Short Story: She's Started To Have Visions

Ronia Ibrahim (she/her) 

There wasn’t much to say about the place when they first moved in, except that it’s right next to the zoo! Mona said. Lennie had rolled her eyes, hugging a box of books to her chest as they surveyed their new home. It was damp and empty, as all new rentals are, floor discoloured with the sweat of past sofas, spilled drinks, and ghost cabinets. 

And it was an apartment, which meant no yard. Lennie said we’ve got to claim this god forsaken space somehow so they decided to saturate their tiny balcony with plants, a lush territory spilling over the railings in soil and green. When Lennie left in a huff to wash the dirt from under her fingernails, Mona stayed for a while. She liked the view from up here, even if it was just the block of flats one the other side. It was a good place to think about new beginnings and such.  

Mona had always been a bit of a dreamer. Her English teacher first coined the term in Year 10. She liked English because she liked that teacher, who always told her things that made her feel special. That year, heaps of people did their speech on global warming and how so many terrible things were happening and the world was on fire, while Mona did hers on how we could still save it, with the help of bicycles and sunflower seeds. “You’re a dreamer, aren’t you, Mona”, Miss Trentham had chuckled and Mona had felt a glow of pride inside her cheeks. She got four Excellence credits from that speech. 

The next morning they awoke to the sound of lions. It was a Sunday, the air was milky-warm. They made pancakes from the bit of flour and egg in their desolate pantry and slow-danced to “Can You Feel The Love Tonight?” Then they spent the rest of it lying on the floor among their boxes of belongings half tended-to, curling their toes to the sun’s shadows. When did we get flowers? Mona laughed as the last bits of daylight descended over the stack of New Yorkers, still in their boxes. But then Lennie said what flowers? and the daffodils turned into her elbow.

It was the day after they moved next to the zoo that she started to have visions. As in, seeing things—random, odd moments where the inanimate turned animate, or an object began to wriggle into life before her very eyes. 

In contrast, her dreams were awfully plain. They usually involved going to the supermarket, losing something, or the cute barista near her old work. They would usually play out in ordinary fashion; she would find her keys in her pocket, or she’d walk out the cafe with a mocha again, blushing the same colour as the tomato stack at New World. 

It was as if they switched places—the absurdism of dreams replacing real life. Whether it was the pear on the coffee table that melted into a puddle or toast that jumped out like a fold of skin—brief, freckly, tanned, then just toast. Real life and its sober impossibilities were tiring. Sometimes, she would wake up to the immediate thunder of cicadas, ricocheting off the bedroom walls like a swarm of zig zags. Sometimes it was the yawn of lions next door. Every morning that question felt a little more overused, a little more pleading: everyone sees things sometimes don’t they?

She did not tell Lennie because she thought it wasn't that big of a deal. She did not tell Lennie because she did not want to be thought of as crazy. 

I’m going for a walk, Mona announced, on the third day of visions. The concept felt thrilling and adventurous, and the prospect of non-domestic air seemed appealing. She thought it would be good to familiarise myself with the area, ay, so I'll see you later, then she was out the door and descending.

Then there was the zoo. Somehow the neighbourhood seemed to shrink at its welcome sign; the bronze bear statue’s presence more dominant than their ten-story apartment block. She felt the urge to turn away from it. Yes it was wonderful to think of all the birds and mammals and lizards right next to her flat, but she thought it a little unsettling that she was the human newcomer while the monkeys had been wriggling around these parts for years. 

It was lucky that she discovered a small bush walk, at the opposite end of the street. 

The plaque at the bottom of it said that 40 Tōtara trees were planted here five years ago in lieu of conservation efforts. How tall they had grown in that time! Five years ago Mona was in high school, doing speeches, having crushes, and yearning for validation from her English teacher. It was odd to think that she had thought herself so grown up back then, all the while these trees had stood in the same place, inching towards the sky in quiet photosynthesis. They were humble, blissful in their stagnancy. If the world was ending they did not know it. 

Suddenly Mona became overcome with sorrow. But why should she ever feel sorry for herself in the first place? She could never be expected to be a tree. Likewise a tree could never be her. A tree could not go to uni or pay bills or go flatting. A tree did not go through puberty. It did not know English. She tried to affirm that her own growth, while leafless, was still valuable. But when she stood under the Tōtara, she felt like the youngest and smallest thing of all time. 

The bushwalk led up to a small lookout on a patch of hill. From up here the town looked simple. weather-board huts perched on a strokes of concrete, toy buses and cars tracing the streets. The apartment looked like a minor crater, throbbing slightly with the currents of heat. And the zoo was visible too, but only the tops of the chimpanzee exhibit. A playground model made out of popsicle sticks. There was something about the way the world looked Outside and On Top, that made the Inside and the Bottom so comfortably insignificant.

She breathed a sigh of relief. At what, she wasn't sure. The visions did not escape her here. Nor did the sound of cicadas. Out of the corner of her eye she saw that a flax bush was waving at her in a friendly motion. Like it was saying I know what’s up. Like it was saying I understand. 

You’re a dreamer aren’t you?

Yes I think so. But I think she meant naivety not ambition. Or do you think it’s stupidity? Or insanity?

The flax bush did not reply. 

And am I dreaming? she muttered and knocked on her forehead a few times. She felt a dull thudding on her skull, but no awakening. 

She suddenly felt the urge to lie down, feel her spine mould against the earth beneath her. Although there was something that felt so vulnerable, almost illegal about it, being horizontal to the earth, parallel to the sky. But if there was something sacrilege about that moment, there’d be a sign from the universe. A pine cone from above to split her head open or something. But nothing came hurtling. 

So Mona laid down and closed her eyes. In the womb-like orange of her eyelids she began to imagine a series of flax bushes, a fringe of harakeke, setting the scene of a memory from primary. Katikati was what they called the flax bushes back then because they had a habit of slicing your shins if you weren’t careful. You wanna watch out for the katikati at the end, her classmates warned her. She was standing on the edge of the flying fox platform at Year 6 camp, plucked into the air by a harness. Nothing else about this memory is vivid, because the rest is windy blur of black that went zzzzzzzzzzip, the feeling of scrunched-up eyes, a deadening smack, and then at the other side already, in front of her classmates, and the full, raised thumb of the instructor. And her ankles were untouched. Katikati—that wasn’t their real name, but they had a habit of slicing you open.

***

Something vibrates, stirring wind into Mona’s chest, forcing her eyes open. For the briefest moment, the world is colourless, as if she’s just woken up after a forest fire. Slowly, her conscience returns, and she knows this because it becomes easier to define the treetops' subtle yellows and olive, the grey clouds are more saturated. And the vibrations are coming from her phone, flashing lightning green next to her. It’s Lennie. 

Yo where are you? You’ve been gone on your walk for like 3 hours. Are you ok?

A few feet away in the bush, she sees a black wig, rustling among the leaf floor, breathing. 

Oh god, she mumbles into the phone. Yeah. I’m ok. I fell asleep on the hill.

You fell asleep in the forest? Bro how are you not dead?

I don’t know. Sorry. I’m on my way now.

She gets up and brushes the pine needles off her jeans, like the Tōtara had begun burying her. It starts to rain slow watery blades. In front of her, the wig rises, stumbles, then swells into a black bird, soaring into the air in a flurry of feathers and pieces of glass. In the distance, a chimpanzee cries.