We Were Visionaries

02 | The Art of Forgetting

Lucia Zincheart was being followed.

She knew it by the insistent prickle at the back of her neck, that flash of movement just out of her line of vision, that feeling. The seesaw between confusion and clarity. A familiar note of panic.

'Mum,' she murmured, tugging the heavy coat sleeve of the woman walking briskly alongside her. 'There's someone watching me.'

Her mother looked down at her, just for a moment. 'No, there isn't.'

'I can feel it. They're behind the trees.' Lucia turned her head to the right, and there it was again, a rustle in the bush like someone or something had stepped out of sight. 'Mum, please look.'

'Lucia,' her mother said, closing her eyes in frustration. 'There is no one there.'

'But -'

'I don't want to hear another word about this. We're going to be late if we don't hurry.'

They were walking faster now, fast enough that Lucia had to jog to catch up. The sea of foliage that was the scenery of the Forgotten Gardens passed by all around her. Revived plant species, once obliterated from the memory of all living people, now reached their tendrils or petals or leaves up to the afternoon sky. They came in such an exquisite sea of colours - dark red, soft blue, some indescribable colour between magenta and purple - that Lucia felt like stopping to look at every one. She quelled the urge, though, to shadow the insistent steps of her mother.

'Who are we meeting?' she asked. Then, after a few moments of silence, 'Mum?'

It was a long time, punctuated with nothing but their footfalls, before her mother replied. 'It's Camille.'

Lucia was confused. 'That's your name.'

'Yes,' she said. 'I want you to call me Camille.'

It took a full second for the meaning behind her mother's words to sink in, but when it did, it was like a shot to the heart.

⋆｡ﾟ☁︎｡⋆｡ ﾟ☾ ﾟ｡⋆

'Oh, darling Camille, it's been ages! Do come and sit down...'

The person they were meeting was a friend of her mother's. Lucia had forgotten her name, but remembered the pendant she wore around her neck - a shiny black bird. It caught the light as the woman sat back down on the grass in the clearing they were in and gestured to the spot beside her.

'Run along now, Lucia,' her mother said, casting her an absentminded backwards glance. 'Yolanda and I have important business to discuss.' Yolanda. That was it.

Lucia stepped out of the clearing, more out of duty than anything else, and retraced their steps back to the footpath. The Gardens had changed since she'd last been there. She could have sworn the plant labels had been made of wood, but now they wore the shine of varnished metal. Little decorative fish on strings hung from trees whose branches had once been bare. The same smell was in the air, though - the scent of dampness, of earth after rain.

'Sparrow of sorrow,' she hummed to herself, climbing the steps of the ornate bricked gazebo off the path and taking a seat on the bench inside. 'Sparrow of love. How do you fly free, free as a dove?'

'But sparrows don't fly.'

Lucia turned around to see a boy around her age, with bright eyes and floppy dark hair, leaning on the rail of the gazebo near her head. They stared at each other for a moment.

'My mum says they did before. Once.' She frowned and looked closer at the boy. There was something familiar about his features that she couldn't place, a fragile whisper of memory that might fragment if she brought it to light.