by the blue liquid brewing in the cauldron.
“You’re going to poison yourself!” Rahima exploded.
“So you agree that it will do something to my body,” Cimmy continued.
“So would a knife, but you’re not going to swallow that either,” Rahima retorted.
The logic had come to a stopping point, so they continued to watch the pot in silence. A few minutes later, Cimmy couldn’t help herself.
“How does it poison me, exactly?”
“Here,” Rahima offered her a ladle of blue dye. “Drink this!”
“No!” Cimmy shook her head.
“Why not? How is it different? It’s a boiled plant!”
“But it didn’t heal my wound. It stained my shirt,” Cimmy replied.
“Maybe the other leaf can stain your shirt, too. You haven’t tried,” Rahima argued. Cimmy acknowledged her friend’s objection and put testing the leaf for dye pigments on her list of things to do.
“But it also healed my wound.”
“You don’t know that,” Rahima disagreed, stubbornly. “But say it did. How would you be able to tell apart the plants that heal your wound from the plants that stain your shirt?”
“How do you tell apart the plants you eat from the plants you use to make baskets?"
“I don’t know, you grow up with them, you get taught by your parents,” Rahima hesitated.
“How do you think they figured it out the first time? I mean, somebody must have figured it out at some point.”
“I guess starvation wises you up really fast,” Rahima frowned.
“So does blood sickness.” Cimmy’s eyes turned dark suddenly.
Life was harsh and cruel in their village, which had been visited by loss more times than the girl wanted to remember, and every time it did a deep sense of helplessness and inevitability set in, a sense that they were all slaves to an implacable fate.
Maybe it was a fool’s errand, but, according to the widely held opinion, she was a fool already. It wasn’t like she had a reputation to maintain.
Reputation, Cimmy thought, was incredibly damaging to a person’s creativity. It kept one locked into a state of being one didn’t belong to anymore, like a tree whose growth is stunted so it continues to fit in a dish. What good is your reputation when fate comes for you? That said, she blessed crazy with both hands, wrapped the sky blue gossamer veil around her head in an even more eccentric manner, if that were possible, and planned to go out into the fields and figure out the plants that heal from the plants that stain your shirt like her life depended on it. She had absolutely no idea how she was going to do that, of course.
“Maybe you can go blindfolded and hope to stumble upon them,” Rahima offered, half jokingly.
“You think that would work?” Cimmy asked seriously. Rahima shook her head in dismay and pulled out the blue cloth, which had finally achieved the desired hue, out of the cauldron.
“Do you think you can find other plants to get more colors?” she asked, pleased with the results, and went to spread the cloth on thistles to allow it to dry.
“At least we won’t run the risk of poisoning ourselves while doing that,” Cimmy thought.
Science
"Use leaves to heal wounds?” Bertha thundered, seriously irritated. “Is that what you’ve been doing instead of tending to your chores?”
Cimmy looked down, trying unsuccessfully to feign contrition.
“I’ve had it with you and your nonsense! You can go out into the meadow and graze for all I care. Useless cow!”
“What’s with the racket?” Josepha showed up, worried that she missed the scuffle.
“This nut thinks that you can heal people with foliage!”
“Why are you even paying attention to her? It’s Cimmaron we’re talking about. What did you expect?” Josepha continued, poised.
“She spent an entire month drawing leaves and writing about them. Are these the actions of a sane person?”
“Leave her be,” Josepha made an annoyed hand gesture. “If we could fix her, she’d be alright by now. Some people are beyond help.”
“So, what do you want to do, let her study dirt next?” Bertha commented, exasperated.
“That’s interesting,” Cimmy flew on a tangent, while she occupied the spot dedicated to public shaming in the middle of the village square. “I never thought about this. Maybe some type of dirt is better than others, and if so, it could help us improve the crops. I wonder what it would take to find that out.”
