I took in a breath of cool, earthy air, and my eyes creaked open.
My jaw turned to the cream, marble moon, sitting lazy in the sand of the sky. A blue fog lay thick and assertive over the horizon, holding up a burning orange, which didn’t tell whether the sun was approaching or taking its timely leave. Above was a vast, pale green, starless and smug with ambiguity.
As the venturesome breeze rustled through my hair, it seemed to stop and question each strand.
What are you doing here? This isn’t home.
Not quite hostile, not quite kindred. We were one but not the same.
“Passing by,” I told it. “Carry on yourself, and know no use in lifting my veil, for my scalp shall show no better answer.”
So it left me.
I looked up to see the sky hadn’t changed.
I glanced around, across mold shrublands to burnt sienna slopes. Their crooked rock fingers pointed to the mystery of the sky, no more understanding than I. The eye reached nothing but a spotty, dusty, tufty ground, stretching, seeping, winding on, on, on.
The sky blazed, never dwindling, nor tongues of flame ever rising. I couldn’t know.
I waited—with innocent filth dancing on my skin, valley fever threatening to trickle down my throat—and the scale did not tip for a moment. The special balance of vibrancy and drear stayed planted in the sky, invisible roots tangled deep within the atmosphere.
Until I couldn’t bear it, I waited. Until I let that earthy breath come and go a hundred, thousand, decillion times, and I realised nothing was changing here—not the smirking sky, or the fat, snoozing moon, or the shrubs which stared me in the face until I turned to them and they shut their prickly eyes again.
My heart lost the battle, and my victorious, agitated feet picked me up. They felt they had to bring me somewhere: nowhere in particular, just elsewhere. Forward, into the distance, where I would meet the fog face to face. Where the horizon runs out. Where the sun comes into view at last.
I have to see it. I don’t care that it doesn’t move, or that the world froze after the breeze abandoned me. But I’ve got to know.
Each breath is harder to coerce inside me while keeping the fever out. I’m losing capacity. My lungs are weakening.
The slopes may have given up on the mystery, the rocks resigned to the unknown, but I will not.
I will walk.
Into the fire of the sky, letting the flames lick me like the rough tongues of dogs, my feet will carry me. I shall walk, and I shall know, and maybe in another uncountable number of breaths, I will have an answer to tell the breeze.
Celeste Wilner – Year 12
