The Fall: A Story on Persistence of Memory | Thursday Tale No. 27

 The world is full of small acts of disappearance. Leaves loosen from branches, voices fade from rooms, familiar places change beyond recognition. Yet loss rarely arrives empty-handed; often, it leaves behind a different way of seeing.

Twin Flame

Photograph by Fakhri Baghirov on Pexels.

 “Even objects abandon, I guess,” Leela murmured as she looked for an amber gemstone that had fallen to the floor and vanished out of sight.

  She stooped to look under the burnished oak armoire once again, but she found nothing but the same procession of dust dancing along the rays of sunlight touching the base of the shelf.

  She looked under the rug, under the bed, by the study table and the chair, behind the dresser, behind the door, and in every cosy corner of her room one more time, but the stone was nowhere to be found. It was as if it had always wanted to find a moment of escape like the fall.

  Exhausted from searching, Leela slouched on her bed and looked at the oval, black, glossy obsidian pendant in her palm. She ran her fingers through the heart-shaped cavity carved in the centre of the obsidian and felt its emptiness. It was in this cavity that the gem—carved from a Baltic amber stone into the precise shape of a heart—was once inlaid. She closed her eyes and imagined how magical the fiery gemstone had glowed against the blackness of the obsidian; it was as if a piece of coal was crackling into a divine blaze.

  Every time she beheld the pendant, the words of Anthony Doerr from *All the Light We Cannot See* flowed through her: “Consider a single piece glowing…that chunk of coal was once a plant…its leaves caught what light they could…and that sunlight—sunlight from million years old—is heating your home…”

  But it also reminded her of Aunt Sandra, her favourite in her family.

  Aunt Sandra had an impeccable skill in telling stories. The warmth with which she engaged others with stories drew children to her like moths to light. The earliest memory Leela had of Aunt Sandra was her narrating the story of Rapunzel using a humorous insertion of songs from other movies.

  It was to this aunt that the pendant had once belonged.

  When Leela was fifteen, Aunt Sandra had appeared at a family gathering with her usual grace. It was against her aunt’s neckline that the pendant—as calm and fierce as the bearer—had hung. Leela, who was chatting with her cousins, was immediately captivated by its sight and the way it highlighted the fine features of her aunt and her regal smile.

  From then, Leela had longed to buy one of her own. She had learnt from her aunt that the pendant was bought from a flea market for less than a hundred rupees, and that she would buy one. But Leela and her aunt found nothing of such splendour displayed in the market again.

  So one day, when Aunt Sandra was decluttering her house before moving out of the city, she handed Leela the pendant neatly packed in a ziplock bag and said, “This is all yours now.”

  For years, Leela possessed it sincerely. She seldom wore it, fearing it would break or get misplaced. She eventually retired it to her small wooden box of memories, which she visited often.

  Even on the day when the amber heart had fallen and disappeared, Leela had opened the wooden box to interact with all its age-old residents: the moon-like white buttons from her school uniform; glass pebbles her friend had let her pick from her fish tank; tiny blue square mosaic tiles she had found by a construction site; a netted peepal leaf her cousin had given her; calligraphy on a tissue paper made by a classmate whose name she no longer remembered; a rusted key of the old lock of a house her family lived in a decade ago; and dozens of many such objects.

  She had held each object, felt its texture and temperature against her palm, and conversed with its story. She allowed each object to bring back the light, smell, and echoes of people who sailed away with the motion of life.

  But then she had picked up the pendant and had lost the amber part. After having turned her room upside down and right side up twice, Leela eventually gave up.

  But when she opened her eyes and found the empty obsidian, which had patiently remained in her palm, she was overcome with uneasiness. So she quickly put the obsidian back into the box and put it back in the armoire.

  A year and a half passed—clouds gathered over the city, turned grey, poured their heaviness out, and floated away to another city; dragonflies rose to the azure sky and departed with the change of season; cuckoos sang listlessly, ignorant of the shacks in the neighbourhood being demolished for a construction project; the wind swayed from north-east to south and from south to the north-west, carrying with it balloons, kites, leaves, clothes, asbestos sheets, and whispers from the city and beyond.

  Then, one day, Leela returned to the box, having saved up enough courage to re-encounter the discomfort. She went through the box, holding each object longer than usual. She looked at the colour, the shape, the size, every shine of perfection, and every scratch of imperfection that made each object special; Leela closed her eyes, absorbing everything in.

  As she put down each object, she put them in two sections. The buttons, tiles, pebbles, keys, pendant, a wrapper made into a doll by her uncle, and a lot of others went in one; the bronze bracelet that needed polishing, the Titan watch that needed its glass changed, the jhumka that needed a quick solder, and the Parker fountain pen with its ink went in the other.

  But Leela had a difficult time deciding where to put the obsidian pendant. After a lot of thinking, she put it with the first lot, filled them into the wooden box, and set it aside on her bed.

  Leela took the other lot and spent an hour fixing them. She also designated them new places on her shelf.

  After that, Leela returned to the box on the bed, with each heavy step trying to buy her some time to absorb the effects of her decision.

  Leela picked up the box, went behind the door, and emptied the objects into the bin. As all the objects rained into the bin, the obsidian pendant hit the rim of the bin and flew under the oak armoire.

  Leela reconsidered her act for a moment. Choosing to stand firm in her decision, Leela bent down—her face touching the carpet—as she looked for the obsidian pendant.

  There in the corner, against the hind-foot of the armoire, behind the grand procession of the dust in the sunlight, sat the black obsidian beside the fiery amber heart.

  Chuckling, Leela reached under the armoire.

- Mercy Rebonica