VOICES - before it was written

Francis Rosenfeld
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These are spoken fragments—reflections, passages, and pieces of stories that have not yet settled. Some of them have written forms. Some of them point to places that already exist. Some of them are the only version. francisrosenfeld.substack.com

  1. 3d ago

    Rachel: Reading from Between Mirrors - Ritual

    When she was about six Claire started wondering what had happened to her parents. She tried to ask her grandparents about them, but they got so upset with her that she cried for days and decided never to bring up the subject again. Children tend to believe that everything that’s not right with the world must be their fault and adults will be mad at them for it and stop loving them, and Claire was no exception. Of course she never ceased questioning the issue, silently, and over the years constructed fantastic scenarios about what might have happened to them, stories which were heroic and extraordinary and made her hope that maybe some of their exceptional quality rubbed off on her too. One wouldn’t call Claire’s life exceptional. One wouldn’t call it miserable either. She had worked so hard at fitting in that the results, which turned out to be the exact opposite of that, were almost hilariously bad. Unfortunately Claire couldn’t appreciate the fine irony because she had lost her sense of humor somewhere along the way and replaced it with a pleasant attitude meant to accommodate any opinion she might encounter on her journey. That afternoon, when she asked what had happened to her parents and got scolded, Claire ran out into the garden and hid in the natural hollow created by the thick and gnarly roots of an oak tree where they broke the ground, and that spot became her secret hideaway from the world from that day on, the place where she could go to dream and find comfort in good times and in bad. That oak tree remained her best friend throughout her childhood: it didn’t judge, it had no expectations and it listened to whatever Claire’s wild imagination came up with. A weird friend for a child, but, as I said, Claire herself was weird. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit francisrosenfeld.substack.com

