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Like the Sounds of Cracking Pond Ice

His visions were visceral, real, lived...

By Cynthia L FortnerPublished 3 years ago 6 min read
2
Like the Sounds of Cracking Pond Ice
Photo by erin mckenna on Unsplash

“…Abrupt sounds of cracking ice in a frozen pond...”

**********

They came to me in snippets, Andres’s visions. They were often announced by incongruous sounds that were clearly not part of my summer garden world. Me, the Sorceress whose purpose it was to comfort souls as they were in transition before fully entering the spirit realm, if that was their choice.

Andres sent me frequent visions, sometimes of where he had traveled in different locations, and at other times from sound and memories. Andres would always narrate, never from the beginning, but from the middle of the memory he was telling. Images of his story formed in the ether of my imaginative mind.

**********

“...I was on the phone with the now-adult children I had known in Nis, Yugoslavia, when there was still a Yugoslavia back in the 1980s. I had done my Fulbright teaching during 1985 in the city of Nis. We had become close. The families in my neighborhood were all my friends!

They were the lucky ones and had survived the ethnic cleansing of Milosevic in the late 1990s. He was guilty of genocide and war crimes in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo...”

**********

Andres's voice trailed as the splintering, fracturing sounds--like boulder after boulder was crashing into thick pond ice--came to me in a rapid-fire, staccato sequence. There were always remnants of him being a professor, his explaining, his detour of details, his practiced storytelling finally getting to the point.

**********

“...So now in the dead of night, in the middle of winter, March 1999, I am on the phone listening to the bombs dropping on my friends in Nis. NATO was dropping the bombs. We were all crying, screaming, barely breathing. I tried to calm them even as I felt dire panic. They were in their basement with no lights, not even windows…”

**********

As the darkness of his vision swirled around me, I touched my face. I was crying too. In empathy, I felt their pain.

**********

“…Without lights on, the hope was the bombs would drop outside the cities on frozen lakes and ponds, mitigating further deaths…”

**********

I wondered where his dark vision was coming from. Why this? Why now? Where is he on his spirit’s journey? Was he wanting to say goodbye to his earthly confines? I didn’t want to think that. His passing had come too soon. He had left his earthly self, entering into the spirit realm barely three years before. But I could still hear him as the professor I knew.

**********

“…We all made it to sunrise, the symbolic light that was putting an end to Milosevic’s regime. I wrote letters and made endless phone calls in protest. The irony. The contradictions. War to stop a war. I was good at protests…”

**********

The dark swirl was clearing, and a cacophony of clamoring voices and ringing phones, the old dialing kind, filled my head. The vision moved into thick white mists, swirling white into yellows and blues.

His voice changed as well. Andres was now in a different memory, a flashback to his college days at Berkeley. Indeed, he had been there during its prime protest seasons of the late 1960s into the early 1970s. His tone lifted as the colors of my misty vision further lightened.

**********

“…1973, I graduated with my PhD…Yeah, constant crisis…sure, just crossing the entrance to campus was a war zone of being harangue--sometimes by the abrupt thwacking sound of a police baton as if reverberating against ice on the top of a frozen pond. We were bull-horned, tear gassed, …”

**********

Andres breaks into a thick and heavy cough. The vision I see goes deeply yellow, to orange, and purple for a moment, until he regains his voice in this vision, then picking right up where he left off. I can picture him. The mists of the vision lighten in shade but remain distinct in the swirl of opposing colors.

**********

“...petitioned, and leafletted, or asked to donate…to any variety of causes. We had to make several serious political decisions before breakfast! Every semester, we had to make a vow to stay in school. Classes often couldn’t be held, but we were still responsible for the readings. I would sometimes have to wade through pamphlets in order to turn in an essay or to go to an oral exam. Come to think of it, that is one reason why I like being a talker…”

**********

I hear him laughing, light-hearted with the realization, as he describes how this environment launched him, not just his ideas, but he himself, who he was. I feel uplifted too, as if a breath of fresh air has blown its invisible life into the intensity of this vision and perfumed my senses.

**********

“…The action was in the cafes and in the streets, not in the classrooms. The intense political atmosphere there, the questioning of everything, stayed with me the rest of my life, became me…”

**********

The vision I see immediately swirls from the yellows, oranges, purples, and whites into a red fog, suddenly moving into a mix with thick blackened burgundy. I feel Andre’s emotions change. It was like someone else, somewhere, was asking him questions, like he was being interviewed.

**********

“…After Berkeley? Sure, …I can talk about that time. Junior Bullfighters is what we called ourselves, the group of us teaching in Spain. We were all young Fulbrighters. Spain came before my Fulbright in Yugoslavia. Where in Spain? Oh, right, …in Barcelona through ’74 and then in Valencia through ’75. I wanted to leave the Berkeley turmoil…Franco was still in power in Spain, …his fascist regime was on its way out. Protests were illegal in Spanish universities, but they happened, just like at Berkeley…Yes, the universities got shut down…so did Berkeley at times…”

**********

Oddly, the narration kept fragmenting, cutting out, while the colors of the vision cut out as well, but then returned in the same red-burgundy intensity.

I cried out in my mind: “Andres, I am losing you; your voice is fracturing, like the breaking ice sound of a frozen pond that you keep alluding to.”

Andres continued with his interview tone.

*********”*

“…What? Sure. I can speak up!”

**********

Had he heard me? I drew in a quick breath.

**********

“…Yes, us Junior Bullfighters, meaning newly minted lecturers, went to a few bullfights. It was part of the cultural history. Brutal? Yes...I didn’t like that. In Barcelona, though, I learned about the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona. Right there and then, I knew I would do that run, a run for my life, running to find its next excitement. I planned for Pamplona. I did the run three different times…”

**********

Loud and clear, he was coming through now. His visions always connected us, even before he passed into the spirit realm. We could read each other’s minds in a revealing sort of way before. So why not after?

In the swirling color of the vision, I began to see Andre’s face. I thought from my heart this time: “Andres, don’t leave me yet. I am not ready to let you go.” He smiled.

**********

“…Let me tell you about Pamplona and the Running of the Bulls one more time, then…”

**********

Yes, please do, Andres, please do...

**********

This is my third in a series of stories. Please read the previous two and follow their interconnections.

Please like, heart, read, tip, and follow my stories, and subscribe. Let's see what happens to interconnect a final story in this series!

Enjoy,

Cynthia

Short Story
2

About the Creator

Cynthia L Fortner

I like words, their etymologies, as meaning comes from memories, histories, that little internal voice, barely a birdy chirp. Words are a performance of meaning psychologically. So, I like memoirs, writing them, birds, flowers, and seasons.

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