“Cimmaron!” Bertha screamed so loudly that Cimmy’s ear rang in a high-pitched whine for a while. The girl’s heart jumped in a panic. “Take that stupid thing off your head!” Bertha grabbed onto her headscarf, but the resilient fabric refused to rip. “From this day forward, you are forbidden, you hear me? Forbidden to entertain any more of this lunacy! Defy me and see what happens!” she got in Cimmy’s face, menacingly.
Cimmy returned her gaze with a long, probing stare, and the strange look of sadness and pity in the girl’s eyes further infuriated Bertha.
“Insolent snot!”
“Leave her be, Bertha. Who’s to say that she isn’t right?” Josepha tried to reestablish the peace.
“You too? You’re taking her side? What rational person insists you can heal sickness with plants? What’s next? Cutting people open to fix their insides?”
“What if it worked? As things stand right now, we’re all at death’s mercy,” Josepha replied softly.
“It doesn’t work! She knows that it doesn’t work! Tell us how it works and what plants?” she turned to Cimmy, who wasn’t there yet, knowledge-wise.
The girl shrugged.
“There’s your bearer of wisdom! You’re all wasting your time on a lunatic!” Bertha concluded her argument.
After everybody left to tend to their interests, Cimmy looked at all of her drawings and all of her writings, realized that she was no closer to an answer now than she was in the beginning, and started contemplating the fact that she may, in fact, be wasting her precious time on this doomed endeavor.
There was no logical starting point for any of the information, no way to structure it, no organizing connections, and no way to verify her assumptions, unless she considered hurting herself on purpose.
The wealth of data stared her back, a pile of random fragments indifferent to her plight.
“There is no way I can do this,” Cimmy thought. “Not without help. Not by myself.”
She put the stack of drawings away, determined never to look at them again, and found ways to keep herself occupied for the next month. And then, according to the law of averages, somebody else in the village got sick, and she, along with everybody else and just as helpless, had to watch from the sidelines and pray for life to prevail in the brutal battle with its reaper. When the struggle ended, she got angry, at life, at herself and at her own ignorance. But anger doesn’t make learning go faster, it doesn’t make one understand what one can’t understand yet, and it doesn’t help one perform miracles one hasn’t earned. There is no point in being angry at the amount of time it takes to master skills and knowledge. It diverts focus from actually acquiring them. If you find yourself looking long and hard for information about something you really care about and you can’t seem to find any references about it anywhere, that means you are the reference; you better figure it out as much as you can all by yourself, so you can be of use to the next person who is going to inquire about it.
She pulled out the plant drawings and started from the beginning, and she stopped caring how long it would take to figure out the connections between things, the logic of the whole endeavor, where the knowledge would lead her, or whether it will be something she would actually be able to use. It turns out the only way to tell the plants that heal from the plants that stain your shirt is to tell the plants that heal from the plants that stain your shirt. Everything else is extraneous detail.
Chapter 5 - The Garden of Confidence
Self Help
"What is all this stuff, Cimmy?” Rahima asked, looking around at the piles of sketches carefully hand drawn on thin sheets of parchment that covered the table and the walls.
The descriptions of the sketches were elaborate and brightly illuminated, appearing more like art than scientific documentation.
“Oh, nothing. Just some notes I took, on plants and their properties.”
She remembered something and turned around.
“How are you here? Aren’t you supposed to be in class?”
“The teacher sent me for a potion, one of the girls is running a fever.”
“What kind of fever? Does she have a rash?”
“Does it matter?”
“Very much. Can I come with you and see her?”
Rahima nodded in approval and, upon leaving Cimmy's cabin, they bumped into Josepha, who generously shared her wisdom.
“Oh, go ahead and visit the feverish. Bring some friends along too and talk to as many people as possible. How wise is our resident layer of hands not to worry about all of us catching this thing? It’s indeed a miracle from God we’re all still alive in your capable care!”
Much as Cimmy resented the tongue lashing, she had to agree Josepha was right and felt embarrassed for not thinking about it herself.
Experience is the most valuable teacher, especially when other sources of knowledge are scarce, and the grouch's experience was far more extensive than her own.
Josepha had seen her share of outbreaks and instinctively knew how to protect herself.