    Rachel: Reading from Between Mirrors - Ritual

  2. Oct 20

    Rachel: Reading from Between Mirrors - Memories

    “Get out of the doorway!” The words boomed like thunder in Claire’s ears, now almost thirty years later, with the same intensity and pronouncement they carried the first time she’d heard Grandmother utter them, the first time of many. She smiled vaguely to the memory. It was vast, this mansion of her grandparents where she had grown up, but Claire didn’t know it at the time; she never questioned what she saw because she’d never known another way of life, she’d never ventured past the end of the formal alley flanked by huge oak trees, hundreds of years old, which led straight to its front doors. For her the mansion and its garden were the world. The most interesting feature of this large house, and the one that had prompted Claire’s memory, was its entryway. The double doors carved out of solid walnut had stained glass panes set in intricate wood tracery and were so heavy little Claire always needed both hands to pry them open. The doors were flanked by large crystal mirrors, parallel to each other, which ran floor to ceiling and reflected everything and everybody that passed between them into infinity, contours diffracted into rainbows in places by the finely polished bevels around their edges. She must have been five years old at the time, intensely curious about this exciting new world she’d been born into, wandering around the old mansion whose windows were frequently propped open to temper the sweltering heat of the Louisiana summers and whose broad surrounding porch offered welcoming shade during those afternoons when even the wind stood still. Nature afforded itself no movements and no sounds then, other than the eerie trilling of the tree frogs. This was her first memory of the mirrors: she was standing between them trying to understand why there were so many of her and why they seemed to get farther and farther away. She could still remember the way the white ribbons of the dress Grandmother had sewn by hand just in time for her birthday moved in the doors’ draft like they were alive. Little Claire had managed to smear cake frosting on the dress, a fact she was trying very hard to hide, and she remembered feeling somewhat relieved that all the Claires in the mirrors were also looking down with guilty expressions on their faces. A razor sharp ray of sun sliced through the stained glass suddenly, with the swiftness of a blade, and hardened the contours around everything, rendering the shadows deeper and softer than black velvet. For a second Claire could almost touch the substance of that shadow, feel its palpable nature. She got scared of it and ran out of the doorway, her frilly white ribbons trailing behind her, and promised herself to listen to Grandmother and steer clear of the doorway going further. Naturally, she forgot her promise the very next day. Claire’s fascination with this mirror world which she perceived as three dimensional due to its endless patterns of reflection had subsequently earned her many scoldings, but she simply couldn’t resist the attraction it exerted on her; she kept getting drawn to it like a compass needle to the north. Even now the fascination that weird alcove exerted on her made her feel guilty, an absurd emotion for a woman in her mid thirties, even one who was still trying to find herself. She decided to work on her assertiveness and stand wherever she pleased, since she was a grown up, gosh darn it, but her ears instinctively tuned in to hear if her grandparents were approaching, so she could get out of there before they saw her. She was grateful for her grandparents’ company and felt relieved to be back home, but she was also kind of embarrassed to move back in with them at her age. She shrugged. Life had unexpected ways to steer one’s journey and it had certainly taught her it was easier sometimes to accept them at face value. The world outside these familiar walls hadn’t turned out the way she hoped, nothing like the overheated imagination of her youth had painted it to be. The real world didn’t end up being her enchanted playground, quite the contrary, it stubbornly and consistently refused to cooperate. She was too weird for it, Claire learned. She didn’t exactly know how or why, but she didn’t seem to fit in it or understand its ways, the subtle cues and unspoken agreements that function so flawlessly in society and form the basis of common understanding. It’s not that her life had been worse than anybody else’s, it’s just that everybody else accepted it the way it was, without unnecessary commentary, while Claire, for whatever cursed reason, could not. She had questions in school which made her teachers uncomfortable, she had questions at work which made coworkers find her difficult, but worse of all, she had questions regarding social expectations that doomed any potential friendships before they even started. She often felt like a car stuck going the wrong way on a one way street with no places to turn. She couldn’t even remember what prompted her to pack up and come back to Louisiana on this self-imposed sabbatical she took because she didn’t have an alternative to it. “Get out of the doorway!” the real voice of her grandmother startled her from behind, and Claire let out a resigned sigh: she had fallen for the spell of the mirrors again and had lost track of herself. She obeyed, out of habit, and stepped out of the little alcove, somewhat disappointed that her endless reflections were now confined to just one body. “You never listen, bebelle,” Grandmother shook her head in distress. “Thirty years old and still you never listen!” “What’s wrong with it, maman?” Claire forgot to subdue the inquisitive streak that never failed to get her in trouble. “Why do you get so upset when I hang around the front doors?” “It’s bad luck, child! Do you need me to draw you a picture? Why would you want to invite trouble? God knows it is easy enough for it to find you anyway.” “Please, maman,” Claire besought her in her loveliest cajoling voice, one she hoped the elder would find too endearing to deny, “just tell me!” Grandmother dismissed her with an irate hand gesture, turned her back to the granddaughter and went to the kitchen. Claire was still standing in front of the doors, whose intricate stained glass and wood motifs, depicting angels and flowers, were close enough to get caught in the mirrors. They multiplied in ways that confused the eye and made the entire scene absolutely hypnotic. “Aren’t you hungry, dear?” the soft voice of her grandfather startled her from her second reverie. She felt his hand on her shoulder guiding her gently towards the kitchen. She was hungry, she realized, and weary, and grateful to be cared for again, if only for a while. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit francisrosenfeld.substack.com

    Rachel: Reading from Between Mirrors - Memories

  3. Oct 19

    The Room In Between

    The room was large and not brightly lit, a feature that had obviously been designed to create a relaxing ambiance and induce a meditative state. Its calming features worked in concert with the soft muzak tunes and the cozy leather chairs, whose generous width and soft cushions cradled the body into a state close to sleep. On the back wall there was a bar with under-lit glass shelving and strange looking bubbly bottles in unusual shapes and colors. They were all filled with liquids that looked better suited for a chemistry lab than for cocktail ingredients. The dark wood of the bar was topped with a bright white marble slab, streaked with deep green and bluish veins. Oriental carpets, which looked a little worn but definitely expensive, covered every inch of the floor, overlapping in places, so there was no telling what kind of flooring lay underneath. Here and there, on dark wooden side tables, generic ambient lights, elegant but subdued, cast a gentle glow. The walls were the only element in the room that seemed designed to draw attention. They were covered in intricate wooden inlay panels, not dark like the furniture, but in a range of warm golden oak hues, no two designs the same and with no discernible theme: exotic blossoms and twirling vines, geometric motifs, circular labyrinths, grids and landscapes, trompe l’oeils, flower garlands and abstract art. The entire wall was lit from the floor with wall washers, the way they illuminate important buildings and monuments at night and with the same eerie effect. High up close to the ceiling where the light of the floor lights was fading, the motifs seemed to come alive in the flicker of the buzzing bulbs, in an illusory motion so distracting that one would forgo even the slightest curiosity about what lay above. He couldn’t remember how he got there. He just knew he’d been in this room before, more than once, judging by the familiarity he had with its features. Find the rest of the story here, or read this chapter in translation at frosenfeld.fika.bar This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit francisrosenfeld.substack.com

