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The woman entered the room like light creeping into a warm November morning; silent, smooth and of natural tranquillity. She moved towards the front of the class like smoke through an open window, her dress swishing as her bare feet skipped along the cool tiles. The children followed her every step; their eyes lightening as their smiles widened.
The woman pulled a piece of chalk from her table and drew a large white heart on the board. Immediately the children rose from behind their desks, holding a small mirror to their eyes and in the weight of their own reflection, they sang in honesty; The Collective creed:
I am to eye,
As the heart is to lie,
But to many, I am one part of all.
Love always here,
Make no business with fear,
And never again shall we fall.
The Children moved from their tables and gathered around the woman who was seated on a large cushion on the floor. They formed a circle around her, some lying on their backs staring up at a grand orange sun painted on the ceiling, some leaning against the wall with their arms either folded or on their laps and others sat cross legged and perched upright, leaning forward just slightly; fixated on the woman´s empyreal grace as she moistened her lips delicately and hollowed her breath in preparation to tell a story.
She looked up from the book she was holding, breathed heavily and swallowed the children´s pent anticipation as her eyes widened, magnetising the room. When she smiled, The Children could hold back their joy no more. They threw their arms in the air and beat their palms together in a deafening thunder.
“Fonafon, Fonafon, Fonafon” they screamed and chanted.
“OK children,” she said in a calming tone.
“We don´t want to disturb The Fathers next door. Everyone put on their listening mouths and their seeing ears, and set your soul at ease” she said.
The Children all ritually wriggled their entire bodies as to exercise their untempered souls, shaking them free of their rigid corporal bindings to move like water from an open stream to the ocean of their waiting minds where their consciousness lit up like solar flares; exploding in bursts of colour, waves, spectrums, atoms, particles and frequencies.
The zeros and ones that spoke to them every moment of their lives, those plain white everything numbers etched on that black nothing canvass vanished down the drain of imagination and in their place, rainbows, mushroom clouds, super novae and in finale, the formation of an orange crest, the warm sunrise which accompanied their dreams.
Calm washed over the children as they sank away from their bodies and into the viewing theatre of their mind´s eye, submitting to the will of their sub conscious. When corporal stillness commanded pensive silence, The Woman opened the book, lifted her eyebrows in wonder, widened her eyes, outstretched her index finger, gently licked her fingertip, pressed down on the course paper and slid it across to the first page.
The sound of the paper turning under her fingertips made the children smile. Their ears pricked and twitched in an effort to cling to the familiarity that passed under a momentary breath, emptying their cerebral stage of its props and actors, erasing the stencilled lines and colours they thought of in anticipation of this moment, clearing the table so to speak, in preparation for the main course.
“Jonathon and The Collector,” she said
Once upon a time, there lived a boy named Jonathon who loved nothing more than playing in the wild forests of his imagination.
He had a mother and father who loved him so dearly and friends of plenty of whom he danced with so freely.
But one day whilst playing by himself in the snow, dear Jonathon met a man he quite surely didn´t know. The man said to him: “My boy, have you the time, for if you have none you can make haste with mine.”
Jonathon thought what a strange thing to say, for why would a man count existence away? “A second, a day or a week or a year, are treasures to keep, my boy, nothing to fear.” Jonathon knew that his musings were wrong, that time only is, in each note of a song. And just as a note may be grandiose and vast, a song that´s been sung cannot sing in the past.
“My boy you´re so clever, then care you a treat? I have in this bag a prize for your feat.” Jonathon smiled and ran to his side and tugged at the bag to peer deep inside. “My child if you will reach as far as you can, a surprise for you waits at the stretch of your hand. Wiggle your fingers and tip on your toes, the deserve you desire is beyond your nose.” Jonathon did as the strange man had said, he stood on his toes and he buried his head. When balance was lost there then came a mute cry from a brown hesham bag with a young boy inside.
How did I fail? Stranger please tell me why.
“You won me with logic, but I fooled you with pride.”
The Collector moved on and he vanished from sight; into the darkness, away from the light. And inside his bag a collectable toy, with movable parts, a collectable boy.
Fear then sprang upon The Children, plucking at their nerve endings as The Woman calmly closed the book over and laid it neatly on the floor beside her.
“Keep your eyes closed,” she said as she moved over to open the large curtains which had been negating the light.
The dull morning light flooded the room and with a click of her fingers, The Children reacted by opening their eyes in the direction of the board at the front of the classroom. The Woman was standing with large boards in her clutch and on each board a horrific image and under each image, a word or phrase.
The first image was of a tall man in a dark coat or cloak. The material was torn in many places and it disguised the man´s form completely, transforming him into an aboding tower of darkness. The face too was blackened out by a hood that covered his head and its empty centre acted as a worm hole to nothingness; a vacuum directed into a void that locked onto one´s eyes and from them, extracted one´s soul in a whirlwind of emotional and self-dissipation. Inside the black centre, one could see the faintest flickering of light.
Should one look longingly and with sustenance, they would see that the flicker was, in fact, the light in their own eye, for in the heart of vacuity; in that black core of despair and desire, were two tiny mirrors; blackened out, but with the most miniscule of scratches on the paintwork inviting wandering eyes and wondering souls to their peril.
A Rising Fall Page 3