Here is my contribution to the A to Z Challenge of April 2019.
This is the first time I am participating in this challenge, so we'll see if I have the stamina to complete the whole month !
I am also, very ambitiously, writing for the April NaNoWrite ! So the challenge is twofold !!
Hang on to your horse and enjoy the ride. And good luck to all my fellow participants.
My contribution today is F for Fantasy. An anticipation story written in 2011for Mslexia. Theme 2021.
Mathilda
“Stop
fidgeting and listen !”
The
old old man glared at the youngest of the dark round heads gathered
around his wicker chair. Beneath the stern look that darted from his
eye, shimmered a benevolent gleam. He had seen it all, he had
survived 2097, yes he had. On the top of the mountain, a young, young
man in sandalled feet and draped shoulders, he had been an engineer
on the Huma-Terra project.
He
had seen the crevasses split the earth's crust, zigzagging on the
screen: Tokyo, Paris, Shanghai, LA, Calcutta. Through the smoked bay
window he had seen the giant wave crash at the foot of Kilimanjaro.
“The
animals had fled days ago, you see. The cheetahs, leopards and lions
had escaped towards Mount Kenya. The elephants had filed up
Kilimanjaro. The flamingos had taken off in a cloud of flapping pink
and pedalling stick legs, no-one knows where to.”
Peter
raised his forehead to the sky and squinting at the sun, tried to
imagine a vessel-shaped storm cloud pulsating with the curious birds
he
had only seen on the archive pad.
“
Once the waters had finally receded, a colony of fuchsia flamingos
was spotted on Table Mountain ! ” the ancient man gazed over the
hair of his audience, his mind wandering. “ That was in 2120, but
I'm getting ahead of myself. ”
A
few of the boys shifted on their silk cushions. One of the girls,
Mathilda, pulled at her pigtail and sucked on her teeth : “ suurrp
”.
2
“
I met May, your great-great-grandma in Megêve in November,
plus-thirteen. The Kilimanjaro survivors flew to the Alps in the Huma
1, the first solar-powered air glider. The Mediterranean then
stretched from Mount Kenya right up to the foothills of Mont Blanc.
”
“
Was she pretty ? ” Mathilda asked, surprising herself with her own
boldness.
“
Like a prairie in the wind, golden locks on speckled wheat skin...She
was as light and fresh as I am dark and oily like slick fuel. ”
“
What is fuel ? ” interrupted Peter, perplexed. “ I haven't seen
that word in the archive. ”
“
Ah! That's because we wanted to forget about it. The Devil's
substance, the curse....More about that another time, ” the ancient
survivor snapped impatiently. His eyebrows notched up and stuck
V-shaped, his lips tightened, a lead bar.
“
May was part of the Mont Blanc project. She had witnessed a river of
cows gushing past boulders and screeching crows beating around the
peaks. She told me of a blazing horizon in the far distance to the
west where the volcanoes of the Central Plateau were erupting. We
travelled there a few years later, together, and trod on a sea of
caked lava, cars melted to metal plates frozen in the mud. There were
no survivors. We will probably find the inhabitants of these buried
towns and villages a thousand years from now, standing petrified,
eerie statues, in their homes like in Pompeii. ”
Cows,
volcanoes, lava, cars, Pompeii. A lot of words of which Peter could
not grasp the meaning. He opened his mouth to ask but then shut it
again. A vibrant gong had sounded above the wooded porches. Then a
tune tinkling from a triangle. They say a large clock-tower in
England used to chime the same melody everyday at twelve o'clock
noon.
3
“
That's enough for today. Time for potato pulling. Up, up, Samantha
will be waiting for you... ”
The
wise African settled back down into his wicker chair and laid his
neck on the headrest, a firm canvas pillow embroidered with a
large-tusked elephant pulling a wooden plough.
Peter,
Mathilda, Sarah and the rest of the twenty boys and girls skipped
down the porch steps and ran along the dirt path to the potato field.
Their arms brushed against umbrella-like green-brown banana leaves;
the stem of fruit, a black eye seemed to record their progress.
Peter
ran ahead, jumping from side to side over the potholes in the path,
slithering on damp grass like the snow-boarder he had seen on the
pad, down the slopes. The other children attempted unsuccessfully to
keep up. They were nowhere close to having Peter's agility and
stamina. Mathilda brought up the rear, idly skipping along, dreaming
of May and imagining her own wedding in an ivory dress with frills
round the shoulders. She had seen a picture of a princess who had
lived over a hundred years before the cataclysm and who died in a
tragic accident. A sad, sad story which brought wells of tears to her
eyes every time she saw the pictures on the pad.
“
There you are Mathilda, I had almost given up on you!Lost in your
dreams again,” Samantha wagged a finger and then pointed to the
last row of dark earth.
“
Sorry ” Mathilda whispered as she took up her spade and bucket.
The
air filled with a tune of scrapings and thudding as each child dug
the earth and dropped the potatoes into their buckets. As the rhythm
intensified, there rose a melody, a deep-throated song that stretched
back through the wakes of time.
4
Another
day, sun beating my brow.
We
dig, we delve, bend and bask't
Oh
! The earth is hard but my life is sweet.
Tonight
we'll gather round the fire.
We
stand upright on our two feet.
Hewella,
wangole, wangole.
Hewella,
bandome, bandome.