For a moment, the girl thought bringing the elder along would be useful in identifying what kind of illness she was facing, but one look at Josepha conveyed without doubt the latter wouldn’t be caught dead within a thousand paces of the patient.
Many of the afflictions that visited upon their village came unannounced, always met with helpless hand wringing, and Cimmy had made it her life’s mission to figure out how to heal as many of them as possible, and since she couldn’t do that from a safe distance, she prayed for luck and went in.
While she tended to the sick girl her mind raced with worries and what ifs, peeved at Josepha for not offering her invaluable input into the matter and mad at herself for needing her help, and was appalled that in all this time, through everything that happened, nobody ever thought of describing the various plagues for safekeeping, so the next generations didn’t have to start from scratch again and again.
Since then, she began sketching rashes and noting symptoms in a large and ominous book that took up half her workspace, a book that no one else would open for fear it might be cursed.
Nobody knew who had spread the rumor, and maybe it wasn’t just one person at all, but a compilation of the collective fears and assumptions of the village people, most of whom were firm believers in the law of correspondence, and for whom a detailed description of disease was a disease recipe, pure and simple.
“You are going to doom us all with that evil tome of yours! Banish the day that brought us together, for it seems there is no harm visited upon us in which you didn’t have a hand. Bertha,” she turned to the latter for support, “let’s have a show of hands to find out how many people think this abomination should be burned to cinders and spread into the four winds before somebody touches it and gets cursed.”
Cimmy had known Josepha long enough to understand she meant to destroy her research, and took the first opportunity to sneak past the village boundary with the book and find a place to hide it.
The disappearance of the tome unleashed whispers that Cimmy was consorting with the forces of evil, and her all too frequent visits to the wilderness instantly became suspect, for what could one possibly seek in the wild, if not malevolent non-human creatures?
“Cimmy...” Rahima started her timid inquiry.
“Yes?”
“We always shared everything, right?”
“Always.”
“So, if you did something, you would tell me.”
“Something?”
“Well, you know… things.”
“Please tell me you didn’t give in to this nonsense! Rahima, you’re my best friend!”
“People talk,” Rahima looked down, embarrassed.
“And that’s new?”
“No, it’s just, you never talk to me about what you do out in the wild, and as you said, we used to share everything.”
“I didn’t know you were interested. Come with me next time and I’ll show you what I learned so far.”
To a group that is accustomed to expressing common opinions and beliefs, the only thing that induces more panic than a secretive life is a conspiracy. As soon as Rahima joined the effort to fill in gaps in diseases' etiology, Bertha became concerned.
“I told you to forbid the girls to learn how to read and write. What need do they have for those worthless scribbles? They’re busy enough with the field work and their household duties. You know what writing is good for? Preserving evil knowledge and hiding it away from the people of good will, like a shameful disease only the unworthy delight in.”
“In all your born days, Josepha, did you have any question, any concern that couldn’t be solved by respectfully asking your elders? Who knew everything worth knowing and kept us and our sacred values safe? This writing business, those terrible drawings, I’m telling you, the girl is evil, as I’ve been saying all along, and now she corrupted that hare-brained friend of hers. Poor girl wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but at least she was obedient and respectful. How long before all of our youth gets corrupted, you think? Is it worth putting up with damnation just because an evil doer got lucky enough to cure a few diseases? Who says it was her effort and not God’s grace that did the healing, and she’s not taking us all for fools to advance her unholy plans?”
“So, what do you want me to do, banish her?”
“Them. And why not? Better two get lost than the entire village, two who are as good as lost already. Let them figure out how to live in the wilderness if they like it so much.”
The council of elders was assembled, and it was decided and announced, in dignified fashion, that Cimmy and Rahima were to depart the village and seek their fortunes in the wild.
The two left at sunrise, with nothing but the shirts on their backs, and walked quietly through the wild meadows, not looking at each other. After a few hours, Cimmy gave into her guilt.
“I’m so sorry, Rahima. Maybe Bertha is right. I seem to get myself, and now you, in trouble no matter what I do.”
