Eight Ball

Marta ventures tentatively out into the oppressive darkness of the permanent deep grey of a deathly night. She is swaddled in layers of clothing over which she has wrapped and tied strips of blanket. Despite these precautions, she shivers with the cold, leans into it and hugs herself for comfort against the ever present elemental force of the unnatural Winter. 

She does not move far from her sanctuary. There is no point, and she cannot afford to waste anything, including her energy. She pauses as though considering her next action, then she unfurls, turns her head upwards and points her eyes to towards the skies. 

Her eyes are the only visible part of her. They are watering as the cold assails them. Watering with superficial tears as she once again looks up towards the heavens and sees nothing but a grey hell.

There is something pathetic and overwhelmingly sad about the way she returns to her bent and cowed state. For a moment, she dared to look towards the face of God and having not discovered his countenance, she rolls back into her foetal position and shuffles away. Her loneliness is painful to observe. That she is alone is an absolute certainty made all the more clear by this daily ritual of hers. No one else ever emerges from the hole in the ground. It has become her hole in the ground. There is only her and the desolation that sits upon her. A ghostly monkey of depression suffocating the life out of her.

Soon enough, expedition over, Marta is swallowed up by that hole in the ground and a metal disc closes over the spot. There is a laboured, metallic scream as Marta secures the entrance, then she climbs deeper into the Earth, an acorn awaiting its cue to grow. A cue that never came for those who went before her. Yet still she repeats the daily ritual. A ritual that appeases her own inner acorn of hope. A ritual that is accompanied by a short and increasingly desperate prayer; one day it will happen.  

Marta doesn’t know what it is. She was told often enough, and she remembers the words well, but they are words banished from her lands of meaning, hollow vessels gone mad over time. All Marta can rely upon is the evidence of her own eyes. She has to make the assumption that she will know it when she sees it. After that maybe she can try to make sense of a change she has longed for, for a lifetime, but has no way of preparing for. If she is afforded the time for a luxury such as that. She doubts it. Somehow she knows that there will be no formal introductions. The new visitor to this grim world may not even be her friend. 

And yet she continues to yearn for change.

Her father knew. Her father was there in the Before Time. But now he is in the ground near the closed metal hatch and his acorn will never grow, not in the way that nature intended it to. Now he is one of many mounds of earth that have gently sunk over time. A gradual recession that has stolen Marta’s memories of him and the others who once were. Now, the grounds of the dead are barely perceptible, and in the dull grey light of Marta’s world, everything else that once was is being swallowed by that apathetic and colourless maw. This is a world that became bored of life. It has no energy or enthusiasm. The chaos and vibrancy of the living appalled it, and so it became stagnant. Motionless and toxic. This cold world can’t even bring itself to freeze what remains of the living. Instead it relies upon it’s listlessness and the abandonment of its former duties. It no longer cares and it expects the few who remain to die of neglect and abandonment. A sordid waiting game that it always expected to win. The numbers of time were always on its side.

Marta ignores the nihilistic world and holds onto what she has. She knows no other way, but she has no word for determination, she cannot say that she is stubborn. She feels it though and often she grits her teeth, looks up at the callous metal eye of the hatch and dares to believe that one day there will be a change and that that change will redefine her life and make everything she has endured worthwhile. 

All of this has to mean something. That is the nature of her belief, and the nature of her waiting is to discover that meaning at last.

She doesn’t know what awaits her, but what she does know is that she needs to fight. To fight and to keep fighting. It doesn’t matter what she has to fight. Something. Anything. She yearns for an obvious target for her conflict. Everything up until the moment she is presented with a focal point for her existence has been waiting. A tortured and protracted wait for an event or a moment that may never come. She understands that she may wait her entire life only for nothing to happen, and she wonders whether she’ll know when her time is up. She’s even entertained the macabre fantasy of crawling into the earth beside her slumbering father to put an end to her endless waiting. 

In dreams, she has seen her father still fully formed as he lays asleep in the earth. He is peaceful in a way that he never was in this harsh existence. He is content in a knowledge that she does not possess. This frustrates her and she wants to wake him up. She shakes him and screams in his face, and that is when he smiles serenely. She always wakes up when he smiles. She wakes up and she is as angry as she has ever been. Angry and spoiling for a fight that may never come.

She envies her father that smile. 

She envies the peace that he has found at last.

Unwrapping herself carefully, Marta partially emerges from her mummification. Down in her sanctuary it is still cold, but not so bitterly cold as on the surface of the earth. Once she is more comfortable and can move more freely, she sits on a rickety chair in front of a battered apparatus that has seen better, far off days. Marta also envies that. She knows that this apparatus was conceived and made in the Before Time, and she has marvelled at the impossible stories she was told of those times. But despite the magic of this machine, she does not believe most of what she was told. It isn’t the far-fetched nature of a world of abundance and much more. A land of plenty that went mad with excess. A world that became drunk on far-too-much. No, Marta cannot bring herself to begin to believe that those times were real, because then it begs a dire question and that question pains her soul to such a degree that she cannot bring herself to articulate the question that is a nonsensical equation of too much somehow equalling nothing. That makes no sense. It’s not fair. And it hurts. It hurts in every conceivable way, but the worst of it is the liquid sadness that threatens to breach the last of her defences, flood and drown her, the weight of her own crushing loneliness, dragging her down into the depths.