Peter
was already seated at the long wooden table in the shade of the vine
trestles, nails clean and face eager, when Mathilda having at last
finished her row stepped onto the large porch. Samantha bustled the
children together and one by one they filed along the table to their
chairs.
“
Boiled carrots and beans with sautéed grasshoppers today, ”
announced Peter, who could always be relied upon to keep up with the
week's menu.
Once
everyone had their helping, the children awaited Samantha's signal.
“
We give thanks to Mother Earth for providing. Tuck in. ”
Sarah
chatted to Mathilda between mouthfuls.
“
What are you doing this afternoon ? I'm going fishing with Auntie
Grace. The river is swollen with fish. Pike, minnow and trout. Then
we'll smoke and salt them. The minnows we'll pickle. It might rain
round four o'clock and Auntie Grace promised us a rainbow, a full arc
over the hills. ”
Mathilda
munched the insect legs, then swallowed.
“
I found an e-book Emma,
by a woman called Jane Austen, written ages ago. I think I'll sit
under the gum tree and read it. ”
5
“
You're so lazy Mathilda. There's work to be done. You know, 'for the
communal good' ” she added, ironically quoting the words with her
fingertips as she'd seen Samantha doing.
Mathilda
looked at Sarah's face with sad puppy eyes and sighed. After their
bananas for dessert, the boys and girls lined up to stack their
plates on the wooden counter. The five girls and boys who had
dishwashing duty slipped behind it. Mathilda quickly slunk towards
the library to borrow an e-pad, vibrating, shivering in anticipation
at her stolen afternoon on the hillside devouring Emma.
At 5 o'clock ironing duty was on her schedule : sheets ! No way of
sneaking out of that one. She could be sure that Amy would hound her
down by a quarter to.
The
path up the slope was steep. Moist blades of grass caught in her
sandals cooling her toes. Wild flowers, lady's smock and meadow sweet
tickled the back of her shins. Snug under the gum tree, Mathilda
closed her eyes to the wind in her face and thought about the words
she had just read : ' the cold, however was severe; and by the time
the second carriage was in motion, a few flakes of snow were finding
their way down, and the sky had the appearance of being so
overcharged as to want only a milder air to produce a very white
world in a very short time.' Mathilda
had read about snow and seen pictures of blanketed landscapes but
couldn't grasp the panorama evoked by Jane Austen's words. She tried
to imagine England and winter in December. Here in Eastern Africa
snow rarely fell. Sometimes you woke up to a white-topped Kilimanjaro
but only great-great grandfather Joseph had stood in a crisp January
morning and caught snowflakes on his tongue among the wooded fields
of Europe. In the book, Emma and her father Mr Woodhouse would have
6
thought
nothing of falling flakes among the meadows. The wonder and delights
of winter magic were not foreign to them; a lost world that Mathilda
could only dream of. She would never see England. There was nothing
left : a few dried-up, weather-beaten peaks, barren lakes in the
North and unwholesome marshes in the South. They say the ruins of the
once big city of London lay under twenty feet of salt water; St
Paul's dome, a cracked green globe, sometimes reverberating a glint
of weak sunlight. Mathilda, however, wished to be able to sit on a
window bench in one of Jane Austen's cottages and watch spring
blossoms float feather like to the ground. Or to curl up on a woven
rug by the hearth of a stately home with colonnades and listen to the
conversation of her own two parents discussing matchmaking between
respectable men and women of the county or the success of the latest
ball at the Manor House. Mathilda sighed.
All
of a sudden a pitter-patter could be heard on the leaves of the gum
tree and a wonderful clear rainbow arched over the hills below
Mathilda. She plunged once more into Emma's intrigues. Life did seem
complicated in 1800. Four hundred years, however, hadn't changed
human nature much. Mathilda knew whom she must avoid and whom she
could trust. Sarah was always amiable but was she really a friend ?
She often reproached Mathilda her whims. How would Sarah react if
they were ever in a tight spot ? Peter could be counted on to provide
you with information and would be practical and clear-headed in the
face of danger. Mathilda liked Amy, the chore coordinator. She was
strict but fair and never beat about the bush when things needed to
be done. At the same time Amy was full of stories about her
grandmother and the way she went about domestic tasks. A leader in
the colony, who had established the round of duties, she had kept
alive the songs and nursery rhymes to which rhythm the tedious
work had pulsated.
7
Hickory
dickory dock
The
mouse ran up the clock
The
clock struck one
The
mouse ran down
Hickory
dickory dock
Amy
said the clock was a tall wooden box called a grandfather clock with
a moon face and metal hands travelling round numbers : twelve at the
top and six at the bottom. Peter had made a drawing and shown the
other children while they were at their studies : playing a game of
calculus with pencil and paper; counting beads on an Asian wooden
contraption. Mathilda sometimes felt the world that was no more must
have been decidedly strange. Even Jane Austen would have been out of
her depth.
A
soft tread on the path behind a boulder woke Mathilda from her
speculations. She whipped her head round in time to see Amy's dark
closely knitted braids appear through the gum tree's leaves.
“
There you are ! Four forty-five, sheet time, ” she declared.
Mathilda
smiled, folded her pad and sprang up. She squinted into the infinite
sky and breathed in the immense landscape below, the yellow plains of
Masaï Mara glowing in the setting sun. Her soul lifted from her
melancholy. She followed Amy down through the shivering tall grass
and they picked up an old tune :
He
has the whole world in his hands
He
has the whole world in his hands
He
has the whole world in his hands
He
has the whole world in his hands
