Helga (unedited)

Chapter 4: The Lost Copperfield

Before we progress with the melancholia of this woman; Helga. Helga, that’s her name, I’m going to tell you a short story about myself. She told me that it’s an earth name meaning ‘blessing’. The name is awkward. Just saying it, you’d swear that it pertains to Hell or Hell’s demons. Funny, how this woman that looked symbolic of a corpse, was given such a name. Right, now for my story...

Well, my name is not so ambiguous. I have a Mercurial name and live the life of the odd Mercurial boy, or ‘nalit’ as we say in Hua (whooo-wa); that is the language of Mercury. I have no friends, with the exception of Helga who is more of an acquaintance; my saviour from boredom. The days are short, so I don’t really long for friends, then again, so are the nights, only to deliver me back into the merciless realm of solitude. I spend my days reading and by reading; I MEAN READING. Three books every week are sufficient to me. I guess there’s something pleasing about getting lost in worlds that have longer days and better activities than mine. Helga brought me a few books from Earth; this one time. There were books that were just stupid, environmental books about saving the Earth. Now, there is no Earth to save, I guess those books were like a boxing coach trying to encourage a boxer that is getting the beating of its life.  Earth people loved themselves too much; as I witnessed that the majority of the books, 94,537%, were about people. I mean, from how Helga spoke of her sisters, you’d swear that there’d be more books about: water, air, and the animals, but I guess it wasn’t so on that planet. My favourite book was David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. That book is transcendent. It is not decorated to give a story, but simply a story written. It is also not written to make the reader feel good. It just describes how life is; without favour. I read that book religiously with vigour, but one day someone found it amusing to hide it from me. I suspected it to be my mother. She never lost breath in antagonizing my reading of the book.

‘You’ll never make any friends reading that darn thing,’ she said one day when I was sitting in the fields. I guess she didn’t know how much of a friend David Copperfield is. Luckily for David, his mother died, but mine, was still around to criticize more than an expert. Those days without my book, I found myself more observant of people; which wasn’t always a good thing. People aren’t creative enough; the majority of us merely relay information to ourselves and others. You do get the revolutionaries, the visionaries, that invent new things, but the majority just watches television, listens to music, reads books etc. and relays that information to anyone willing to listen. I hate when people do that. I must admit that I hate myself sometimes. I’d rather be a hibloe, the descendent of dogs, and go about my business. As a matter of fact, you’ll never find a hibloe telling another hibloe about how its dinner was or what it saw that previous night. Long story short, it wasn’t my mother that had stolen my book. That I figured out in the afternoon, when she was out in the field sweeping and asked, ‘I’m surprised you aren’t hands-on on that Cropping Fields book of yours.’  

If my mother didn’t steal it, then who was it? I had no enemies because of my lack of friends, so that cancelled them. Perhaps it was I all along; my own worst enemy. Perhaps I misplaced it. ‘Helga is going to kill me,’ I found myself thinking. Sure I was the owner of the book, but I was adamant she that she would’ve liked to borrow the book from time to time and that book was of biblical proportions. It’s safe to say that book is one of the few good things to have ever come from Earth because, as all the other people in the other planets know as well, is that Earth produced for itself and died on its own.

‘You lost the book?’ is what Helga asked. The question was scarring and exposing.

‘Someone took it from me.’ I replied. The response was true and had substance. My dread was concealed behind this very response. I could tell that she wasn’t pleased and began getting tense, veins surfacing all over my body.

‘We’ll get it back,’ she replied. Now that response eclipsed mine in all magnitude. The sentence was said in a cold, slow, and effective manner that echoed thunderously in my very eardrums all the way to the depths of my soul. It was assertive, prophetic, and all the more precarious. Could her sayings be more demonic than she looked? Could her statements be so ravenous?

The days waned and my religion had no reliance that is until I found Helga, the book in her hand, in flames! Yes, the same woman that believed to be a demon of sorts was on fire. My very eyes, ironically, were frozen in gaze. My heart beat perpetually and my mouth opened widely in excessive awe. She was really supernova; the sun that wasn’t the sun, but a woman, a woman that I knew.

‘You can explain this-right?’ I asked.

‘Do I explain that I’m on fire or must I lie to you because in your mind people don’t ignite?’

Honestly, although it was a good time, it was no time for wisdom, but time for resolution; the revelation was enough.

‘How?’ I asked.

‘Because I can,’ she replied. It sounded cheesy, but it was all the more true, ‘Come on now, you read books, surely you understand imagination. You’re supposed to expect anything and everything in imagination. We live on Mercury- the sun’s neighbours we are. Earth’s people didn’t believe they could ever live here, and now look at us, we are their descendents. Don’t be limited by what you are told, read, observe. In life, impossibility is the only impossibility. If you want it, there’s no law to stop you.’