Forgetting Rain

Notes: This fic doesn't represent my beliefs about the afterlife. :)

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October 31. 9:17 PM.

The quiet was all-encompassing. I fell through sticky blackness, each movement languid and slow. It was freezing. The cold burrowed deep into the marrow of my bones - inside my brain! - and I ached all over, falling, molasses-black clinging to me as I desperately flailed, trying to escape.

The dark was forever and the sticky shut my eyelids. Eventually I slept, and upon awakening from a frightened, fitful slumber I attempted to blink - but it was impossible. I could see redness, the sun through thin flaps of skin, but that was all. It hadto be the sun! It was warm, blessedly, heavenly warm, and tiny sugar-fine granules of sand beneath my back reassured me that this was real.

Water dripped onto my face from above, and suddenly my eyes sprung open, tearing lashes violently apart. Above me there was a dewy leaf of the exotic sort one would expect to find in a tropical rain forest: blue-veined, delicate patterns running its minty length, yet still sturdy. A butterfly with color-blazing, beautiful wings flitted around the plant, hovering then sitting still on a stem - then off to fly again, up and down and over me. And that was the first time I ever saw the Feld.

The Feld was the oasis in a burning desert. Somehow I thought I'd been there before - the desert, not the Feld - but I could never quite remember it. I could recall the cold blackness that I had fallen through (it seemed ages ago, when I was very small, but I knew I hadn't been asleep that long), yet nothing before it except a feeling. The feeling was like wind sweeping across moors, like the sea, like Christmas morning; a happiness that comes from somewhere secret and deep. The happiness was the most critical thing about the feeling, but I couldn't quite think of how I'd gotten it or how to find it again.

I asked the other people on the Feld about many things, at first - because there were always other people. Some, I faintly recognized, though I could never place them or think of their names; others were alien in their ways and speech. They were all human. I couldn't imagine what one could be except human (although I knew that at one point I'd known), but I knew there wereother things. I'd try to talk to them. I'd say, "Look, the sky is cloudy. Perhaps there'll be rain to-night." But they would always, always respond, "What is rain?"

I don't know why I try any more, except that there surely must be someone who remembers - not just in half-measures like me, but everything. Someone who can help me build nets and capture the weird butterflies that flit and flutter around the bushes and pools. Someone who will tell me where I found that glorious, glorious happiness.

Someone from beyond the Feld.

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Later. Undisclosed date/time.
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A red haired woman came today. Her eyes were closed like mine had been until I was woken by the water, so I dipped my hand into a stream and flicked some of the simon-pure moisture onto her face.

It was a lovely face, alabaster-white with faintly tinted lips and a proud nose, but it was lovelier still when her luminous green eyes were open. They were like springtime, like the scent of rosemary and a riot of living things. "James," she whispered in a voice I had to strain to hear, but I pulled her onto her feet and didn't let her dwell on whatever she might remember. "Come, come," I told her, "welcome to the Feld."

She asked me many questions. I answered them as best I could, but my faint recollections of 'fog' were already fading away into nothingness and all I could say was "We never have that here." A little more comforting was that she couldn't answer my questions either, about happiness and wind and the scent of flowers that don't grow in the Feld. Slowly, as we talked, she got a starved look - starved for what, I wondered, for the Feld is plentiful and nobody goes without. Or was she thinking about the feeling?

Afterwards we stood on the edge of the Feld and stared out into the endless desert. Her auburn hair streaked out behind her because of the howling, gusting wind that blew from the flatlands to us, and it seemed like some fabric I once saw, or perhaps like flames. If we had taken a step backwards, we'd have been safe in the lush silent life on the oasis. But we didn't step back and we didn't move forward.

When night fell we returned to our impromptu camp - it doesn't matter where you sleep on the Feld, everything's safe - and ate the juicy, plump fruits the trees near us bore before falling asleep. The night wind was low, but I could still hear the echoes of the desert in my ears.

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Much, much later. Undisclosed date/time.
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Someone, a boy a little older than a child but too young to be a man, walked across the desert today. Yes, walked - he didn't just appear the way I did (did I? I can barely remember coming, it was so long ago) but instead trooped to the Feld from the desert, miniature sandstorms rising at his feet. He hovered an inch above where he should have been and wore a cape and boots, walking proud like some messiah, only to crumble the instant he stepped into the oasis.

There was a flash of light and all of a sudden he was inside. A boy lay there, not the man-thing that he had been while walking but a boy, and he was like us again: silent, still, eyes shut. The red haired woman splashed water on his face and his eyes opened, taking in the scene with all the curiosity of a newborn. The cape and clothing shredded to nothingness, but nobody wore clothes on the Feld. It didn't matter.

"Mum," he called to the red-haired woman. She was crouching above him, and startled at the voice - the first words either of us had heard in ages. "Mummy... where are you? Why are you? Mummy... Dad?" I couldn't answer, didn't understand, didn't want to.

After a time he had stopped naming us Mummy and Dad. He had returned to our ways. He had my tousled black hair and the red headed woman's lovely eyes, but I couldn't think what it meant. He was just another person coming to the Feld, another like so many we'd met in our time here together. We scaled a tree for the most succulent morsels, looked out to the sunset, jumped from rock to rock in twilight as animals do and in the morning splashed each other with the water that collected in pools overnight.

"There's clouds in the sky," he muttered to me in a low voice, glancing upwards into the blue-white expanse. "Perhaps there'll be rain to-night."

I knew that rain meant something, something that was vital and interesting and incredibly important. But on my life I couldn't remember it, couldn't grasp the concept. Whatever it was, it wasn't in the Feld.

So I asked. "What is rain?"

-----finis.