The Basilisk's Mouth

17: THE BEGINNING

 The humming stops. The shouting fades away. For the first time, I am alone.

 I hold a hand to my throat, surprised to feel something solid under my fingers. I still have a body, or at least something that resembles it. My skin is warm and tight. Everything feels new, even though I know it's the end.

 Before I can get used to the silence, a strange sound echoes through the air. It sounds familiar and friendly, like a small piece of home. It's the sound of a dog barking.

 I'm in a park, then. There's nowhere else you'll hear the sound echo over an open space like that. The bark comes from deep in the forest, and trees materialise slowly in front of me like water spilling over a canvas. The sound vibrates the particles in the air, rippling reality into focus as it goes. I watch the sound oscillate over a small pond just a few metres away from where I stand. The water is like a sheet of dark blue glass, except for a pair of brown ducks that glide along its surface. The dog barks again, and the sound seems to catch onto the pond and stay there for a while.

 I tug at my clothes. It's very hot. As soon as I notice this, a chorus of crickets starts up from deep in the underbrush. The noise is enough to shiver the air into life, and the rest of the park creeps into existence. I see enough to know that I'm emerging from a copse of trees, entering into a small crescent-moon shaped clearing that is half eaten up by the pond. Facing out into the water is a bench. My heart skips a beat when I see the person that occupies it.

 She has a book on her lap, but she isn't reading it. I didn't know she liked reading until we were both twenty-two. It seems a crucial detail, and I wonder how I missed it. She was always so introspective.

 Her face is turned up to the sun, and her bare shoulders are glowing white. A beanie is pulled low over the dark strip of her fringe, despite the weather. Her maddening tolerance to heat clearly hasn't changed.

 Of course, this is all in the past. I'm living a memory. It makes sense; there's nothing left in the present, after all, and I'm afraid to think of whatever future there is. Despite that, it makes me happy to see her again. I step out into the clearing and into her line of sight. It's New Year's Eve, and the height of summer in Brazil. The world is declining into a new century.

  "It will be good to see the snow again," past Gesa says without opening her eyes. "It's not right without it, at this time of year."

 "You seem to be enjoying it just fine." It's like reading from a script, but the words seem natural, as if it's my first time saying them.

 She opens her eyes and gives me a shrewd look. It's the kind that makes me painfully aware of the dampness under my arms. "I enjoy a lot of things that I shouldn't," she says, and slides over to the edge of the bench. "Sit."

 I obey, perching as far away from her as I can, just like I did the first time. I glance at her book out of curiosity, hoping for an easy entrance to conversation. She's tucked it between her legs so I can't see the title.

 "You wouldn't like it," she explains, laying a hand across the spine. "It's fiction."

 "I like fiction," I say on instinct.

 "In that case, you must have changed quite a bit since I saw you last. I distinctly remember a kid with the imagination of a can opener."

 That makes me smile. "You always underestimated me," I say, but of course it comes out sounding more serious than I intended.

 "Name me some recent reads, then."

 "Okay. How about 1984?" I read that three years before this memory, but I don't specify.