Stories

The Library - Fourth Scene

The next morning Gwen awoke to a sustained but orderly shuffling of boots, bags and paraphernalia and watched in bewilderment how the seven were quietly preparing for what looked like a military campaign.
They looked serious and none of them was speaking, which rose Gwen’s anxiety to panic levels. She didn’t dare ask what they were doing.
No. 5 spoke eventually.
“Are you coming?”
“Where are you going?”
“Fishing.”
“In the middle of the desert?”
No. 5 pointed to the creek in the valley. Its waters looked murky and ochre after the rain, and raged, powerless, against their banks, carrying dead sticks, straw and debris.
“What could possibly live in that?”
“Catfish.”
“I don’t know how to fish,” she hesitated.
“Suit yourself,” No. 5 replied as he walked to the door.

The Library - Third Scene

When Gwen was awakened by the chill of the desert night, she found herself in an empty house, dead quiet except for the eerie clinking of the bead curtains. 
The quiet of the desert reaches beyond silence; it preempts the emergence of sounds, like an anechoic chamber.
In the desert, one only hears two things: the wind and total silence.
She tried to go back to sleep, but her three nights in the desert had conditioned her to a different sleeping schedule. The empty house felt creepy at night, with no light and no sound, almost like a tomb.

The Library - Second Scene

“Welcome, light of the Sun, the fairest/ Sun that ever has dawned upon/ Thebes, the city of seven gates!” 
‘What in God’s name is this racket?’ Gwen jumped out of her made shift sleeping accommodation on the couch to watch a glorious sunrise accompanied by what sounded very much like an ancient Greek chorus.
“Sophocles,” a soft voice replied, so close she could feel its breath on her ear. She jumped off the couch and turned to face her morning companion.
“Antigone,” he clarified. “We haven’t been introduced, I’m No. 8.”
“Gwen. Whitman.” 
“Hard name to live up to.”
She mumbled, feeling ridiculous to introduce herself to an element of the set of natural numbers, and couldn’t resist her curiosity.

The Library - First Scene

She’d been walking through the desert all night. She figured it was better to walk at night, despite the cold; at least she wouldn’t get fried to a crisp in a place with no shade.
One could say Gwen was experiencing an existential crisis and was trying to find herself, even though she was only twenty-four and the middle of her road was so far into the distance she wouldn’t get a glimpse of it for another couple of decades. 
Regardless, she was indulging what she perceived to be her dark night of the soul, college behind her, unappetizing options in front of her, sensitive, idealistic and over-educated, the perfect symbol of her generation.

Fair- Chapter 31 Denouement

The meeting room of the Council Hall was filled with the electricity of anticipation but eerily quiet, as if the solemnity of the event muffled the usual banter and pleasantries. A request for a full plenum from Mrs. Eberhart was a rare occurrence, and even if quite a few of the ladies of the Circle knew what the meeting was about, they were still somewhat nervous about the details.
Mrs. Eberhart stood up and walked to the podium, waiting the customary minute or two for the room to settle down, a pause completely unnecessary now, given the frozen silence.
“I have had the honor to lead the Village Council for many years, and as such, was entrusted with the responsibility to uphold its laws, a duty I fulfilled with the utmost respect and of which I always strived to be worthy. It is unfortunate that our devotion to the law led us to results that sometime defy its very spirit. No justice is served when children are held responsible for things they have no control over, or can even understand, or when the brightness of our human spirit is overshadowed by fear. 

Fair - Chapter 30 - A Maze of Twisty Little Passages All Alike

The following Wednesday Giselle showed up at Lucille’s house for a nice cup of tea and a lengthy demonstration of her new embroidery pattern. The table in Lucille’s drawing room got covered quickly with bits of yarn, several types of canvas, scissors and pads of paper covered with sewing motifs, wristband pincushions, thimbles, cups and saucers, a teapot, a sugar bowl, a plate of cookies, still warm, and two tablets, one of which was Giselle’s, finally restored to proper functioning.
After a few hours the crewel technique was mastered and Giselle left, tablet in basket. She picked up the pace when she was out of sight and headed straight to the Council Hall where she interrupted a meeting in progress in order to whisper a few words in Rosemary’s ear, a feat unheard of in general and quite incredible coming from Giselle.