Rahima refused to answer. She was furious, scared, and never felt more alone. Rahima had built her life inside the soul of the village, and the absence of society hurt her like a wound.
What were they going to do now, how were they going to live, who would take care of them when they were in need, what of all the terrible creatures of the wild, from which they had no protection now?
These thoughts reminded her she hadn’t seen Fay in days, and, upset as she was, she still had to ask Cimmy about his whereabouts.
As if prompted by the question, Fay poked his snout through the high grasses by the side of the path and clambered Cimmy’s leg and arm to reach her shoulder, where he made himself comfortable in her hair.
“Great. You have rat in your hair. What on earth was I thinking?”
“Rahima, please don’t hate me! We’re in this together. We need each other.”
“And what exactly can we do to survive? Have you thought of that? What of your precious sketches? Good luck drawing them now, with no charcoal and no parchment. What about food, Cimmy? Or shelter? How are we not going to starve or freeze to death? Or get eaten?” Her voice went dry with dread.
“Fay managed to survive here, and he’s a rat! Have some faith, will you? We’ll think of something.”
“It would have been better to think this through ahead of need.”
“The thistle cakes are edible, and there are plenty of those. We can make some beds out of the stems, too.”
“Are you mad? Who eats thistle cakes?”
‘She really doesn’t remember anything,’ Cimmy thought, amazed that the skip jumping through history and time she seemed to experience was completely foreign to her friend.
“Rahima, it’s not that hard. You’ve been sowing and reaping and making clothes and cooking food and starting bonfires your entire life. There is no difference between doing it for the village and doing it for yourself, except for your own fear. Let’s set camp somewhere, it’s close to sunset. We’ll find some thistles and berries to eat and tomorrow, before dawn, we’ll sneak out into the fields and gather some seeds and grains to plant out here.”
“What, steal?!” Rahima started shaking.
“No. We’ll just starve to death.”
“You and your cursed book! Bertha was right. It’s a slippery slope and before I know it I will be damned, I know I will,” Rahima started sobbing uncontrollably, refusing to allow Cimmy to comfort her.
“I am doomed, and it’s all your fault!”
“Be that as it may, can we ensure our survival first? You can blame me later, on a full stomach.”
Through all the drama, Fay snuggled comfortably in Cimmy’s hair, watching the two with intense curiosity, trying to figure out if their bizarre behavior was meant to accomplish something.
Sailing
"Ithought you gathered the seeds from the fields,” Rahima complained, staring in disbelief at a gangly plant with palmate leaves, which was towering over the almost ripe field of wheat.
“I did.”
“We didn’t have this kind of plant in the fields.”
“It’s probably a weed. Pull it out!”
Rahima obliged, irked, throwing the offending trespasser into the nearby stream, to keep it from spreading its seeds.
The water was shallow, and puddled in places after the rain, and the incident was soon forgotten, in the rush to get to harvest and stop subsisting on thistle seeds.
Weeks passed, during which it rained, and the puddles filled and dried out repeatedly, hiding and revealing their submerged contents.
One doesn’t realize relationships exist in context, and while Rahima was Cimmy’s most devoted admirer, supporter and confidante when they both lived in the village under the ceaseless scrutiny of the elders, being thrown into the wild to fend for herself had turned her into an assertive, critical authority, who could find fault with the weather if she thought her friend had something to do with it.
Some resentments run deep and she never forgot it was Cimmy’s obsession with all things weird and unnatural that landed them in this tragic circumstance.
She didn’t have a specific complaint, since both her wherewithal and work load didn’t much differ from what she’d been used to her whole life, but the blood of the tribe runs deep, and being separated from everything and everyone she knew made her feel half dead.
She kept wallowing in self-pity and ruminating over the stupid diseased book, as everybody called it, wishing she’d never laid eyes on it and wondering where did Cimmy hide it, now that her old aspirations for writing and drawing were obviously unattainable.
