A RED LIGHT BLINKS FAST, screams of panic erupt; amid the commotion a young man's voice shakes with sadness: “I'm sorry, mum...”
Rapid heartbeats, amniotic fluid, a fetus within a womb. A mother's voice filters into the womb, singing, “Care is heavy, therefore sleep, while I o'er you watch do keep. Sleep, pretty darling do not cry. And I will sing you a lullaby...”
A young man jolts awake, sucking in air, as if breathing for the first time. He sits up under a canopy of ferns, trying to gather his thoughts, but his mind reads like a blackboard wiped clean. Struggling to his feet, Man breaks through a thin mist; it lifts and shifts into white butterflies that now flutter in a forest of pine trees.
MAYAWE! A little way off a peacock stands proud, its long feathers spread out like a fan. A swift collapse of the fan reveals to Man gates at the forest's edge. He plods through the bracken, powerless to shape his question marks into full stops. What has happened to him? Who is he?
As he draws near the iron gates, two cornucopias on them turn at a snail's pace; the gates heave open, allowing him to walk out into bright sunlight.
***
In every direction, a lavender field rolls away under a cloudless sky of vibrant blue. No trace of the forest where Man was a second ago, no sign of life anywhere. Where to now? He circles around several times; leaving it up to chance, he wanders off with no set aim.
Man parts the spikes of purple flowers extending to his chest; they close up in his wake and leave no trail. For all he knows he could be going round in circles. Yet, by default, he carries on. The aroma of the lavender rushes through his nostrils; he tips his head back, lips curling with joy, and brushes the lavender all around him with his hands.
There, on the horizon! Man catches a flash of green. He sprints on ahead. A tree forms, growing taller and larger, until Man stops to crane his head up: an oak tree, with a mane of green leaves soaring into the sky. In front of him, roots arch over to reveal a path, which runs to a door carved into the base of the tree. When he starts down the path, the door swings open, letting him into blackness.
“Turn around,” a voice calls behind Man... High above him, three hooded and faceless shapes, in white robes, sit behind judge benches.
“Come forward,” the central figure says. Man steps up to the witness stand. “How do you find the accused standing before us,” she asks Sunaj, who sits in a jury box below them.
“Guilty. Of course,” Sunaj answers from behind his mask with a long hooked nose.
The three hooded female figures lean forward: “You are henceforth sentenced to a timeless and solitary existence until deemed necessary.” They fade away.
“Wait! What am I guilty of?” Man calls out after the figures, which merge back with the shadows. He looks up at Sunaj. “What's happening? Tell me at least my name. Help me, please.”
“You've made your bed, you must lie in it.” Sunaj fades away.
“FINE! I don't need anyone's help,” Man says when a bright doorway opens up in the shadows. He paces around it. Guilty... Nonsense. What else can he do? He has no other choice. Thus he crosses onto the other side of the doorway.
***
The doorway scrolls up behind Man and disappears. “What on earth are these?” Under a cherry sky, 12-feet-high objects, some charred, some melted, dot a dry lake. Dwarfed by their size, he ambles along the giant objects and studies them. A baby cot... A broken rattle... A teddy bear... Alphabet blocks... A merry-go-round – it comes back to life, and the wooden horses rock to the jingling tune of the calliope –
The tune stirs up images from his subconscious: a woman in a white dress, lavender, a farmhouse, and wind chimes. The merry-go-round dies down, the images vanish from his mind. He journeys on, struggling to shake off the feeling that he has seen the white-dressed woman before...
Miles, miles, and yet more miles of the same dry lake, with cracks akin to the plates of a stegosaurus. When it seems that Man is making no headway at all, the ground shades into smooth white sand. Then a basilica comes into sight. Under the portico, a young girl in a yellow dress is rolling her hoop around the columns.
“Hi, I'm Aimee.” She offers her hand, a big smile on her face. What's your name?”
“Dunno,” he says, not shaking her hand. “What are you doing here, are you lost too?”
“No. I'm waiting for my mother.” She hops through the hoop and whirls it around her waist.
“A mother? What's that?”
“Not that,” Aimee tee-hees. “She. A mother.” She spins her hoop again with a graceful twist of the hips. “She loves you, protects you, don't you remem– ”
“D'you know what's inside?” He nods at the basilica, a rainbow of mosaic tiles. She shrugs. “What do you know?” he asks.