    The Room In Between

  4. Oct 1

    Elena: Reading from The Garden of Belief - Work in Progress

    It doesn’t take much to make the mind wander, especially when one is engaged in tasks that don’t require any mental processing. Cimmy got mesmerized by the silky texture of the onion’s skins which slipped under her fingers when she sorted the seeds by size into large wooden vats. Lost in her inner world, she went over the smallest building parts of matter again and again, wondering how come they stuck together in consistent ways, so that their composite was always a rock, or a girl, or a fronded leaf. None of it seemed random, as if reality itself bowed to a higher law with reverent obedience. After her random wanderings through reality and her unexpected growth leaps, Cimmy wasn’t sure about anything anymore. She wasn’t anxious, or afraid, because a deep instinct she couldn’t express told her she was precious and protected in this realm, or whatever one wanted to call this ever shifting reality; she was always its center and the reason for its accommodating changes. She felt like her whole life was nothing more than a conversation with this much larger intelligence, to which she herself belonged, a part of it, but not small at all, and imbued with the same gift of creation and change. Whatever this was, it was alive; she was sure of it. Probably made of the same living blobs that moved around, guided by unknown reasons, to keep it healthy and in balance. “Rahima,” she started suddenly, startling her friend, who was lost in her own world as well. Maybe everyone had his or her own world, and those small personal realities touched and merged into each other for brief stretches of time, and then became disjointed again. “Yes,” her friend replied. “Do you think there’s something up there?” She pointed to the sky. “Or someone,” Rahima nodded. “Who are you and what have you done to my friend?” “I’m serious. This, none of this, feels random.” “You think a higher power purposefully put Bertha and Josepha in charge of your life to torment you, stunt your growth and steal your joy?” “Maybe, in the large scheme of things, I’m not that important.” “How does it help you to know there is a higher power, but it doesn’t even know you exist? On the bright side, if it never pays attention to you, you can do whatever you want.” “True,” Cimmy thought. She enjoyed the freedom to follow up on her curiosity wherever it led, even to the metal-sweating rocks, if the spirit moved her. She returned to the subject that had been occupying her mind for some time now. “Think about it: if it has to follow up on everything to make sure the rocks rock and the plants plant and the humans human, how could it possibly have time to deal with me, or Bertha’s musings? We’re not that interesting.” “Maybe it runs out of thinking space, you know? Maybe that explains all the things that look ugly and unfinished: smelly swamps, barren lands, awful people.” “You know what that means, right? It means that when we were desperate and barely scraping by, eating bitter roots and starving, we probably were in the unfinished portion of the higher intelligence’s work.” “What bitter roots? What are you talking about, Cimmy?” And again, the reality bubbles, which had so easily merged for a while, suddenly bounced apart, making each of their personal worlds impenetrable to mutual understanding. Cimmy couldn’t understand her own jumping through realities, where everything was almost the same, almost, and because she couldn’t understand it, she always forgot that this Rahima, although she looked the same, had never shared those early experiences with her, like the other Rahimas did, and all the references to those times were wasted. “Never mind. Here. Now. Does this look like finished reality to you?” “I suppose. This is good: there’s an abundance of food and comfort, we’re in good health, and the meadow is beautiful. The world is beautiful, Cimmy, that’s what I think.” “We must be in the finished portion of reality, then.” “Why don’t you ask it, whatever it is? If it is a higher mind, it should be able to hear you.” “Especially now that we’re in a part that it already had a chance to work on, I suppose,” Cimmy agreed. That was a very good idea. Rahima never ceased to impress Cimmy with her unexpected insights: under a silly and easily distracted exterior, she concealed a deep fountain of wisdom. One must stay true to the scientific process. If one has an idea about how things are, one has the obligation to test it and accept the results, wherever they may lead. That was universally true, and what is universally true must apply to what kept the universe running smoothly, whatever one wanted to call it. If it had a mind, she should try to communicate with it and find out what it wanted, what it was like, and how she fit into its story. She did not know how one communicated with non-human entities, so she closed her eyes, trying to figure it out. Time passed around her, while she stood still inside it, like a boulder in the middle of a bouncy brook, until its spirited waters got blocked suddenly, drowning her in all their happenings, by Josepha’s angry shout. “What have you been doing with those onions? Bertha, come look at this: the whole day she did nothing at all! Three onions sorted, that’s all she accomplished today. And they’re sorted wrong too!” Bertha arrived, with a full head of steam, to throw more kindling on the fire of Josepha’s ire. She examined the contents of Cimmy’s bucket and then got in the girl’s face to intimidate her. Cimmy looked unimpressed, which infuriated the latter even more. “We can’t have someone like you ruin the efforts of every hard-working person in this village. When you were a child, we put up with your bad seed because we felt sorry for you, but not anymore. Bear witness to me, Josepha, when I declare she doesn’t belong to this community anymore. Go wherever your twisted soul leads you, girl, as far away from here as you need to be so I never have to see you again.” Cimmy got up, surprised by the insane request, even now, after Bertha’s deranged and abusive behavior had bulldozed her work and purpose so many times, unsure where to go, and what to do, disoriented by the abrupt and destabilizing intrusion upon her life. Most of all, she was sad to part from Rahima and wondered if the latter would eventually forget her, just like she would if she were to die. What happened after death, anyway, if there ever was an after? She put that on the list of things to ask the higher power, if she managed to get in communication with it, looked around to see if Fay was nearby, because she was absolutely determined not to leave him behind, and once she found him, left the village again, at sunset, without looking back. The familiar scents and colors of the meadow welcomed her, as she made her way to the seashore, in a daze, thinking for sure Rahima would try to look for her there, or come after her to the island, and she should try to leave a message by the raft, to let her friend know her whereabouts, so many thoughts, racing, racing, no longer held at bay by small and mindless manual chores. The moon rose over the ocean, and the luminous creatures that formed large pools under the water surface flashed blue and green under its silver light. Rahima was right; the world was beautiful, and if that was true, then this place where she found herself now was part of the finished reality as well, and as such safe and welcoming. Cimmy found a patch of tall beach grass on the shore and made her bed in it, from which she could look up at the bedazzled firmament, where a profusion of stars filled her with wonder. How could the higher power have time to talk to her when it had to work so hard to make that infinity of stars and keep them steady in the sky? She pondered whether all those lights she saw up there were finished, and figured maybe some of them were not, maybe some were unstable, ugly, and scary. Who was to know? She had no way of telling, since they were impossible to reach, at least for now. And thus Cimmy solved the problem that had tormented sages and saints forever: if there was a God, how did he allow so much evil in the world? It was very simple. God’s reality was still a work in progress, as yet unfinished. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit francisrosenfeld.substack.com

