Niko’s Eye

Chapter 65.

Zainab.

Life couldn’t have been any better for Zainab.

She smiled to herself as she sat on the roof terrace of her father’s humongous mansion. Feet raised up on an antique mahogany table, finished with a glass top. She could smell the floor varnishes and furniture polishes floating around in the atmosphere.

In this light that paints my skin so warmly, the trees are dancing ladies, each in dresses more fabulous than any designer can craft. They move, choreographed by the wind, in perfect time with one another. They are the life and soul of this early summer morning, and I wonder how many hues of green my eyes are witnessing. As they stretch upwards and outwards toward the light, drinking in rays as pure as the rain, I stretch my arms up too, fingers spread toward the sun and slowly begin to dance.

She smiled as a poem that Isis had once recited to her, flashed through her mind. It resonated with how she was feeling at the moment.

7:26.

She glanced at her watch, and acknowledged that the scent in the air made sense.

Of course, this was the perfect time to clean a house.

Her father had swerved back to his house, claiming that he had forgotten something and she had taken the opportunity to wander around the house until she finally settled into the room she liked the most.

Zainab didn’t care that she was late for school, she was more interested in the size of her father’s house and all of the cars that were neatly parked in his massive garage.

There are times being late is rude, other times it is polite, different cultures view punctuality so very differently, some take times as estimates and arrangements as possibilities. For some being late is very serious and taken as offensive. All in all, it is relative and perspective is key.

Zainab hadn’t been brought up to view punctuality as important and to take it with much seriousness, so she wasn’t worried. At the back of her head, there was a small voice reminding her of how frantic her father was that morning, and she had made a mental note to ask him as soon as they were back on their way.

And well enough, she heard her father shouting her name from the bottom of the grand stairs of the house.

She ran back downstairs and flew out of the house, into the car that was waiting for her.

"Sorry dad."

"Yeah, it’s okay. Let’s just go."

Frowning, she cleared her throat and tried to find out what her father’s problem was.

"Nothing. I’m just grumpy today. Seemed to have woken up on the wrong side of the bed it seems. And on top of that, I’m fricking late for an important meeting."

"Well, life has some aspects that require firm punctuality and others that do not. To behave as if "late" was equal in all situations is to miss opportunities to relax and be in the blessed moment. Give divine intervention a chance when you can. Perhaps by being late once in a while you give more room for good things to happen."

Sergio parked right in front of her school and waited for her to get out, lightly nodding at what she was saying to him.

"Mmmh."

Zainab spotted her girlfriend Ida, and jogged up to her, kissing her on the mouth, while fully conscious that her father hadn’t left yet.

Ah, freedom.

Sergio.

"There are better and worse versions of loss. We are aiming for the better version because then we have the strongest base possible for rebuilding. That is our victory, it is the only one on the table, and it is a painful, sad and desperately awful form of success. Society can fall a hundred stories, seventy, thirty... whatever happens, however much we win, it will be measured in how much more we could have lost than we did. I’m sorry the news is that bleak. But, there you go."

The radio blared in the background as Sergio skipped through his mind, wondering how he could let things get so out of control so quickly. He knew that Aisha would want to rat him out by using blackmail but it just hadn’t occurred to him that she would’ve thought about it so soon. It threw his plan off-balance and threatened his freedom. He was supposed to be calm because he saw it coming, but instead, sweat beads formed on the top of his lip and his wrinkling hands were shaking as they held the steering wheel.

Fuck.

He took a few deep breaths to calm himself down.

When he got to his destination, he buzzed the doorbell and the massive gates in front of him, croaked open.

Gliding through the driveway filled with strong and stoic trees, he felt a gentle wave of relaxation.

Though black heavens and sun-lit days, the tree is sentry to landscape, the stoic guardian of so many souls.

"When breaking news is untethered to truth and reason, when it fails to see events from multiple perspectives and do the real legwork of journalism. We need the everyday Lois Lane heroes to step up, as many already are. Presenting ungrounded hearsay as truth is causing cognitive dissonance on populations, a form of psychological damage, similar to what we call gas-lighting. And this is why for population health the media must be held to standards - they are free to speak of whatever they want so long as they can back it up with facts, logic and reason that are ideally informed by empathy and the intuition of nurture."

He stared at the car radio with disgust, before smacking it off.

Is breaking news bray-king you? Does it break what you knew and keep you saddled with fear and doubt? Are you addicted to car-rots, the orange tweets that are care-rot? Does the breaking knews contin-ewe to fleece your sanity? Because it is creating so many short-circuits in your brain that soon even number five won’t be able to make you come alive.

His thoughts were jumbled up in his mind, causing his eyes to shut tightly.

Like, really? At such a time.

He opened his eyes and saw that the man he came to see was waiting for him on the lawn of the mansion.

Let’s change the gears of this plan.

Aisha.

Though the path is dark, cast into shadow by the tall mossy pines on either side, the sun must be brilliant beyond it. Every tree glows brightly virescent just at the edges of the trunks, a biological halo of sorts that brings a soothing happiness I’ve been missing these past few days. I have to fight. I have no other goddamn choice. I can’t rot in here while my empire is being enjoyed by someone else.

The worst part about the whole thing was that, Aisha did not even know which facility she was being held in, but now she had a clue because winter had come, and in Barbados, there was hardly any cold weather. She climbed onto her little bunk bed and peered through the tiny barred windows of her cell.

When the trees have almost cried their last golden tears for the passing of the warm season, glossy on the rain-washed street, winter is at hand. The sky is of rolling clouds, a thousand greys from deep to pale. In the morning half-light the evergreens are blackish-green silhouettes and the snowy mountain peaks behind them are every child’s Christmas dream.

Christmas? It was never my thing.

Winter trees shiver in the bitter wind, naked branches adorned with snow. Clusters of twigs, gnarled and twisted, extend like the very hands of old man winter, ready to catch the soft falling flakes. Against the dark mossy trunk the brilliant white drifts rise in soft curves and fall again to the hidden ground. It will be some time before the trees awaken and when they do it will be a slow stirring, gradually growing unnoticed buds until finally the delicate papery leaves and blooms within are ready.

Aisha thought it would be beautiful to compare the introduction of spring with her story. She thought of herself in that moment, as a naked winter tree, waiting to bud and flourish again.

"Gazing at the winter trees it’s hard to imagine them re-clothed in their finery. With roots buried deep in the frozen earth they sleep, their twigs moving in the breeze, stirring their wintry dreams. Ice forms and melts, snow showers come and go; then each spring the first delicate blossoms and leaves send a frisson of joy through the neighbourhood. Yet as summer wears on we take the deep green leaves for granted until finally they blush the colours of autumn," she whispered to herself.

Aisha was given a cell without anybody else.

Thats how dangerous they think I am.

She smirked inwardly.

She then heard the voices of two prison guards outside of her cell.

"After last season the winter trees simply did not wake. We feared they were dead, that they had died in their seasonal slumber, but our tests showed living cores. The farmers, the biologists and the gardeners floated tens of conflicting theories, but still they remained in their wintry form - bare limbs extending into the blue sky. The birds hopped on the boughs that stubbornly refused to grow buds. The trees stayed that way all through the summer and fall, only looking right in the winter time under the flurries of snow. When they remained bare the next spring the concern intensified, next came the failure of the wheat seed to germinate. Each one remaining inanimate in the soil."

Is this a sign?