She opens the front of the apparatus and delicately retrieves a rectangle of plastic. She examines it briefly and then places it in its container. Next to that single container are two stacks of similar containers. She knows them all very well, has a pencil to hand in case she needs to repair any of the objects contained therein. Watching her consider the stacks is a rare delight. Her forehead crumples in concentration and her finger slips along the containers. She prefers the ones with the handwritten labels. Those are the ones that her father made. She pulls one from the midst of the second stack. Opens the container. Examines the contents and then places the rectangle in the apparatus, pushes the door shut and presses the button with the single triangle on it.

The small underground space is instantly transformed by the sound of music, as is the little girl who has lived long enough to be an adult but has never been cajoled or conditioned into such a pointless state. She stands up and with every beat of the music she becomes more animated. Her small and fragile heart beats harder and more quickly to sync with the music and she throws herself into the sounds without a care in the world. She is transported elsewhere and there is magic in the air. She is grinning wildly and flinging her arms around her as she jumps and kicks. Not a sound does she make, nothing and no one should disturb her enjoyment of the music, not even her. She has never sung along to any of the tracks. She saves that for later. The cassette is half way through when it begins to slur its musical words. Marta hears it in the instant it begins and a switch flicks within her. Her movements cease and she is all business as she leans over the apparatus, stopping the music, pulling the tape out from the now open door and checking it over. She is relieved to establish that the tape is intact. She replaces it and turns the apparatus around, then she lays it flat. She pauses and considers for a moment. She will leave it like that for now, and the next time she plays music she will begin by rubbing warmth and life into the batteries. She has no more batteries. These are the last and it pains her to witness the beginning of their end. They will die soon enough and with them the music will die. A world without music is no world at all, Marta thinks sadly. The first shards of grief are already pushing against her heart. She bites her lower lip and turns from the stricken music apparatus, wondering how long she can hold the ghost of the music in her mind. 

Nothing lasts forever.

Not even the seemingly eternal grey outside the safety of this hole in the ground would last forever. Her father had told her that, and she believed him. She had to believe him. It was all that she had.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out the black ball. Upon its surface it had a white circle and within the white circle was a symbol which her father had told her represented eternity. He’d given it to her before he’d moved on. It was a relic from the Before Times, but it belonged to the now. And now it belonged to her. 

Her father had shown her the ball many times and he had talked about the Earth. How it was a ball like this and although it was now so grey it was almost black, it had once been blue and green with magical whisps of white floating in the skies. He’d told Marta that the Earth would last forever, or at least so long that it may as well be forever. That there were powers beyond her understanding and those powers would restore the glory of Earth in time. He talked about a mother, and he told Marta that the mother of the Earth would look after her, and that one day she would see something far better than had existed in the Before Times.

Marta could believe that. The Earth had to be better than this. The Before Times were a silly fairy tale, but The Earth in all its glory felt real. She felt it with every fibre of her being. There was a knowing within her that could not be denied. Something called to her and that was why she would never dispense with the ritual of emerging from the safety of the hole and looking up towards a space that was once a sky and would one day be a sky again.

One day, she would be rewarded for her efforts, and her belief in the world above her. It would start with a revelation that crept up behind her on silent paws. By the time she understood that a change was occurring, it would be well underway. And it would begin with a warmth she had never experienced. Little by little, she would remove the blankets she wore to protect her from the hungry cold and eventually she would unzip her coat. 

Even then, as she looked up towards the hidden heavens, she would be greeted with a single, grey, dead eye, but the seed of her hope would grow all the same, and as it did, she would see beyond the grey and fancy that she caught the brief explosion of light from the stars that her father had talked to her about as they waited out the worst of times. 

And as the world continued to warm, she would begin drawing for the first time in years, and her drawings of what lay beyond the grey curtains that had so oppressed the world since the end of the Before Times would be frighteningly close to the truth of the universe. Her inner eye saw more than she appreciated, and when the truth was revealed to her, she would be surprised and delighted, filling to the brim with the truth of her existence and her part in that universe.

The day that would really change everything for Marta, was a day before the skies finally cleared and the light of the sun and the stars came flooding in at last. On that day, Marta would meet another living being. A tiny and impossible warrior that came out of the nowhere and heralded the end of her exile in the grey. That herald would fly upon wings of grey, but upon its chest would be emblazoned with a shock of red, and the sight of that remarkable splash of colour in a world of constant, monotonous monotone, would burst Marta’s tiny and constricted heart, preparing it for what was to come, allowing it to grow and become so much stronger.

Marta would need that heart, for the path ahead of her was long and treacherous. But at the end of that journey awaited her tribe and a life more remarkable than she could ever imagine. And along that path she would see the grey break apart and witness the first rays of a sun that had been waiting patiently in the wings for an age. A perfect circle would open in the grey and as Marta experienced her face warming in the first of the sun’s light, her fingers would wrap around the eight ball in her pocket and she would weep tears of joy that would water the acorn of her hope, awakening it from its too long slumber and reminding it what its purpose truly was.