As she pondered on the sorry state of her life, her eyes wandered to a puddle that had dried out, leaving behind a whitish film.
‘She hid the book in the stream?’ Rahima asked herself, bewildered, and since the hypothesis was too crazy to entertain, she drew closer.
On the bottom of the dried puddle lay a sheet of something that looked very much like parchment, woven through with rough brown thread.
Resentment took a back seat to opportunity. Cimmy and Rahima sat down and debated the potential uses of the material.
The whitish dried paste looked kind of pointless, but the threads’ usefulness was immediately clear, although they weren’t near as soft and beautiful as the ones the plant with blue flowers yielded.
Cimmy wished she still had her charcoal and her parchment, so she could draw the new plant and detail its characteristics. Everyone grieves in his or her own way. While Rahima suffered the anguish of social isolation, Cimmy was distressed over the loss of her favorite activities, which gave her a reason to look forward to each day. She wasn’t a conscientious type, Cimmy, and having to go back to working the fields was more punishment than her friend would think for her. Field work was tedious and repetitive, and yielded no surprises.
Fay emerged from the tall grasses and sat himself on top of a flat rock, munching on grains.
“Are they ripe?” Cimmy asked him.
The rat gobbled down another helping and gave her a blank stare.
“I guess that’s a no. Do you ever get bored being a rat? I wish I had something to do that didn’t involve digging, mowing, or lifting heavy bundles.”
Fay had had his fill and descended from the rock, careful not to scrape his pudgy belly on its sharp edges. Nature had provided bountifully for the little critter, if one were to judge by his girth. He trampled through a mud puddle and advanced towards the sheet of dried white paste, which he intended to chew up and fluff to build a nest, tracking perfectly clear paw prints, tail prints and whisker prints on its bright surface in the process.
He had to be moved away by force from the useful material by a very enthusiastic Cimmy, who grabbed the sheet and rushed to the extinguished fire pit to find charcoal.
“Look at this, Rahima! Just look!” She forced a fresh drawing of the new plant, complete with written details, on her uncooperative friend, until she managed to pique the latter’s interest.
“It’s just like parchment, but better. And we can make so much of it!”
She turned around in dismay, remembering they threw away the plant, seeds and all, and she couldn’t remember seeing any other plants like it around.
“I don’t know about the white sheet, but the fibers would be useful,” Rahima deigned to agree.
“Where do you think it came from? There can’t be just one plant.”
“Maybe a bird ate it somewhere far away, flew back and dropped it here.”
“Flew back from where? We’ve seen all the land. It always ends at the waters.”
“Maybe there is more land on the other side of the waters. Think about it, Cimmy! What if there are splendid, unimaginable wonders in that land beyond?” Rahima’s eyes were instantly veiled by the mist of wanderlust.
“I thought you wanted to stay in the village, and adventure was another name for misery.”
“This adventure is. How is being banished from society but still within eyeshot of Bertha, in order to do exactly the same thing, only alone, a valiant exploit? But that… I wonder if we could, Cimmy! Maybe find high ground and look as far as we can, to see if we can glimpse land across the waters.”
“Say we do. How do you expect to get to it?”
“I saw driftwood floating on top of the water. Maybe we can tie some together with those threads. They seem sturdy enough.”
Cimmy didn’t want to spoil her friend’s good mood, which had become such a rarity lately, and they spent the afternoon making plans to climb the shallow dune near the beach in the hope the waters would gift them a wonderful discovery.
They reached the top of the hill at high noon, which didn’t show very good planning, because the water was gleaming like a mirror, impeding all visibility, while the unforgiving sun was threatening to cook them alive.
“Look! Look over there! See?” Rahima pointed in a random direction towards something that wasn’t there. It was impossible to tell what was there or not, with all the glare.
“It’s not land, Rahima,” Cimmy tried to diffuse her friend’s enthusiasm. “How can you see anything? There’s nothing but glare.”
Just to contradict her, the sun hid in the clouds for a second, revealing a flash of something green in the distance, just a flash, and then it was gone.
“So, say that is land. What do you want to do about it?”
