DAWN, 10 YEARS AGO …

Drifting down down down and spinning as if on a thread in dizzying turns, the invisible strand that connects me delicately unravels as I join with you in your act of becoming. I will share with you in this, your dangerous journey, because I cannot bear to allow you to do this alone. Into your memory we travel together, and of all the strange corners of the world where we could land, we find ourselves in a kitchen.

So many sensations, strange but not unpleasant, envelop us. So much stimuli to delight and intoxicate. Warmth emanates from a cooling stove. The scents of drying leaves that hung along the walls fragrance the air. The aromas of the spices and mint, and the grassy freshness of the herbs growing on the windowsill or neatly labeled and placed on shelves, waft through my incorporeal skin. And yet I also sense unease, a darkness looming from every corner and shadowed crevice. Memories can be like this—ghostly and unsteady, a little bit true, a little bit false disconnected, then joining to create image and form.

You appear out of the ether. Both of you. Mother and child. Deidra and you. Cora, with your soft, puffy body and two small, awkwardly protruding points pushed up against the front of your frock, make a very unlikely harbinger of the days to come. Only your eyes cause one to stop and consider. They are wide and inquisitive, with irises of amber outlined in mahogany, and your stare penetrates, infusing the onlooker with the strong desire to turn away.

All is stillness as I move about the kitchen, then the room morphs into activity. The clinking of dishes. The tender steps of the child clearing the table. The wish-wash of moving water as the mother earnestly washes the dishes. A strange tension lingers in the air. Were they mad at each other? Has the child done something wrong? She seems so timid as she stands behind her mother holding a bowl cupped in both hands while the mother bends over the sink. Moments pass in agonizing lengths as the two remain like this: one standing, quietly beseeching attention, and the other ignoring her presence. For a while I wonder if the mother knows that the child is there. A slight nod of her head and a grunt makes it clear that she knows. The child, finally given permission to approach, carefully places her bowl on the counter.

Mother bemoans, “After a long day of work I still have to do all this.”

“I’ll do them,” Cora says, brightening.

“No, you never do them right,” Mother responds with a sigh.

And then I feel how the girl feels. She thinks her mother doesn’t like her, maybe even hates her. She thinks her mother believes her strange, too wise beyond her years, useless, incapable of doing the simplest things—even something as mundane as washing the dishes. Cora longs for the feel of her mother’s soft skin, cool and scented with lavender. It’s been so long since her mother touched her and Cora doesn’t know why the tenderness ended. Flashes appear of how close they used to be. How they went everywhere together. How Mother strapped Cora to her waist with a cloth with the child’s little head bobbing. She smiled with her two tiny front teeth surrounded by gums. Dark splotches swam across the child’s skin, face, and arms—something left over by what they had done to her. Mother simply covered them with the swaddling clothes and kept prying eyes at a distance. Then the images waver and fade away.

The child is too young to understand that her mother’s recent behavior has little to do with her, and everything to do with her mother’s own discomfort—and maybe anger—that her daughter is turning into a woman. The helplessness in seeing her child grow into not needing her is at times too much to bear. One day Cora may understand this. But not now. Not today.

I follow Cora as she leaves the kitchen and enters her bedroom. The redness of the evening light cascades through her open window, flooding her small room in a burnt sienna blush. The horizon glows a golden yellow shimmer, mocking a rising sun. This view remains, and will always remain, on this tidally locked world where the people live on a narrow perimeter around the center of the sphere, the habitable ring. This half of the ring has been designated as Dawn. The other half, designated as Dusk, has a similar, but some consider, darker view.

The rotting remains of the transport ship that brought her and her mother here—the very last ship to leave Earth—stand in the distance, its metallic frame oranged with rust like the bloody ribs of a skinned animal. Cora and her mother are both a little more than four hundred ET (Earth Time) years old, unchanged by time as they slept in their cryogenic chambers. And yet changed. Their bodies manipulated to “help with their adaptation to the environmental differences” of this world.

Deidra has become a worker of the soil, her hands gifted with abilities with the Seed. Her skills made her invaluable as the hard, unforgiving land struggled to feed the people. But Cora … Cora was turned into something I still don’t quite understand. Knowledge of her alterations has been purposefully taken from me, and I desperately need to remember. Only now, as I reach into her memories, do I begin to glimpse what she is becoming. Cora, lost in concentration, wistfully stares upward, seeing more than only the stars high in the indigo-blue sky. What she gazes upon with those eyes of hers is the reason I am here.

Many who arrived in the transports had similar indications of body manipulations, their irises glittering every color but normal as they awoke from their long sleep. Eventually the iris colors of most (but not all) turned into shades of brown. But Cora’s eyes seemed to have intensified with age, glowing like a cat’s caught in the light.

Cora understood her difference. The manifestations of all that she is to become may not have fully flowered, yet she knew. So why has her mind brought me here? And such odd things to show me, such odd things to remember. These nothing moments, as memories, hold weight for her. I continue my ghostly study, searching for these answers.

Children pass by Cora’s window in groups of twos, then threes, then fours and fives. More still can be seen in the distance, arriving from a variety of directions. All carrying small bundles and heading towards the north. Every evening the children in the Outlands of Dawn walk for miles to the nearest town, seeking shelter for the night from raiding rebel militias who prey upon small villages to steal these little ones to fill their ranks.

Cora hurries to ready herself for her nightly journey, assembling her homework, rolling her bedding, and wrapping her hair in a gonar, the traditional headwrap her mother still insists that she wear. Flashes of girls from the village making fun of Cora appear before my sight, as well as a few of the tense battles she has had with her mother as she begged to be allowed to dress like the others do. The image of her mother remaining stubbornly firm on the matter lingers before me, then fades away.

Cora finishes folding the flap beneath her chin, completing her tentlike attire. She returns to the kitchen, where her mother sits at the table preparing some herbs to be dried. Cora quietly slips past with her arms full of her bundle. Mother doesn’t look up as Cora approaches the door and cracks it open. A slice of dim light from the outside world cuts into the room.

“Good night, Mom,” Cora says.

“Don’t forget to bring in the water when you come home in the morning,” her mother replies, still not looking in her direction.

“I won’t forget,” Cora says as she quietly steps through the door.

And now I see why this memory is so important. These are the last moments this daughter will have with her mother for many, many years …


Copyright © 2021 by Jennifer Marie Brissett