Fair - Chapter 29 - The Life and Times of Mary Coulter, Born Fair

“So,” Lucille said casually, “I hear that our safely guarded secret school is the talk of the Village!”
Mary looked at her with genuine bewilderment.
“Giselle told me all about it yesterday over a cup of tea. Oh, by the way, could you ask somebody to figure out how to make this work? She left it with me to get looked at,” Lucille pulled the tablet out of the basket and set it on the table. 
“How did she find out about this?” Mary asked, and a fleeting flash of fear shrouded her eyes.
Lucille forgot about her irritation for a second, when she remembered that the girl was hiding there to safeguard her life. Her previous priorities fell to the wayside for a little while, as she thought of the best way to reassure her niece.
“She listened in on the girls while they were talking in shop,” she said in a much softer tone. “It seems,” she hesitated, “that not every Council member is averse to the idea of all of you learning these things.”

Fair - Chapter 28 Crewelwork

After many months with only an impressive collection of desert artifacts to show for, Rosemary and her team were called back by the Council, despite clamorous protests and, on occasion, veiled threats. Every time she had to go to a meeting, Rosemary got into the habit of carrying around an object or other from the collection, which she liked to parade around the room as a symbol of her righteous outrage.
“There is no hope for the Village anymore. You just destroyed our last chance to uproot evil from our midst once and for all!” she raised her voice in Council, an outrageous and completely unheard of behavior that made even Mrs. Eberhart frown with disapproval. “I warn you! This will not end well, and I’m not going to sit here, idle, while the likes of Mary and her evil mirror mongers destroy our traditions and endanger our children! If you don’t do anything about this, I have no choice but to take matters into my own hands!”

Fair - Chapter 27 - Archetype

The more Mary delved into the recovery of the database the more she became tangled in the old story buried inside it, almost as if her own memories were finally brought back to life. At times she felt as if she had awakened from a long sleep and found herself in a room she recognized without knowing why.
She had learned enough of the old code to understand that the Que’d held technical instructions, not the story of her ancestors, and she was a little disappointed about that. After all the secrecy and the sacrifices that kept the sacred book from being lost through the centuries, she expected it to reveal the meaning of life, or at least provide some moral guidance for her future. On the other hand, the database was a never ending source of wonder, an entire alternate history her generation knew nothing about. It is said that history is written by the victors, and a couple of centuries ago, as the defeated party, the Scholars’ line simply slipped out of existence, its every trace erased, and only its shadow stayed alive in the folk tales, carried by the vague whispers and half remarks passed down from generation to generation by the few dissenters left behind.

Fair - Chapter 26 About Flight

In all fairness, Mary was banished indeed. The makeshift team at the rock mound spared no effort in setting up means to detect her presence, if and when she decided to approach the apparently agreed upon meeting place and look for her aunt. Every day a small group of ladies took it upon themselves to check all the tracking markers, only to notice that their condition always changed. The wind, the rain, the little creatures of the desert trampled them over in their comings and goings, oblivious to the interests and goals of the humans and answering only to the larger scale of nature.
The group spent lots of time in meetings, trying to pick out the artifacts from the random patterns of being, an activity blessed with the same odds to succeed as finding a needle in a haystack. Every now and then someone in the group would single out a detail that looked like obvious proof of Mary’s touch and they made it their main goal to prove themselves right. The more someone else contradicted them, the more invested they became in the defense of their theory and when challenged they took it personally. The contradicted parties abode morosely by the group decision that the artifact was not relevant, but stashed the offending item in a coffer, certain that the truth will see justice in the end. That’s how the camp was blessed with an ever growing collection of sticks, rocks, sand pattern molds made of wax, drawings of quasi-random straw patterns, and even, for a reason nobody really understood, an abandoned bird’s nest.