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Light through the haze

Never trust the haze

By Mara PapavassiliouPublished 3 years ago Updated 3 years ago 9 min read
1
Light through the haze
Photo by Damon Lam on Unsplash

“Where are you going?” Greg asks.

The view at sunset is a blaze of fluorescence, and everything else a dark silhouette, like it’s all made of plasterboard and painted black, the backdrop to a school play. In the distance, there is a palm tree. A lone singular palm tree, not native to this land, that someone would've planted before all this happened, long dead and calcified.

“The palm tree,” I say.

“That’s past the escarpment,” he says.

“I know.”

The old warning rings in the space of our silence: never go beyond the escarpment.

“When?” he asks.

I feel the wart lumps of my stuffed-full backpack.

“Whenever. Now.”

“No,” Greg says, “not now, not yet.”

“When then?”

“Tomorrow morning. When the haze goes. The haze is bad right now.”

Greg is right. The haze is bad. Winds last night brought it in, and it settled over the escarpment and turned the midday sun the grand, blinding white of a clinician’s light. Even now, little but the sunset is visible. Night will make it worse.

Never go beyond the escarpment, and never trust the haze. Those were our most sacred rules, and I am about to break both of them.

“Alright,” I say, and Greg goes back to his whittling.

Chink, chink, chink. The shards and dusts of the stones and the rocks and the petrified woods we dragged up from the desert plain for him to chip away in the endless hours are a vomit of inorganic material at his feet. No particular forms can be made out. These days, he destroys much of what he creates. It’s been years since he has shown me any new pieces.

“You don’t need to come with me,” I say.

“I know,” he replies, “I’m not.”

------------

Sleep is only dark seen through the veil of eyelid membrane, coloured by the pulse of capillaries. A blanket hue but not a blanket dark. Eyes are heavy, weighted; always closing, but never shut. Mine are open, and I am sitting on the wide balcony of the great house, waiting. In my dreams, I see that the haze is bad. Only the palm tree is visible. I must go to it.

I’m unsure when it is I wake. The house is frozen and still in the desert cool of the early morning, and there is a container of mushroom stew and a small piece of damper bread waiting for me in the dining area.

"Greg?" I call his name, though it, and all names, are absurd now. There is only Greg and I. We love eachother, but we are tired of eachother. We are tired about worrying about losing one another, our gut wrenched insides already juiced of all sadness. Neither of us cry anymore, and Greg, wherever he is, does not answer my call.

My shoulders ache at the familiar pull of the backpack as I tighten the straps. I take one last look at the house. I drink in the crimson eaves, the curves in the old masonry, the cream-coloured walls, paint wrinkling and puckered. A shadowed figure stands at the second story window. It stares out as I begin to walk.

------------

The haze has not shifted in the night and still sits heavy over the plain. I try to eke out the palm tree and the mounds and distant hills Greg and I have mapped out over the years, but it’s like looking through fogged glass.

The plain before the house is familiar, the sand soft and red and patterned with the soles of my shoes and Greg’s shoes; our thousands of trails crisscross, the Earth scarred with our treading, our boredom, our loneliness. In the early years, our parents would worry about covering the tracks, to stop too many people from finding the house. They needn’t have been concerned.

It was my mother and father who first found the house. Safe house, they called it. Greg and his parents came after that, with his sister, but she died, and our parents died, and after that no new people came.

I scan the ground, but there’s not much to be found on the parched granite. Low-lying saltbushes and spiny grevilleas poke through my socks to itch and scratch my skin. They won’t flower, not while the haze hangs.

My parents were careful to teach me about plants, told me which could be eaten (noonflowers, scrub cherries, lemon myrtles), and which were toxic. Plants are important, my mother and father would say. When the plants come back, the people will come back.

"This is your tree," my father once told me long ago, in front of something that looked little more than a shrub. He planted it on the day I was born, a ritual from the old country. I can't remember what kind of tree it was, but I remember it would lose its leaves in the winter, would be only its skeleton branches until springtime when flowers the colour of women’s blush would erupt like tiny spot fires from its blanche-bone bark.

There is no one who will plant little trees for me now, and no one but Greg to remember my birthday. There aren’t any countries either, old or new. My little tree is long gone too, even before all this happened. A gardener uprooted it because he thought it had died in its winter sleep.

I place one foot in front of another.

I’m not sure if I have held off some part of myself in winter sleep, or of I too am dead, my soul petrified like the palm tree I walk to.