“We can ask for my mother's help when she gets here.”
“Yeah, thanks. I can help myself.”
“Here. For now, would you like to try my hoop?”
“You must be joking. You spin it. It falls. You pick it up, spin it, it falls again. And on it goes, it's pointless.”
“I don't need a reason. The fun part is to try to keep it spinning for as long as possible. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't.” Aimee looks past Man's shoulder. “My mother. I'm sorry, I have to go.” She skips off to the fuzzy shape of her mother, who stands motionless at the top of a sand dune.
“Round and round the wheel goes,” Aimee sings as she climbs the dune, “where will it stop nobody knows…” At the top of the dune, she waves good-bye. “Good luck.” She drops out of sight with her mother.
“Good luck. Silly girl.” Man kicks a column of the portico when the basilica echoes with the melody of a music box. As if under a spell, he drifts across the portico and through the large entrance of the basilica.
Inside the dark hall, the melody is rising in pitch, coming from a red door. Man moves across the draughtboard floor towards it. He opens the door – a woman's singing voice filters out from the other side: “Golden slumbers kiss your eyes, smiles awake you when you rise, sleep pretty darling, do not cry...”
“That voice again,” he says. “I've heard it befo–” A blast of air tugs him though the door; his mind tumbles down the rapids of confusion...
***
The woman's voice grows clearer, “And I will sing you a lullaby. Care is heavy therefore sleep, while I o'er you do watch keep...”
Everything comes into focus: in a nursery, a baby is watching his mother from his cot. She sings to him as she waltzes to the tune of the music box. Shaped like a merry-go-round, it stands on a wall shelf beside alphabet blocks. The mother leaps into the air, spins around, and alights with a bow.
“Ma…ma,” the baby says.
“That's right, I am your mummy.” She swoops her son in her arms. “How wonderful, your very first word.”
She cuddles him and twirls and twirls in front of the mirror, her white flared dress swishing around her ankles. The baby bubbles over with laughter.
“Ma…ma…” the baby says; he points at the mirror between the sunlit sash windows.
“This is mummy.” The mother's hazel hair hangs in tendrils. “And this is YOU.” The baby stares at his reflection, with big blue eyes. He twiddles with his mother's hair when the memory dissolves into...
A granite farmhouse, snug as a bug, at the heart of lavender fields. Wind chimes hang from the roof of the front porch and tinkle in the warm breeze.
The mother, now several years older, is holding up her child's arms as he is toddling down the driveway between the lavender fields. She lets go of his hands – he takes off at a gallop towards the winding road ahead. She catches up with him before he reaches the edge of it.
“There's nothing to see out there, sweetie.” She gathers him close. “We have everything we need right here.” In the distance, ravens wheel in the sky above a sprawling forest of pine trees –
The memory breaks up into fragments. Then Man, who all this time has been reliving the baby's memories, feels a rush of air – WHOOSH – and is sucked back into...
***
A cubbyhole. The haze around Man's mind clears away: he has relived his childhood memories.
The cubbyhole has no exit, only a glass screen looking out onto a blurry white background. Two shapes gather behind it.
“When is my son going to wake up?” a woman's voice asks. Man's eyes widen: the woman from his memories, his mother.
“Mum! I'm over here.” He bangs on the screen. No use, because she can neither hear nor see him.
“Some people wake up from a coma after a few days, or weeks,” the doctor says. “But more often, consciousness isn't regained after several years, if at all. He is fortunate. No one else survived.”
“I'm awake, mum. DO SOMETHING.”
“Rest easy. We're together again,” she says. It must be to his comatose self. “I won't give up on you...”
The glass screen morphs into a bright doorway. The revelation floors Man. How does he wake up? Can he even wake up, when so far he has been going through the motions? He shuffles through the doorway.
***
Back in terra incognita under a sky as pink as candy floss. Behind Man, the doorway rolls up like a blind and disappears.
Around him, large dinosaur skeletons lie in ash; as grey as the day when parents tell their child they are divorcing, a day when he glimpses the truth about happiness – it never lasts.