“Go there, of course!”
“You are going to get us killed.”
“You sound exactly like Josepha, you know that?"
“You take that back immediately!” Cimmy bristled, offended.
“Only if you promise to come with me to the new land.”
They argued over the feasibility of the project until the sun went down, and while they were sitting on top of their dune, watching the sun go down, the new land came clearly into view, impossible to deny now, as it appeared, surrounded by the rosy and purple hues of the sunset.
After much back and forth, Cimmy had to concede once they reaped the harvest and stored the grains there wouldn’t be much to do anyway, and with the weather being so accommodating, it didn’t seem impossible to float atop a bundle of driftwood to the land in the distance.
Nobody had ever crossed the edge of the water, and to Cimmy it just looked like liquid land: you look in the direction you want to go and just advance steadily towards it, what could be more simple than that.
Once the harvest was gathered and stored, they started work on the floating device, which was a lot more trouble than one would have expected, ground some grains, on a whim, to have some food, stocked up on a sizable quantity of thistle cakes and pushed the contraption in the water.
They barely had time to lift themselves on it before a strong current grabbed the vessel and pushed it decisively in the wrong direction.
“Jump!” Rahima said. “Jump now!”
“But we’re on water!” Cimmy returned her a blank stare, too shocked to react.
“You have to jump off now!” Rahima pushed her and jumped, as the ambitious raft picked up speed and was soon lost from sight.
With the whole brouhaha, Cimmy forgot to panic, and as a result, she found herself floating effortlessly on top of the accommodating waves.
“Who needs driftwood? We can just float there!”
“Put your feet down, or you’ll drift out to the horizon just like that raft!”
The waves had dragged them rather far from their camp, and it took hours for them to get back to it, and by the time they did, it was already dark.
“That was pointless,” Cimmy started.
“Well, not entirely. We learned what’s not working.”
Nothing could dampen Rahima’s enthusiasm for the project, least of all the impending drowning.
“We need something to push the float in the right direction.”
Three sets of paddles and a very long stick later, the design was revisited.
“It’s never going to go in the direction we want. We don’t have enough strength to push it ourselves.”
“Why don’t you make the water do it?” Cimmy asked sarcastically, but Rahima had lost all sense of humor and was taking everything seriously.
“You are right! We need to trick the water into pushing us where we need to go!”
The addition of the rudder didn’t seem to make a lot of difference, other than the improvement of now floating sideways in the wrong direction, instead of straightforward, so they took another dive and watched sorrowfully as the second raft disappeared into the distance.
As they huddled to dry up next to the campfire, Rahima started again.
“Maybe we can make the wind push us.”
“Or maybe we can drown ourselves directly and be done with it,” Cimmy mumbled, resentful. She was cold, she was wet, and the fresh design held the promise of lots and lots of hard physical labor. “Besides, I think we ran out of driftwood.”
“One more try, Cimmy! Just one!”
Cimmy curled up, trying to keep herself warm in the evening's chill, her clothes still wet. She had noticed, as she jumped off the raft again, to avoid getting dragged to that place behind the horizon where all the water dropped into a chasm, that it tasted salty and made her stomach revolt when she tried to drink it. Now that the water on her skin and clothes had started to dry, it left behind the pinchy substance, which was itchy and uncomfortable, and made her skin feel leathery.
Rahima was wide awake, ignoring the wet clothes and salty skin, with wide eyes filled with dreams staring into the fire, and Cimmy could almost see the daring voyage in their dark mirrors, a voyage that to Rahima was eminently possible, and which she had taken in her mind a thousand times, so much so that it felt second nature to her.
There was no doubt in her mind they were going to reach the other shore, and she was already planning the logistics for when they got there.
Maybe whatever is possible in the mind is possible in real life as well.
Maybe that was all her unusual adventure was all about, and if it wasn’t, she didn’t seem to have something better to do, anyway.
“Maybe your garden is there,” Rahima joked.
What if she was right? Cimmy thought.
Motivation makes all the difference in an endeavor.
