River, Sun, Freedom

Chapter 23: Aaron

Chapter 22: Aaron

          Jodi stared at the world around her wondering how she got here. She was no longer in Melbourne, but in a forest, near the coast. The trees were overgrown and wild, covering rusted caravans and cabins that dotted the landscape. The place was familiar, Jodi felt that she’d come here before. A dog, feral and filthy, but vaguely resembling an incredibly skinny Kelpie, shot out of the bushes and sniffed around. It didn’t notice her, even when she approached it. Defying any kind logic any normal person would’ve had when approaching a semi-wild creature, she reached out to touch it. Her fingers reached the place where they should’ve been met with dirty, matted fur, but she felt nothing. She pushed her fingers closer, but strangely, her hand went straight through the creature. She couldn’t interact with it at all.

Curious. she thought idly and removed her hand. She didn’t feel alarmed, didn’t feel anything at all, but a part of her mind wanted an explanation. It was this part that offered her something... a flash of an image, a memory. Too fast for her to grasp it fully, but just enough to understand that she might be dead. Something had happened, and now she was dead.

How strange. Her thoughts were clear, but emotionless, as though there was nothing really strange about the situation at all. They were nothing more than a mental shrug.

If I’m dead, this must be heaven.... I wonder if grandmother is here. A small amount of slightly lethargic happiness filled her at the thought of seeing her grandmother again. And she proceeded past the kelpie to the tree line. Beyond the tree were more caravans, rusted to the pointed that large holes had opened up in their walls, resembling skull-like faces, as though the caravan were skeletons, remnants of living creatures.  Jodi shivered at the sight of the faces. Maybe not heaven...I wonder if I’ve done anything bad enough that I deserved to go the other way?

She moved on, and didn’t stop until she reached a place where there were large wooden cabins, with paint peeling off the wall and covered in the sour aura of neglect. She hadn’t known they were there when she’d walked past the caravans, but seeing them now, Jodi realises she’s not surprised, as though it was her intention to get since the beginning.

In the cabin before her, a large, rotted through, two storey building with a wooden veranda compete with a fence in matching in the front. Jodi looked carefully and spot two people, an old woman and a young girl sitting at the stairs leading to the veranda, each leaning on posts of the fence on either sides of the stairs. Jodi is not surprised to see them.  Moving closer, Jodi sees their faces. The young girl to her right, leans easily wither back against the post, her eyes are alert, though her smile is even and lazy, on odd combination, considering the girl appears to be only eight years old. Her hair is black and long, much longer than Jodi’s and flows down her back in a plait held by to two elastic hair ties, one at the base of the plait and one at the end. Jodi recalled that she used to tie her hair like that, before her hair was cut short. Then it clicks, this girl is her eight year old self. Jodi is watching a memory.

Once again she is not surprised, and the oddness of this lack of emotion doesn’t reach her. She looks at the other woman, older than her current self, much older, with long, unkempt white hair and steely gray eyes, so much like her own. Her grandmother.

 “how long do we stay here?” memory-Jodi says. The question is for her grandmother who smiles.

“two, maybe three days, longer if we can make it.” she replied.  Behind her, through the doorway Jodi can make up a form, barely visible in the darkness. She knows this form is Jake, though she cannot remember how she knows this. Still she accepts it as easily as any other part of the circumstance.