Yesteryear's Paradise

• Mia Kelly, Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2013

The sun dozed in the sky like a cat curled deep in a cushion of summertime blue. Its sunbeam-whiskers tickled the man’s cheek as he sat staring over fields that were mellow and endless and serene, dreaming of a tomorrow that could never come to be.

A parched breeze purred over the wheat, flattening it in a wave that rambled from one horizon to the other, to the ends of the earth. As a boy, the man had imagined that a golden train would journey the wind, that it would spirit him off to some faraway paradise beyond the sunburnt field. But such childish fantasies had fallen into a past that had worn and tattered away until it was but a haze of smoke lost in midsummer skies. A vagrant memory left to wander away.

Ceaselessly, agelessly, the sky would run blue, the fields would flow with arid wind, and he would stand sentinel to this world without meaning or purpose. It had been this way forever, it would be this way forever and all he could do was dream of another way.

He stood; perhaps catching a wisp of yesteryear’s dream upon the wind, and he began to walk. His eyes were fixed on the horizon, on the stark hope of paradise.
. . .
Feet bruised by long roads had returned to old haunts, memories tangling at the old man’s sleeves like ghostly cobwebs.

Stumbling… faltering…continuing… He had scoured the land to where its end met its beginning and where the ground met the sky. He had found only eternity and hopelessness. He had found his way back to where he had begun; back to yesteryear.

There was no faraway paradise.

Exhaustion, regret – the end of life hung over him like the heat of a summertime’s day. Finally, finally, his knees wobbled and gave. Finally, his breath was too heavy to hold and his bones were too brittle to stand and his eyes were too wearied of sight to keep seeing.

He collapsed.
. . .
The boy arose from the coil of yesteryear’s flesh, forever to stand watch over the summertime field as it flowed, around and around, like blood through the heart of eternity.

He mourned the old man, but already the grip of memories had loosened, so that the pearly openness of a child’s mind could once more bare itself to the world.

For just a moment tears smouldered in the little boy’s eyes, searing his vision into an intoxicated clash of brightest yellow and deepest blue. But when the breeze stung his wet cheek, the boy smeared his hands over his face to dash away old sorrows. He smiled.

The fields were his, the air warm beneath the sapphire ethers, and the sun was a golden train streaking over the wind.

He would find solace in the melody of his own heart, the rhythm of his own breath.

Because if there was nothing more to life than this, then this must be paradise.