Author: malcolm

Part ten of Twelve Stories.

The sediment washes away from the land into the sea. A lone lily once stood upon a cliff here. The cliff is no more, it has become the shore.

An unremarkable cafe once stood upon the sand, and for a brief period, enjoyed the benefits of beach-side property.

But when the water level rose, the sea consumed more land, and the cafe, just as easily forgettable as it was, was easily forgotten. No one came to the beach for the cafe in the first place, and people wondered how they could stay in business, as seaside coffee struck most people as an unpleasant combination of heat and heat.

Sand stretched from the inland desert all the way to the sea now.

What was once grass was now all just sediment. Not one creature walking upon the sand had seen the greenery that once covered the land.

Hakon, in fact, had never even seen a lily.

Hakon is a human, one from a long line of what is called a civilization. Civilizations are what people call their communities over time, sort of. Hakon, like many others, assumed his civilization was the product of ages and ages of development – progress. Attending a meditation retreat on the shoreline of a great desert, it hadn’t occurred to him how the land had changed, how what was once the precipice of a cliff with a perfect lily was now deeply underwater, how many different people had enjoyed the same scenery over the ages, and how a select few had enjoyed it with coffee.

Cliffs had become picturesque beaches, the sand of the beach had met the desertification of the land, pushed back by the relentless rise of seawater, and different civilizations occupied everywhere Hakon had ever been. But Hakon could have never known that things hadn’t always been the way they were.

Hakon sits blank-faced on the soft sand of the tunnel or cave, for the first time considering how he has arrived in this situation with a strange woman who’s name he cannot recall, painfully aware of the feeling of having forgotten something important, questioning if things hadn’t always been that way.

Part nine of the Twelve Stories series.

Like so many ceilings in the US, the one in this cafe is white. Based on the ceiling alone, you’d have no idea where you were. Like, you’d probably think it was a house, as to who lived in the house, even if you lived there, you couldn’t tell.

You couldn’t do it.

It has those little ridges that oh so many ceilings have. There appears to be some indiscernible pattern in them. The overall pattern is mysterious, but there is some shape which seems to be repeating, although not entirely the same. Kind of like circles, but not a circle with a drawn perimeter, but with the circle’s area made of lines radiating out from the center at random angles.

A circle with a radius equal to one has a circumference of exactly twice the value of pi.

But these, again, aren’t perfect circles adorning this cafe ceiling. If you were to draw a border around each of those bunches of ridges, they would each be vaguely circular, but kind of oblong and irregular.

The ceiling has either been freshly painted, or is completely free of watermarks. Not the kind of watermarks that are used in branding, but the brownish, dirty kind that the word leads ones to believe are caused, somehow, by water. It, the water, has to pass through what could only be described as suspicious roofing (as keeping the elements at bay being one of the precise purposes for bothering to roof oneself), manage it’s way through the ceiling material of any attic space which may or may not lie above, if there is any, and then it, the water, must seep through while simultaneously being halted by the ceiling. Somewhere along the way, the water must become foul and leave a brown stain or something. The appearance of the cafe ceiling does not give any clear indication of the presence of other floors, or if this is the top floor of the building, or if there was some sort of attic, the lighting only revealing that a window or door must be open while eliciting nothing regarding a sense of elevation. No green glow of plant life reaches the ceiling, just the soft white light of an overcast sky or maybe a LED lamp or something. The ceiling is much too well lit for anything less than a tremendous lighting setup, so it’s probably natural lighting. The lighting makes shadows of the ridges of what is maybe paint, but reveals no lines of paint brushes or other tools. This alone, however, is not enough to rule out the possibility of paint covering watermarks on the cafe ceiling.

One could call the ceiling of this cafe unremarkable, in a way.

Part eight of Twelve Stories.

On a cliff on the western shore stands a lone lily growing in patchy grass. The dirt beneath looks like sand. Perhaps the cliff is made of this sediment, piled up over a span of time much greater than the lily could ever know.

The lily has yellow petals. with reddish speckles, with even more yellow and red coming pouring from the pistil.

Now and then, some sediment falls from the side of the cliff into the sea. The sea is about 85 meters (279 US feet) above the water. Despite the sediment-y composition of the cliff, there is no coast or beach below. The ever growing pile of sediment will get there someday. The lily will have been long gone by then.

The lone lily is frequently visited by bees, when the time is right.

In fact, organisms which can fly are some of the only ones who can even approach the lily. Land-bound creatures over a certain weight know intuitively that the earth of the cliff is too soft to support them.

Something like an ant can visit, though.

Like all lilies, this lone lily is a perennial – each year it comes back to life, blossoms, passes away, and is reborn.

But someday, it’s yearly cycle will come to a permanent, definite end. The cliff is crumbling, slowly, but surely. Someday, there will be no lilies upon any cliffs.