DREAM TWIG - SNEHA KESHAV

The sweet smell of earth never fails to curl her lips into a smile. Parul tried remembering the times she had enjoyed this smell of mother earth, lying on a cot in some obscure corner of her uncle’s sugarcane field. A glint in her eyes, a song on her lips. But never the thought that someday a steel grip would slam her down and choke her on the same earth she loved so much. The grip was unshakable; how could it not be? It didn’t really care or feel for what it crushed.

Tip tap tip tap tip tap tip tap tip tap....the faint sound that jerked her back into her reality. The monotonous manner of mockery becomes insulting after the 561st cycle (each cycle consisting of 692 tips and 693 taps). The message was clear: you don’t even deserve a change in the mode of ridicule. Other than being insulted she also found herself in a very uncomfortable situation of role reversal. The ants that roamed on her well padded white floors seemed different. In the fields, they went about their chores, scattering at the drop of a hat. But here they marched and almost dared her to block their way! Not that she hadn’t tried; the now amputated pinky was just a reminder of who was to cower in here.


Times like these she tried to think of her evening walks. Parul loved to walk. She really did. She walked from her ‘burrow’ to school, from school to the club she performed at; from there to her dog’s kennel which was at a distance of 5 kms from her own ‘burrow’ as her land lady wouldn’t let her keep Hoochie. And she danced; it was this little secret that kept her sane. Her way of living was motion. She liked keeping her pace. Not too fast to blatantly escape, not too slow to be caught up with. Just a sprightly manner to keep her two paces ahead. Even when she was sitting, there was a sense of motion, rhythmic displacement, never distracting, never still. Like a small rivulet crinkling in the sun.

But no longer; for Parul now found herself straight jacketed in mind and body, caged in the dystopia of red livid emotions. She didn’t know why they caught her, drugged her, and immobilized her. The drug: Dream Twig, that’s what she heard them calling it. It was injected into her system in no way she could detect or resist: Air.

Air: the only other like her, never obviously moving, but never stationary either. Air: now betraying her and dousing her with unaccounted memory and time lapses. Air: the carrier of Dream Twig and nightmares.

She didn’t know. But the People behind the Dream Twig did. They didn’t believe in “What you don’t know cannot harm you”. Maybe she didn’t know that she could not be destroyed; or at least not in the conventional manner after what she witnessed 17 years ago in the fields. The light, the drone and the impression of things being moved around at a lightning speed. Maybe she hadn’t grasped the true meaning of what she saw.

Or maybe she did. Maybe that was why she was always two paces ahead. Because she hoped to outrun the memory.

Maybe the people behind the Dream Twig wanted the same: they wanted her to run out of the memory.
(ends)

AVY COMMENTS
I FIND THIS STORY VERY INTERESTING. AND YOUR LANGUAGE IS TIGHT. HOWEVER, I WOULD LIKE TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT DREAM TWIG! MAYBE YOU CAN WORK MORE ON THIS STORY AS YOUR FINAL SCI-FI STORY.