“Hello? Anybody here?” Man says. “Of course not. Why me? Couldn't it happen to someone else?” He flings a dinosaur bone as far as he can when his eyes light on a crypt, overgrown with ivy. He wends his way through the dinosaur bones. Some of them snap underfoot, crumbling into dust, which rises into the air like dead spirits. Finally, he enters the crypt and treads down the cracked steps.
As soon as he reaches the last step, a steel box, big enough for one person, rises from the ground. “A box,” he says loudly. “Lucky me.”
“Who's there?” a boy's voice calls from inside the box. “Help me, please.” Man sneaks back towards the steps of the crypt. “Don't leave me alone. I want to see my mum again.”
Strange. These last words strike a chord with Man... “What happened to you?” he finally says.
“All I remember is that one minute I'm with my mum, and the next minute I'm locked up in this box.”
“And now,” Man says, noticing a keyhole on the box, “I need to find the–”
“If you want the key to free Darius,” a voice booms out, “you must answer my riddle. Good luck...”
Above the box, golden letters are forming in italic calligraphy.
“What's happening?” Darius says.
“I see words writing themselves out.” Man reads out the words, “In the morning, I am the giver of life… In the afternoon, I am the nurturer of life... In the evening, I am the preserver of life...” He chews the riddle over.
“Of course! It's so obvious.” Darius says.
“What?”
“Not what. Who. Mother...” The letters turn to vapour and drift out of sight.
“The riddle's gone,” Man tells Darius.
“Do you see the key?”
“No – wait.” Man reaches into his pocket. A gold key. He turns it in the keyhole – CLICK – and the door sighs open. Darius breaks out, his blue eyes shining with tears.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Darius hugs Man – PSHEEE! – Light bursts out from the boy spreading out, becoming bright as when one looks straight at the sun...
***
The blinding light softens. In a high-vaulted museum gallery, young Darius and his mother are admiring exhibits of huge dinosaur skeletons.
“What happened to them, mum?” Darius's voice echoes around the bright gallery.
“Let me see... Well, one day a meteorite struck the earth, triggering off wildfires and tsunamis. The climate changed, and not long after, sadly, the dinosaurs died out.”
“You mean they went extinct.” Darius stops in front of a glass cabinet to examine dinosaur skulls.
“That's right. Very good.”
“Like you will one day.”
“Sweetie, I promise you, it won't be for a very, very, very long time.” She sweeps a strand of hair out of his face. “Look, what matters – ”
Darius runs out of the gallery, fighting back tears, while everything around him blacks out...
He wakes up in a dark cavity, short of breath. He gropes around and hits a smooth surface; it cracks like an eggshell. He jabs out a large opening. Then, slowly, he clambers out of...
A white egg. Darius winces at the sun. After a few minutes, his sight clears up. Lost in the middle of a desert.
Without warning, a shriek echoes around the dunes; Darius squints at the sandy skyline: a giant skull, cheekbones as sharp as scythes, is flying towards him. He takes off in the opposite direction, but roots rip through the sand and wrap themselves around his ankles and wrists. He wrestles with them as the skull, snakes thrashing around its empty sockets, bears down on him. It's hopeless, he can't break free. Then the skull stretches its mouth open –
“AHHHH!” Darius screams, waking up in his bed. He meets his mother's eyes.
“Nightmare?” She sits on the edge of the bed. He nods. She picks up the crystal jug and pours him a glass of water. He nurses the glass for a while, his hands trembling, and drains it.
“I don't want you to die mum.” Two rivulets run down his cheeks.
“Hush, darling, hush. It's beyond our control.” She tucks him in and snuggles the duvet up to his chin. “As I told you at the museum, that's a long way off. What matters is that right now we're together.”
“I'm never leaving you,” Darius says when the memory splinters into...
***
Darkness. Floor lights fade up, marking out a circus ring, where Man now stands. The last memory finally hits home: he is Darius.
From the roof of the big top, a spotlight flashes in his face. His eyes strain against the light to see who it is.
“Mother. Such a simple answer,” someone says from behind the light. “There's nothing like refreshing one's memory. Don't you agree, DA-RI-US?”
The spotlight pivots down to an elevated bandstand. Masked Sunaj, in a costume embroidered with black and white lozenges, is teetering along the ledge with comical emphasis.
