WHERE YOU ARE

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You are here.


If you were in the body you are used to you would be coughing by now. The pollen is so thick that the air is yellow with it. How can you be heaving these motes in with every breath and still take oxygen from the air?


It's warm. The hills around you are the texture and colour of gold foil. Even from here you can hear the ominous creaking. Wattles in full blazing bloom, fertile, short lived and dangerous.


Cay: a word for a sand bank, a fleeting island. Why would you give him such an impermanent name? Did you always know his presence would be brief, that some uncanny tide would swallow him and leave you, a gull without a nesting ground, circling mournfully overhead?


You have the sensation of standing in a long low room. When you close your eyes you see afterimages of lambs.


When did you first read the phrase the darkest timeline? Something went clunk in your head and things fell into a legible order for the first time in a while. You felt like Kai assembling the snow queen’s mirror puzzle: all the sharp little pieces had come together to spell Eternity, and you understood and despaired.


It’s golden hour. There’s smoke as well as pollen in the air. Did this use to be a shopping strip? It seems to be mostly gold dust and rubble now, pierced through with the grey stalks of young wattle. It has been that way long enough for weeds to be romping: wild pea, sedges and warrigals underfoot. Their leaves are rude green. It looks sickly somehow.


There are others here, some with half-hearted respirators, some, like you, just sucking down the pollinated air. All tall. All tired. Listless around smoky sad campfires. No clarity. No industry. No children.


Wattles are legumes. The body you are in now knows this, bitterly. Legumes fix nitrogen. They make it easier for other things to grow. Wattles are legumes, like lupins and peas.


You remember when he was the size of a pea, before you really even knew he was there.


The air is hot and yellow.


You know that somehow the hot yellow pollen sifting down has silenced some crucial hormone in you. You know that this body could never have made even a pea-sized boy, let alone the big baby that busted out of you half a decade ago.


In the other universe (the one with the shopping strip?) you thought we’d doomed ourselves as fast as possible. Industrial revolution to climate catastrophe in a straight line, no stops no checks no resistance. But you were wrong. They did it quicker here. When did the last big collapse happen? Thirty years ago, you guess by the age of the faces you can see. Thirty or more.


He’s not here. You know it. The air is hot and yellow. You let it go, and step back into the gap between the fibres of the universe. 


 
To look for Cay underwater, turn to Timeline II 


To look for Cay at the tracks, turn to Timeline VI 


To look for Cay in the hive, turn to Timeline XX 


To look for Cay in the park, turn to Timeline III


To look for Cay in ????, turn to Timeline IV


To stop looking for Cay, turn to Timeline 0