3.
 Feeding time was over. The nurse took the tray away and folded Cara's scarred, twisted little hands together over her sunken chest. At times it seemed she was not a person at all, just a bunch of bundled sheets. She had to be wrapped up all the time to prevent loss of body heat. Her heart beating under the covers and her fingers touching each other above the covers almost seemed to belong to two different little girls. The nurse's voice drifted through the darkening room in a whispered good night. Then the lights dimmed out to nothing. Then the dreams came. Then Cara was flying, flying, sailing, driving, diving, running, skimming, fluttering, wheeeee……alighting (1883) on a sunny green meadow outside London; there had been a promenade and now she sat in her starched white dress, surrounded by affectionate and competing young gentlemen…
…the warm sun and the good feeling gave way to (1944) a howling of air raid alarms, the insistent howl of heavy sirens in the blacked out streets of Berlin, and all the fear, the distant and growing drone of hundreds of death bringing bombers…
…then (1473) she was old but she still loved her jug of pungent maize beer while the young warriors danced their happy dance; almost time again for the maiden-chasing; a time she relished every spring, cackling merrily with watery drunken black eyes and toothless gums but…
…there was (345) it! There was the cavalry column, surrounded by clouds of slowly seething dust. She could see glinting helmets and shields far off in the distance, and she and the other young girls of Rome started to run down between the eerie gardens and tombs of the Appian Way toward their young husbands returning from the campaigns in the East…
…Even as her handsome young lieutenant leaned out of his saddle to lift her, smiling, she let herself be yanked away to other times and places. She was beginning to know them all, they repeated themselves. Now she was (here) now she was (there) she went to many times and places, knew many lovers, had and lost children, gained children, had friends, spoke many languages, took part in events that changed human history…
…she was (2105) on a sunny Sunday afternoon ascending the immense gravityless tubes, vertical highways ten miles tall, stretching from deep within the earth to just below space itself.
She was ascending, flying like bird, giggling, teasing other sedate and unknowing travelers who rose or fell slowly on windy mile-wide flyways of the great city…
Up and up she went, into the most luxurious parts of the city, into the plush apartments and gardens and offices of the city's star scrapers…
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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