The Winsome and the Empty

She had been asleep when the Earth decided humans had failed it.

It had been flayed for minerals, balded for timber, ignited for oil, starved for crops, crushed to make way for building invented importance. So the inexplicable orb returned these tortures on its subjects. Their evolution became their undoing. When no one heard the last desperate wingbeat of a songbird species so men 10 000 miles away could have more pieces of numbered paper to roll in, something broke. The very spirit of goodness — invisible care, sleep and health and quiet breathing — all maintained in the soil for living things, vanished.

This knowledge seemed to hang in the air: the seasons with their occult colours, schools of fish that dart in spectral formation, the moon and stars whispering beauty through the darkest of nights, the verdure that survive the baking desert as though friends with the sun… all this was not meant for creatures who took no heed of it, too choked by their own association. Man was banished from the Earth. Now slaves to finding survival in the world once so full of it. Life they had exploited. Beauty they had only tried to emulate. The secret spells they had ignored.

Banished.

At 5:43, the sky opened with a crack of brightest blue. Stillness. Then it struck. Small children screamed.

She had been asleep. The low rumblings woke her. She came out of her small home as the night world lit up in UV cyan. Her last, insane thought before the lightning struck was: I have my mother’s hair. Her father called it dishwater-blonde. Then, in one bluebell pulse: her favourite, indomitable swamp gum had ignited. The tree fell on their tiny forest house. Her parents were inside.

That was a lifetime ago. Now she was alone.

When she awoke, she saw that her hair was the same colour as the ground upon which she lay. One small strand of dishwater-blonde bedded on pale ash that welcomed it. The wash of sepia that dimmed away the world had seemed to reach her very self. She rolled up her stinking bedding and shoved it into her rucksack. Full of scavenged food, her old ragdoll, precious little water. She put the doll’s head outside the zip, so it could see out as she walked. See some secret loveliness that she might miss. She turned habit into oxygen and breathed it, however childish. She heaved the bag onto her back, buckling under the weight. She faced the day. Walk on. Only that. I walk on.

Living as she had among the mysterious trees and all the pretty horses; she had seen the beautiful world, had urged others to do the same, but she was punished along with the rest. Yet she still saw the beauty. This was why she walked. A desperately tranquil search for anything but the grim and evil. I walk on.

She held moments in her mind, those that differentiated the endless days. No matter how small:

She found herself singing aloud. That old song her father liked. There is a light that never goes out. It made her think of him. She stopped. Two minutes.

She noticed a shape in the clouds like a person asleep. Next to it, a giraffe. One minute.

She thought she saw a bird. Flitting around a trunk like it was playing hide and seek. For a mad moment she considered joining in. Ten seconds.

All these she held. They made her keep going. How she wanted to stop. How she wanted to sit at the foot of a boulder and disappear. Lost in the nothingness. And then she would see the weak wind making the leaves dance. And so she would rise. Walk on.

One day — it no longer mattered which one — she saw a path of trampled shrubs and pushed-aside branches off the track she was beating. She suddenly knew it to be something more than what it seemed. She followed it, shining with innocence, to an empty river. Immovable rock weaved and folded by the water. What had been before and would be again. She sat in the place where a torrent once had screamed, and it seemed perfectly curved to fit her shape. She caressed the lines of moss, the dark stone embroidered by sand. She turned her face to the sky as she felt it: could this be beautiful? Around her were rocks and earth and wind that had known more than what she had lost, and quietly they sang of hope.