Orchard, Part I

Levi Clancy
Jul 23, 2017 · 3 min read

A horror series about the way our past is remembered.

Told through three interwoven stories: Lydia in the 19th century; Viva in the 20th century; and Elena in the 21st century and her afterlife.

⁂ May 26th, 1974

Viva picked up her pencil.

I hope to return from my strange place, but I worry that I never will.

I realise a spirit has come to me, but this ghost is not an apparition in a dark stairwell. I am haunted by her in the corridors of my own mind.

Old places revert which I have never seen. They are unfamiliar, but brought to me by her. I sense them while I sense my own world. The iridescent wood grains in my desk, they glitter like fields of golden wheat. I can see them, and even feel the prickles on my hands.

The long leaves of the lilies, they bring me memories that are not my own, of endless green rows of cotton fields converging at the horizon. I sense that the ghost is grasping for the familiar — but I know no aim, except she wants to tell me something.

My own life has become a sort of offering. My life is not my own. She picks up my memories, studying them, seeking to see herself reflected back, and when she puts them back — whatever is left feels alien to me.

Viva stopped abruptly, the journal entry unfinished. There was still more work to be done elsewhere.

⁂ June 2nd, 1845

Glory sat on the riverbank. She rolled three old crab claws in her hands, feeling them against her fingers, meditating on each groove and edge. With her eyes closed, she held them against her belly and thought of a name for her unborn child.

“Cece,” she said, and tossed the claws onto the soil. She looked. The claws were pointed away from her. She gathered them up.

“Mary,” she said when she rolled them again. This time, only one pointed away.

“Lydia,” she said, and paused. She spoke softly to herself in the tone of a prayer. “I saw you in my dream already. You are a girl. You will be remembered.”

Glory opened her eyes to see all the claws were pointed toward her. “And your name will be Lydia.”

⁂ February 8th, 2004

Elena was connected to machines — it seemed one for each organ — as she slipped in and out of consciousness at the hospital. But as her body was collapsing, her soul was expanding.

She looked down the corridors of her memories. Her life became clear to her as a space of time. Within it were all the moments of herself, coexisting across an incredible distance of seconds, months, and years.

Each self had been unable to see the other as she lived her life, but now she had the vantage point to look across time and see them all. Something struck her about these versions of herself, these snapshots of her soul: they seemed like strangers to one another.

And with that, at the end of 94 years, she had died.

The entirety of her lifetime coexisted in the singularity after her last heartbeat. She could see every connection of her actions to their outcomes. There was an awe that overtook her, a massive convulsion — a surge of the ability to see so much, so clearly. She was close to god.

But then her spirit settled down. Her soul had a physical shape again. She choked on water as she came back to being, waking up on the banks of a long river winding through the rolling hills of an endless orchard.

Her memories immediately began to fade. She watched the river pass, and felt so hopeless as her memories flowed away too.

Before long, everything was gone. She had lost the ability to talk, she had lost all knowledge of her former self — but she retained her ability to see, of all events around her, a sort of connectedness.

This was the start of the rest of her afterlife.

Levi Clancy

Written by

Yiddish-Euro-Okinawan. Born 🇺🇸 and raised ✡. Live in Hawler.

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