WATERBABY

[excerpt]

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When she was a very little girl, a playmate on Galathea’s street rode the same tricycle. He was quiet, so quiet that she wondered if he ever spoke at all.

One day, when they had ridden to the swings at the top of their cul de sac, Galathea asked him a question, and she made him speak!

 

She said: “Please tell me your name?” And he did, he yelled it into the afternoon sun – “ANTARES!” and Galathea bubbled with joy upon learning the name of her mate, and this should be the end of the story.

 

The next day, at their usual meeting place, he was not waiting for her as he normally did. The little girl went inside, and did crayons, as was her custom when the boy was busy. These were, by no means, a perfect substitute.

 

On the second day it rained. They were not allowed out to play when it rained. Crayons, again.

 

The third day arrived and still the boy was not there. Astride her tricycle, Galathea goes to investigate.

 

There was no-one home and peering through the window she could see that that the house seemed completely empty. The front door was locked, so Galathea tried the gate to the side passageway. It swung open. There was nothing in the garden, nothing at all, save for one purple tricycle, front wheel still spinning. 

 

Antares inhales, bracing for an impact that never arrives.

 

Instead, he experiences a most curious sensation, a quiet and cold creeping of fingers and palms moving up and down his spine. He finds that his body is being slowly dismembered, disarticulated, made non-coherent by hands and eyes and mouths who all claim that they are helping. They pass his form through an endless fractal of twisted mirrors.

 

Antares is scattered into the aether, forgoing connection with the body that once belonged to him, grasping at the latent strings of his little life with hands that no longer exist. He strains to hold onto memories that slip further and further away the harder he tries to clutch at them, and the whole time he must believe them, must believe these faceless foes when they say that they are helping, for Antares is only a child, and children are built from faith.

 

When does it end? He asks, for the process is painful.

 

Nobody answers. The dismantling continues, and now Antares cannot breathe, for the Faceless have stolen his lungs.

 

In a state of panic, the dismantled Antares makes a twist like a fish, and he falls from the clutches of the Faceless and through a watery blankness, bouncing and refracting off of one final mirror before his photonic path of perpetual locomotion finally comes to rest. He has managed to pull with him one single vestige from the life he’ll never get to live.

 

My tricycle, Antares considers. Looking down, he finds his purple tricycle within the nothingness.

 

It is the only thing that appears to exist, apart from himself. Except it would not be fair to call it a tricycle, for Antares does not have a body and he cannot hold the handlebars. He has, a mind, perhaps? No, more closely a conscience, he has a conscience within this dark and pressing nothingness, this utter and complete oblivion, and within that conscience inside of the oblivion there appears the idea of a tricycle, a message from another world, an imprint of something that should not be able to exist.

 

The presence of his tricycle pulls forth another vestige; the second memory falls shiny like a gem into what could be considered his lap.

 

Galathea, he thinks, and this time he finds that he vibrates a little.

 

Galathea! and it happens again. From across the other side of this wise unknown universe, a single atom of carbon responds:

“ . __ __ . __ . __ . … !” The message is warbled, but Antares hears it all the same.

 

Galathea, he almost whispers, and he vibrates again, and this time he finds that he moves a little towards her, this mute mate he recognises as keenly as the abstract thought of water, grandmothers, or snakes.

 

Armed with the only notion that makes sense to him, the atomic Antares begins his long, slow journey across the indeterminate universe, in spite of and in search of the girl across the road who rides on the exact same tricycle, the girl who he has known, and lost, and loves.