AUDIO
Judith closed her eyes, took a deep breath and let the smell of summertime fill her. With it came the memories.
She remembered days spent here on this hill, a gentle paradise hidden away from the city. The soft, uncut grass tickling her bare feet as she spun around, dancing in the open air, her summer dress blowing in the gentle breeze, floating up to rise above her knees. She remembered David’s laughter. His true laugh, not that fake snort he made at work parties. This was a loud, gulping noise, more of a guffaw than anything else. It made her smile every time she heard it.
Judith closed her eyes tighter and tilted her head back so she could feel the sun’s heat on her face. She held her arms out as wide as she could and spun, and spun, and spun.
She remembered David calling her, struggling to get the words out through this laughter.
“Come on you,” he teased, pretending to chastise her. “You’ll make yourself sick.”
He patted the red and white chequered picnic rug. He always insisted it wasn’t a real summer picnic if it was any other pattern or any other colour. Judith flopped down beside him with a giggle, her head coming to rest in his lap, her bare sun-kissed legs kicking the air. She looked up at him, at his handsome face, a face she felt she could stare at forever and never grow tired of. David smiled back and brushed the escaped strands of hair away from her eyes. She reached her arms around his neck and leaned up.
“I love you,” he whispered as he moved down to meet her and they found each others kiss.
Judith opened her eyes. The scene was not how she remembered. That place only existed in her memory now. Through the plasti-glass visor she saw the land spread out before her, desolate and scorched. Away in the distance the remains of buildings poked up like through the dead ground like the bones of some great, fallen beast. Nothing grew here now. It was an ugly, ploughed-up, brown, as if two giants had fought each other, destroying all that was beautiful in their blind anger. And in a way they had.
Bloated, black clouds lounged menacingly in the air always threatening to release their acidic loads. They looked as if they had been belched out of the ground, the final cancerous exhalations of a dying Earth.
Judith wondered if the sky was still blue beyond them. Would the children born now ever be able to see that, what she had seen? What she had known? Would they know what it was like to look up at a sky so blue you could see eternity, where you could almost imagine that Heaven was real?
David always said her eyes were as blue as the sky. She fought back the tears which rode in on the back of the sudden memory.
He’d whispered it to her the first time he’d brought her flowers. Nothing store bought, these had been the real thing. He’d come all the way out to this hill especially, just to pick them for her. That was before he’d ever brought her here, to his secret spot as he called it. He’d told her that her eyes were as blue as the sky and he’d never need to look up again when all he had to do was look into them. He’d told her she was beautiful and she’d believed him.
Judith closed her eyes again, as if she didn’t want to share their colour with the black mockery now spread out above her head, like paint thrown in fury across a canvas. She didn’t want to see this place as it really was anymore. She almost wished she’d never come. But somewhere, in the hidden chambers of her heart, she knew she’d had no choice. She’d needed to see it, to make it real for herself, to know that everything she’d loved was gone. She needed to see this to know that she would never see David again, never see him smiling happily as she danced in the grass. That he’d never bring her flowers again.
There were no more flowers.
Tears gathered along the rims of her still closed lids as she turned her back on a place she’d held so dear and never wanted to see again. She felt the weight of a colleague’s arm across the shoulders of her safety suit, slowly guiding her back to where the transport waited, engine humming patiently.
As she walked away the tears broke through and made their escape down her cheeks like competing raindrops racing down a windowpane. Judith tasted the salt on her lips and for a moment imagined she could taste David’s mouth on hers.
She thought she could smell flowers.