“What do you want from me?” Darius asks.
The spotlight snaps off and on again, this time directed at the high roof. Sunaj is gliding along a high wire, keeping balance with a long pole.
“You up there – HOW DO I GET OUT OF HERE?”
Sunaj freezes on the high wire, drums rolling, and balances on one leg. With a clash of cymbals, the spotlight shines down on audience seats, where Sunaj is now tiptoeing along the top of their backs.
“Oops, nearly lost my balance there.” Sunaj begins to sing, “Round and round the wheel goes, where will it stop nobody knows...”
“Stop that,” Darius says, “I don't wanna be stuck here forever – tell me how the hell to wake up?”
Sunaj leaps off a seat – POOOF! – and vanishes in mid-air. The spotlight pans back to the circus ring. Darius jumps back. Sunaj is there, his mask frowning at him; he whips around, now his mask sneering at Darius.
“Poor thing,” Sunaj says. “You don't want to be stuck here forever, you want me to tell you how to wake up. You're nothing but a crybaby. I, I, I – it's always about you, isn't it?”
“What are you talking about? Who are you?”
“Your memory isn't that refreshed after all.” Sunaj sets off towards the red curtains at the back of the tent. “You figure it out. Good luck.” He thumbs his nose at Darius before he disappears backstage –
Darius dashes off after him. He slams through the curtains, not ending up backstage, but free falling... down a tunnel into...
***
A wooded cliff on a warm summer night. Darius, in his late teens, is lying in the grass next to a blonde girl. They are watching the stars, tiny points that fill every space of the firmament.
“Look at them,” Aurelia says, “they look so tantalizingly close. I could just –”
“Snatch them all up. Me too,” Darius says.
“Do you want to be stuck there until you die?” Aurelia asks him and rolls onto her side. “Don't you want to be part of something great, to be somebody?”
“I once made a promise to my mother. I don't know if I can do this to her. It doesn't feel right.”
Aurelia gets up, then motions far below in the valley. Darius stands over the cliff's edge: the night envelops a market town in its black mantle.
“You see that, it's dead. You can't stay there,” Aurelia says. She draws him close, her breath fanning his face. “You should see it, it's the city of our dreams. It has everything we could possibly want. And at night it just doesn't die out, it keeps on living.”
Aurelia's words weave around Darius's heart and mind in a tight bind. He feels her satin skin. They kiss. The scenery whirls round like a vortex, rearranging itself into...
The granite farmhouse, moments later. Darius is crunching down the gravel driveway towards the house. Its warm lights splash out of the open windows.
“Soon, I'll be out of here,” he says to himself. He glares at his mother waiting on the front porch. “And she will be out of my life, this stupid cow.”
“Darius, is that you?” she asks. No reply. She hangs back in the house and shuts the screen door. “Whoever you are, turn back, or I'm calling the police.” Darius looms out of the dark. “Darius,” she says, pushing the screen door open. “You've been gone for hours. You had me worried.”
“Worried. Don't be ridiculous. I can take care of myself.” He shoves past his mother. “Besides, nothing's going to happen to me in this ghost town.”
She moves to hold teenage Darius, but he pushes her away, and she lands on the porch with a crash. The memory cracks off – Darius is yanked back from his teenage self into...
***
The cubbyhole. Behind the blurry screen, the profile of a shadow is sitting down and hunching over.
“I'm to blame for what happened,” Darius's mother says, unaware of his presence. “I haven't understood you enough, not loved you enough. I'm sorry, I failed you as a mother.”
“No. I did.” Darius's voice cracks. “Mum, I never meant to hurt you.” If only he could say he's sorry and make it up to his mother.
“Do you remember Golden Slumbers? I'd sing it to you when I carried you in my womb... Golden slumbers kiss your eyes, smiles awake you when you rise, sleep pretty darling, do not cry...”
Darius huddles up against the wall, pressing his knees to his chest, and hums along with his mother. Her voice echoes to nothing. When he lifts his head, a red door has replaced the room. All around, black and white stones pattern the floor like tartan.
“No more memories, please. They're too ugly.” Then, as if on cue, the door opens up; Darius sees himself, a young man as now, inside a phone box. “No. I'm not walking through that door – yes, you. In fact, I'm closing you right now... Ah, you refuse to budge. It's not up to me then.”
