Labrinth

 


I dreamed a long dream, so real. I dreamed I was somewhere else for decades and decades. Thrown around time like a fleck of foam in the surf.

*

The teacher looks at the small children, and smiles, “Who can tell me what today is?”

As one, their hands go into the air. She chooses the youngest, “Robert?”

The boy stands, and says, “It is the end of days.”

She says, “Thanks, Robert, you can sit down. Today is the day we remember the end of days. So we have come out here to the rock shelf to look at the sky and remember.”

She points to the sky, and they look up past the skydome, to the stars and the Earth hanging there above them.

She smiles again, “Today we tell the story of our lost home. When we remember our parents and give thanks to the station guardians."

*

Labrinth holds David. She misses the real wind and the real rain. The ones from the sky. She misses thunder and lightning. And she remembers those other days: the days of color and danger in the final days of Hanoi, the days of burning heat of the salt lakes in the central deserts, the days when she ran in the sand and surf. But, she had made a choice, her love is in the stars.

She drifted back to that night at the boathouse when the wind blew away the past.

She told herself, “For so long as someone still remembers, it will not die.”

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