Never trust the haze, my mother and father would say. It was the haze that made all the world go bad, made the plants stop flowering.

When the plants come back, the people will come back.

I walk. Hours pass. The sun rises then ascends in the sky, weak in the frigid touch of the haze. I eat my damper and my stew, and I continue. I see repetitions of the same boulders, the same eucalypts, the same dull grasses. My feet grow tender, my back strains, my eyes cloud. But always there is the palm tree in the distance, shifting in and out of the fog, my true north.

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At the base of the escarpment, the fog is thick. It seems caught here, held in place by the rock face.

I inspect the area, having never been this far out before. Something catches my eye in the rubble. A shock of red. A new plant.

I hold my breath as I approach. At each step the gravel crunches. I crouch down, my knees pressing sharp into the bite of granite-churned ground.

A calandrinia. I recognise it from the Encyclopaedia from the house.

When the plants come back, the people will come back. I wish Greg was here to see the calandrinia, see its alien hand splatter out of the rubble, its bulbs turgid with water and bright as coral.

A shard of light catches. There is something else. The calandrinia clutches something in its basal leaves. I gently part them to pull it out, hold it up to the runny light of day.

It is a heart-shaped locket, gold and with a chain attached. There is an inscription—Lisa.

The old words ring. When the plants , people. There were people here.

-----------

Hunger burns my stomach. The air is soupy. It burns my nose at each breath.

Never trust the haze.

I have ventured too far out, too deep into the poison. Motes of light float in my eyes, but I know I am close. I grab at rocks, logs, dead roots, anything to keep myself up, to keep myself going.

I think of the calandrinia. An ancient plant with thick roots, feeding off old reservoirs of water, deep below. If it survived the haze, then so can I.

-----------

Time weaves in and out through the haze, in and out of each stride of my legs. I grow weaker, but my vision of the palm tree grows clearer.

Keep going.

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It is night by the time I reach the palm tree. Its dark form stands out in the haze like a dream.

I touch its scaly bark, like platelets on a dinosaur. My arms are just wide enough to wrap all the way around it. I press my body into its cold, hard trunk. I can’t see its top through the haze, but I imagine it’s wild do of leaves above, like frizzy hair on a tall, lanky person.

I let go, step back.

What now? Why did I come here?

The locket. I fondle it in my hands. Light reflects off it and cuts into my eyes, like a ray bouncing off broken glass.

I’m not dead, I’m not petrified inside. The locket is a beacon through the haze. If I saw it catch the light, then someone else might too.

I look up, and the throw locket up into the palm tree’s great leaves.

Please catch, please catch.

The locket comes back down, chimes as it hits the ground.

Damn.

I throw again and again. My arm turns wobbly. A headache swells at my temple.

I throw, and there is a blood rush. Dots of black bloom in my vision and I fall. My backside lands in a bone-aching thud. I stare up at the palm tree, my breaths heavy, trailing out. There is a metallic smell, a wetness at my nose.

The locket hits my chest. No!

My hand reaches for it, grasps the metallic heart.

My last chance.

I throw.

Please catch, please catch.

The glom of white haze crowds my thoughts, and I think no more.

-----------

“Jules!”

Someone saying my name.

My eyes open.

“What the hell are you trying to do?”

Greg’s face is before me. Beyond him, something twinkles up high in the thick white.

“The locket…on the tree…so people will see.”

“Fool,” Greg says as he props me up, presses a water bottle to my lips.

“You wait Greg. You will see. Did you see the plants, Greg? There are new plants. The people will come.”

I don’t remember how it is we get back to the house. But I know I sleep for a long, long time.

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We sit upon the wide balcony of the great, empty house. We wait. We stare. Our sights concentrate, details accrue. Dot-point focus on the white glimmer—we watch, for hours, days, months.

But now, there is movement. All the waiting condenses down to this singular moment. There is movement. It floats like a mote, hovering in between the heat lines, sustained in the chorus of long-time silence. Sweat beads form like dew on our skin, from the intensity of our sitting, our waiting, our listening. It is well after the point has amassed globular form, become a bead, and then a dark, embryonic figure, that either of us acknowledge it.

Our eyes dart to one another, a sideways slant that flashes, if only for a second, with hope.

Short Story
1

About the Creator

Mara Papavassiliou

Desert Druid 🏜// Writer 🐍

Speculative // literary // horror // nature

Instagram: dogma.ra

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