With a sigh, he drags his feet through the open door...
***
“I can't wait to see you, Darius,” Aurelia says at the other end of the line. “The city is even more fantastic than we imagined all those years ago. Do you remember on the cliff?”
A school bell rings outside. Across the road, children bundle out of the school entrance. They run towards their mothers, brown leaves scrunching underfoot, and jump into their arms. Darius watches the mothers and children hug in this fleeting moment of happiness.
“Hello? Are you still there?” Aurelia asks.
“Something tells me that I'm being too hasty,” Darius replies as he catches his reflection in the window of the phone box, “that I'm making a mistake.”
“Listen, you won't get a second chance. Trust me, once you're over there, you'll have a brighter future. Or you can stay with your mother and end up a nobody like her.”
The memory swirls like a whirlpool, stretching Darius's reply like a rubber band to infinity, “Youuuuu – arrrrre – righhhhh...” And changes into...
The kitchen of the granite farmhouse. Darius is shoving a mouthful of fried eggs into his mouth. He hears his mother fumble with cutlery. A knife clatters onto the floor. He shoots her a black look.
“I'm sorry,” she says. “Can – can I say something to you?”
“What?”
“Are you sure you're making the right decision?”
“My travel arrangements are already made.”
“There is nothing out there. I know from experience. Why don't you trust me?”
On his feet, Darius hurls his plate of fried eggs at the window – the plate shatters. The egg yolk dribbles down the glass.
“I'll succeed where you failed,” Darius says and storms out of the house. “Soon, soon,” he says to himself, “and then good riddance.”
The wind is rippling the faded lavender in the red glow of the sunset. All at once, the scenery fractures into pieces, and Darius is whisked out of the memory...
***
Back in the present time. Wisps of clouds slither across the flamingo sky. The farmhouse lies in ruins amid the lavender flowers stinking like rotten eggs; Darius wretches up. The wind chimes rust away among the rubble, where the front door stands like a gravestone. He slaps his face. Again. And again. Bruises redden his face.
“Poor thing. Feeling sorry for your mum, do you?”
“You.” Darius says to Aurelia, who leans against the jamb of the open door. “You turned me against my mother.”
“That's not how I remember it. I make you an offer, and you accept it. You turned against your own mother.” Aurelia slinks back into the rubble. “Come and get me.” She cracks the door shut.
She must pay. Already Darius is racing to the door, throwing it open, charging into –
A maze of mirrors. Ahead of him, Aurelia is running down an alley. She flashes off around a corner; in pursuit, he rounds the same corner, cuts into a corridor. Empty.
“Round and round the wheel goes,” Aurelia belts out, “where will it stop nobody knows.” She cackles like a hyena. “What's the matter, am I too fast for you?”
Darius arrows down more alleys of mirror glass (some dead ends), until he screeches to a halt. Aurelia, at the other end, arms wide open. He makes a beeline for her – BANG – and slams against a mirror: Aurelia's smirking reflection vanishes. He doubles back. More mirrors now cut off the way. Trapped. The encircling mirrors rattle loudly; they slide apart to reveal the centre of the maze, where Aurelia awaits.
“You put thoughts into my head,” Darius says, closing the gap between them in the black void. “You are a monster.” He chokes her.
“You – you – you are the mon – monster.” She gestures at the ring of mirrors around them.
Darius sees the image of someone who is the result of a genetic experiment gone wrong. (Face pulled inwards, arms shrivelled up, chest oozing pus.) He smashes the mirrors with his fists, glass spraying around him, until he slumps onto the ground.
“I don't deserve you, mum,” Darius says.
“There, there.” Aurelia cups his face in her hands. “We're together at last. Forget your mother, she's ancient history.”
This is the final straw for Darius. He picks up a shard of glass and drives it into Aurelia's eyes. As he gouges them out, she neither screams nor sheds a single drop of blood. After hitting the ground, her body fizzes away, as it would if soaked in acid.
***
CLAP, CLAP! “Well done,” Sunaj says, a porcelain mask covering his face.
“She's right, you know. I'm a monster.”
