The Cistern

"In the rainy season they’ll live. But in the dry seasons - that’s sometimes months - they’ll have long rest periods; they’ll lie in little hidden niches, like those Japanese water flowers, all dry and compact and old and quiet."

 

Ray Bradbury - The Cistern

 

 

October is Bradbury country, a time for autumn people to think autumn thoughts, for your footsteps in the early dusk to dissipate in trickles of rain gathering to slip underground, each rivulet an ephemeral pattern never to be repeated. Two sisters sit in a cozy little house, keeping the needlework company. Face pressed against a reverberating windowpane, one recounts to the other a tale of another world, a city under the city. The rain has done something to her. It has germinated the poisonous seed of a long-withered hope.

It's Halloween, a time to give your loved ones over to the shades of the past, to camouflage them safe against the other world's hunger. How good is your costume? Can you pretend, for one more night, to be the mask of vitalism? Can you pretend you're just pretending to be dead? Porch light, candy, plastic bucket, requisite pumpkin grin, fake cobwebs at a dime per square meter. Is this you? Or is this the grotesque fantasy, the fear of life gone wrong for a youth buried decades past, swept down the gutter, while you shambled on, decaying, piloting hope's nightmare year by year?

The sistren, time-leeched, skin folded by negation, sit and listen to the flow of the world outside their room. One listens more attentively than the other. She hears the beauty of emaciation, dessication, sees the gurgle puffing lithe, disarticulated limbs into a glorious ballet, patience conjoined not sundered by the passing of the seasons, longs for not-being to be what never was. Both of them can open the door. Neither can stop the other from opening it, if she wishes, if torrential wishes carry her away into a reality to which this is only a cautionary hypothetical.

Come away from the window, into the hollow, dry air.

But for how long will this empty space continue to outweigh the other, as hopes drain into it year by year?

How long a flow does it take to fill the buried hollows in your loved ones' psyche?