Golden Dawns

GOLDEN DAWNS

Published 'AKLO' 1992


John Bello told her that when they played noughts and crosses together she would have to wield the mistake and he the perfect circle. He even hinted that each time she engraved the intersection on the old wooden desk-slope, someone somewhere bore a natural death. For him, of course, the joining of endless curve with endless curve was tantamount to another one being born elsewhere.

Why she had to carry what she considered to be a burden upon her slender shoulders, he never explained. Equally, when they were younger, he never quite chose the right words for their act of see-saw. Into the late gossamer twilights that seemed to abound during those limitless summer holidays, they would alternately break and join the shafts of hill sunshine with their joyful pivoting, young lives very much in the balance. The two of them being of unequal weights, she never really understood how that ill-knotted plank could take him towards the touching blue sky and, then by turns, tug her evenly towards those same parts where earth’s caring pull thinned out. Again, Birth and Death were assigned his and hers respectively, as each made their own characteristic landfall upon the springy turf: he with confident reliance on the synchromeshing muscles and bones of the legs, as smooth as if his blood were oil; she with shapely limbs splayed almost to the snapping point of thin bones, her lips quivering as the tiny skirt grew tinier.

She was given her real name only at the age of twelve. This was the person she would need to grow into, John Bello told her.

“But why? I am surely me already.”

His voice grew deeper in reply. She could never recall exactly what he said. His words, she was sure, were about magic in the hills; past destiny fanning into parallel and crossover realities as far as the eye of memory could see; a greater destiny even than that which circumscribed Space, Time and Mind with its perfect revolved hologram of convoked circles; and the centre of it all, the Fulcrum where the one God and the one Goddess arched.

The schoolyard echoed with the happy frightened cries of short-shinned boys and thigh-wheeling girls. The teacher hid his intrusive gaze as the Bello lad walked hand in hand with that girl who always sat anonymously at the back of his history class. He sometimes inadvertently overheard the conversation of Bello and his girl, but could not fathom why young children should prattle so dreamily: “Golden Dawns” were for books with wide empty margins, weren’t they, and so were such expressions as “the mystical beauty of night upon ever-bosoming hills” and “the white people within our skins”. These were so far-fetched upon the tongues of mere kids, the teacher even doubted whether he had heard them properly. Surely he could not have invented the words himself.

One day, he kept a number in for detention. Even so, there was no explanation for the extension of twilight beyond a certain point. The narrow beams of dusty sunshine still sloped across the double-desk at the back. John Bello and the girl were bent intently over the grain, compass points at crazy angles. The teacher did not dare recriminate them, because of the sparkles at the points.

He felt his flesh crawl when he saw the other children put up their hands. How could he ever explain? But, then with relief, he examined the attendance register so meticulously maintained by their form teacher. John Bello had a series of black crosses stretching endlessly from the edge of his name, instead of the red circles of which all the other names could boast. His relief was tinged with mystery, however, for the lines in the register he kept for his own form marched along with red herring-bones, with only an odd black circle here and there to sully its perfect symmetry.

When the detention reached its inconclusive dismissal, he wished he’d counted them in before he counted them out. He rocked gently at his high desk, somewhat preoccupied, as night reclaimed this particular reality for what it was.

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NOTE: This story is solely re-published on this 'Repository' thread and is publicly linked from the 'Weirdmonger Wheel' here:
http://weirdmonger.mindsay.com/reinvented_wheel.mws
I won't make a habit of this. :-)