“We start work on the new float tomorrow,” she mumbled. “Sleep. It’s going to be a lot of work.”
Tresspassing on Paradise
She was exhausted and wet, and the sand on the beach was burning hot in the sunlight, and it felt so much like one of her garden dreams, Cimmy found it difficult to believe her surroundings were real.
Out into the distance, across the waters, she could see a sliver of land which looked arid by comparison, so alien she could barely recognize it as home, as she stood in the middle of this lush paradise, filled with plants she’d never seen before, except maybe in her dreams.
Rahima's energy seemed limitless as she skipped around the new home, expressing delight and surprise whenever she came across something that sparked her excitement.
“Be careful,” Cimmy warned. “You don’t know what’s lurking under that thick foliage.”
“Spoil joy!” Rahima retorted, sticking out her tongue in a childish gesture, picking unfamiliar berries, tempted by their pretty colors and ripe aromas.
“I hope you’re not thinking of eating those,” Cimmy jumped, outraged.
“Not yet,” Rahima hesitated.
“Rahima, rest a little and then we should figure out how to get back home. There’s plenty of driftwood and vines here. We shouldn’t have any trouble making another raft.”
Not that the one they had built had been any help at all. They had just left the shore when the darned thing fell apart, leaving them with only its floating pieces to hang on to, and it was sheer luck, or divine providence, that ensured the strong current they got caught in drew them to the new land like a watery magnet and dumped them in its shallow waters which extended far out from its shores.
In those waters, there were creatures—colorful, innocent-looking gelatinous beings resembling transparent mushroom caps—along with fast, flat blue, yellow, orange and green animals that brushed against their legs in large groups, never needing to surface for air.
Cimmy was scared silly when she almost stepped on a flat creature lying on the sea floor, which took off in a hurry, making her think the ground beneath her feet had disappeared.
“Why?” Rahima replied, completely taken by the new environment.
“You don’t want to go home?”
“Certainly not! We don’t have a home anymore, remember? If we have to live off our wits, here is way better. Besides, do you want to risk drowning again?”
“Oh, now you find wisdom!” Cimmy mumbled, resentful.
She wasn’t very sure she wanted to go back either, even though she felt guilty for abandoning Fay and was embarrassed by the selfish need on which she had built her relationship with the rat: if Fay was not there to show them which of the fruits were good to eat, how were their going to survive in this new land.
A familiar squirming quickened inside her blouse, and before she had time to react, Fay clambered his way up her arm and made himself comfortable in her hair.
“I see you brought your pet too,” Rahima commented, without looking surprised. “It’s settled, then. We stay here?”
“But...” Cimmy stared at the sea in disbelief, absolutely certain Fay wasn’t with them when they left the shores. She wouldn’t have brought him with her, and put his life in danger if danger were to befall them.
For the first time since they’d met, she started wondering if Fay was just a rat, as she had always taken for granted, if maybe he wasn’t some magical being, sent to her by the divine providence she had called out to, in order to help.
“Aha,” Rahima mocked. “Can you get the magical rat out of your hair and have him help us figure out what’s good to eat around here? I don’t want to starve to death in paradise.”
A few hours later, bellies full, they were sitting on the beach in the shade of a strange-looking tree whose fruits they had enjoyed earlier, wondering if it was even worth building shelter in this place where everything, the air, the water, the landscape, seemed perfect.
The breeze felt soft and balmy against their skin, and the calm waters populated by scores of colorful beings were warm and inviting.
“Does this look like your garden, Cimmy?” Rahima asked, eyes closed as she bathed in the afternoon sun.
“No,” Cimmy replied. “No, Rahima, this doesn’t look like my garden at all.”
“Is it better or worse?”
“Neither. Just different.” Cimmy looked around in disbelief. “Very different. What do you think we should do next?”
“Absolutely nothing!” Rahima opened her eyes, offended. “I swear to you, Cimmy, if you invent us stuff to do just so we’re not idle, I’ll leave you right here and walk along the beach to a place that’s far enough away to live there alone. We’re in paradise. Everything we need is within arm’s reach, just ripe for the taking, and you want to make me toil?”
