Part 3. A Snapshot.

 

Awareness stole in slowly.

Probably the soreness of her feet began the process of coming back to herself. She was barefoot. She found herself walking on a the soft rolling mound in a desert landscape. It didn’t look familiar, but then would it have looked familiar if this had been like any other day?

She didn’t know why she kept taking steps. It seemed like she must have been going somewhere, if she could just remember where.

“I am,” she thought, and then stopped. No name sprang instantly to mind.

There were lights around her. Maybe the lights had something to do with why she found herself here on this remote patch of desert.

Night had fallen, and it was getting chilly. She looked down at herself. She was wearing jeans, and a dark colored t-shirt. She ran her fingers through her hair. She usually wore it pinned up with one of those big claw things, but it was missing and her shoulder length dark hair fell in tangled locks. It kept her neck and shoulders warm, she thought.

She stopped walking, to spare her feet. “Bertie,” she said. “Who is Bertie?”

Some of the lights were amber colored. Amorphous. Having no particular locus of emanation. They made her think of summer warmth. She smiled there in the dark.

Some were blue like clear evening skies. Deeply blue. There was also lavender, and a deep pink. She enjoyed them very much. She watched them drifting like jelly fishes almost. Aimless, apparently.

She thought she had better start walking again. Surely. But her feet were really sore, now that she was noticing them.

“Not a good place for you,” came to her mind.

“Is someone here?” Bertie asked. She couldn’t see anyone there in the dark with the pretty colored lights moving all around her.

“Yes, lady, I am here,” but the word for lady was a bit smudged in her mind, as if the speaker thought in some other tongue.

“But, who are you?” she asked again.

“Hewhowards,” the words seemed to say. She laughed because she didn’t know the word. Ward.

“I will take you to a safe place for you,” he said, “If you will allow it.”

“May I see you?” she said.

“Yes.”

He seemed like a very large man. A giant surely, barely visible there in the colorful semi-dark.

“I don’t know where I am,” she said after looking him over for a minute or so.

“I know,” he said aloud, in a soft deep voice.

He bent over so that she could reach his neck, and said, “wrap your left arm around my neck and I will carry you in my right arm.”

So she did, and he picked her up like a little child and began walking away from the hillside of the colored lights.

She trusted him absolutely.

🌵🌖🌵