“Everyone makes mistakes. But you've fixed it. You can trust in me.” Sunaj whips off his mask: the spitting image of Darius.
“I should've listened to you and mum when I had the chance. Tell me what to do now.”
Thunder rumbles; suddenly, they find themselves in front of a stone portal marking the entrance to a black pyramid. Marbled with white, it thrusts into dusky clouds.
“Inside this pyramid,” Sunaj begins, “you'll find the last memory you formed, before you became unconscious. He steps aside, motioning Darius through the portal. “You're not as bad a son as you think...”
The pyramid spurts electricity into the air, the clouds flash, and Darius sinks into the heart of the pyramid.
In the dark, he draws a breath. SNAP! Before him, lights switch on along a glass bridge that juts over an abyss. At the end of the bridge, a row of red doors hangs in mid-air. The doors whir and begin to move leftwards. Soon they stream past in an endless loop of red blur, until a blue door appears, jerking to a halt. It floats down to slot into the bridge's end, whereby the lights strobe.
Darius pads across the bridge towards the blue door, eyes screened against the harshness of the strobing. As soon as he grabs the doorknob, the strobing lights die out. In the dark again, he opens the door: an aircraft cabin. He crosses over...
***
The aircraft is flying in high altitude. Darius unfastens his seatbelt and looks out of his window. A fireball dominates the sky above the clouds as white as fresh snow. The sun glitters in his dilated pupils; he recalls what Aurelia said to him that summer night on the cliff: ‘A brighter future awaits you.’
He pulls sunglasses out of his jacket when a hand tugs at the right sleeve. In the seat next to him, a yellow-dressed girl is gesturing at a moth-eaten picture on the floor. He leans forwards to unfold it: he, young, and his mother, cheek-to-cheek. For a second he feels a twitch of love – he crams the picture back into his breast pocket, thereby suppressing the twitch.
“Aimee, leave the gentleman alone,” he hears her mother say. The girl is holding out an open packet of gummy bears to him. He forces a smile and shakes his head. Soon, he falls asleep...
BAM! The noise wakes Darius.
“Please everyone remain calm,” the captain says over the intercom, “I have to make an emergency land–”
BOOM! The left engine blows. Through his window, Darius sees a fire spreading across the wing of the aircraft. It nosedives, throwing him back against his seat. The overhead lights blow out, casting the entire cabin into darkness, and hysteria spreads among the passengers.
“BRACE FOR IMPACT, BRACE FOR IMPACT, BRACE FOR IMPACT,” the flight attendants say.
“What a fool,” Darius says. The seatbelt sign above him flashes red. “I should've never listened to her.” Lowering himself into a brace position, he clasps the picture to his heart. “I'm sorry, mum... I love you...”
The memory shatters – a draught of air pulls Darius away, a distant crash ringing in his ears...
He re-emerges in front of a white door, at the edge of a lake encased in solid ice. The naked trees are frozen in mid-stride (they were too slow to escape the claws of winter). Sunaj crops up from behind the door.
“I can't forgive myself for what I did to mum,” Darius says. “I deserve to die.”
At these words, the clouds churn in the purple sky, now looking like a blackcurrant ripple; out of nowhere, a black tsunami is roaring towards them.
“He's crashing,” voices ring out in the sky, “charge to 300 – charged – clear...”
“This isn't about you,” Sunaj says. “Mum only wishes to see her son again.” Black waves as high as Big Ben are threatening to swallow them. “A new beginning lies behind that door. Decide now.”
Darius takes heart from this and twists the doorknob. “It's locked.”
“Together.” Sunaj lays his hand on Darius' shoulder. Darius nods, his jaw clenched tight. They ram into the door, it flies open, and a backdraught sucks Darius through...
He is coming to on his hospital bed. Blinded by the light, he makes out the outline of his mother. “Nurse – my son. He's waking up.” The mother and her son reunited, their hands fuse together into an unbreakable bond.
— ZARA THUSTRA
Zara Thustra is an English teacher who lives in Cornwall, England. He is happily married and has two beautiful daughters, Amber and Natalia. After much encouragement from his wife Philippa, he crossed the Rubicon in Summer ’24 and finally put pen to paper. He hopes to fulfill his childhood dream of having one day a collection of his short stories published. His favorite book is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.