“I’m going to get bored,” Cimmy tried to explain herself.
“Go fetch us more of those fruits then,” Rahima commanded. “And crack one open for me.”
“Fine, we’ll just sit here.” They lay down on the beach in silence for a while. Cimmy got restless.
“Are you sure we don’t need shelter?”
Rahima jumped to her feet, visibly annoyed.
“I can’t even look at you right now! We have one chance, one unexpected chance to be happy, and you have to mess it up with your stupid pestering. Fine! Let’s do some busy work, so that here feels just like home. Maybe you can impersonate Bertha while we’re at it. For authenticity.”
Truth be told, lying around doing nothing wasn’t all that was cracked up to be, and Rahima was getting a little antsy too, so she was eager to grab onto the pretext her friend provided her with to justify some sort of activity.
“We’re not building anything. I built enough rafts to last me a lifetime. Let’s take a walk around this place and figure out where all the good stuff is.”
After walking on the beach for a few hours, they were surprised to find themselves back where they started.
Rahima remembered their old home was surrounded by waters too, and decided that wasn’t that unexpected.
With night approaching, they gathered some large feathery leaves scattered on the beach, fashioned a cozy nest, and readied themselves for sleep.
It was a swift and unsettled gust of wind at first, which whipped the bendy trees into painful contortions, and then a violent burst of light cracked open the night sky, followed by a deafening rumble.
They froze in their nest, staring at each other, bereft of thoughts.
Eventually, Cimmy remembered Fay and worried he was nowhere to be found; she was slightly relieved to see his round eyes glimmer in another flash of light, while his muzzle poked through the brown leaves to reach deeper under them for shelter.
Rahima finally dared to ask.
“Do you think God is mad at us?”
Cimmy looked up and another terrifying blaze slashed through the sky, determined to confirm the assertion.
“Why would God be mad at us?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we’re trespassing. This looks like paradise, no?”
The accompanying rumble finally arrived, making the sky and the earth tremble with divine retribution.
Cimmy didn’t answer.
“Cimmy, I’m scared,” Rahima whispered in a small, dry voice. “Let’s get away from here, please! Let’s find us a place to hide!”
“Hide where?” Cimmy protested. “We walked around this whole place in a few hours. Where do you think we could possibly hide?”
“What do you think God is going to do to us?” Rahima elaborated on her terror, eyes widened to take in the formidable spectacle.
And just then, as if to answer, the skies burst open and unleashed rain upon the land. It was a warm summer downpour that drenched them to their bones in an instant, scattered quite a few large and feathery leaves on the beach, and stopped soon after.
They didn’t move, waiting for the resolution of divine’s just reward, but the skies had already cleared, as was made evident by the glow of countless stars.
“Maybe he just thought we should wash,” Rahima finally deigned to speak.
“This must be the craziest thing you ever said to me.” Cimmy couldn’t believe her ears. She suddenly remembered something and turned towards Rahima. “Hey, speaking of water, did you happen to spot a stream anywhere while we were walking?”
“No.”
“Look over there,” Cimmy pointed to a large waterfall that was cascading over the top of the mountain in the distance, and sparkled in the faint light of the stars.
“Do you think God brought us water to drink?” Rahima refined her argument.
“And that’s the second craziest thing you ever said to me,” Cimmy retorted. “Oh, my God, where’s Fay?” She jumped, anxious that the rat might have gotten washed off in the downpour.
Fay made his way out of the soaked foliage, and he must have been buried deep underneath it, because he was perfectly dry.
Cimmy got instantly aggravated the rat had outsmarted them again, and then remembered they had picked a low-lying area on the beach to build their nest, because it felt cozy, a shallow bowl which was now starting to collect all the water from its surroundings, and quickly turning into a puddle.
Rahima didn’t dare look at her, and had a guilty look on her face.
“Maybe we should reconsider building that shelter,” she mumbled.
“You think?”