    Elena: Reading from The Garden of Belief - Work in Progress

  5. Sep 21

    Elena: Reading from The Garden of Belief - Into the Structure of Matter

    Cimmy got lost in thought as she assessed the plots for planting, her hands caressing the dark rich dirt. One thing was clear: nature didn’t need her help to pour forth abundance, so her trip to the fields was purely decorative. When did the earth decide to bless them with such fertile soil, she wondered as she looked at it, as if from far away, as if from another world. She’d been so accustomed to the struggle to survive she never stopped to question her purpose, and now that the struggle was over, and her dream garden was a reality, all the markers on her path came in full view to show her the journey had never been random: someone, or something, led her here, stepping stone to stepping stone. It stood to reason the rest of her journey wasn’t random either, and she got suddenly scared of that invisible future that already existed somewhere, and curious about all its discoveries that hadn’t happened yet, and weary of her own mortality. She suddenly thought of Rahima, and couldn’t bear the thought of losing her, so her own demise suddenly lost significance by comparison. We don’t live to die. We live for what comes before that. That is the allotted time we need to beautify, make happy, fill with meaning, love, and friendship. Was there an afterlife? Bertha and Josepha certainly felt entitled to their great rewards, and Cimmy had been brought up in a culture that expected something after death. She always thought the afterlife must be that beautiful vision of her paradisaical garden, and now that her vision had been transposed into reality, she felt confused. If one got one’s great rewards here, and one’s spirit outlasted death, then what was left to experience on the other side? She’d shared her mental struggle with Rahima, and the latter took it all in stride, with her good-natured laughter that made everything seem easy and clear. “I’m sure they’ll think of something for your moral dessert, Cimmy! Don’t waste your time trying to guess what it will be.” “Who’s ‘they’, Rahima?” “Well, you know how people say ‘they’, ‘them’. Whatever seems to be but never leaves a trace on the world below.” “What if there is no ‘they’? What if it’s always only been us?” “Funny for you to mention that, you of the magical rat who led you past the walls and brought you gifts from the world beyond. Speaking of which, where is Fay?” The rat peeked its head from Cimmy’s blouse, excited to be included in the philosophical discussion. “If anybody else made that comment…” Cimmy shook her head, appalled. “We’re on the verge of the most exciting scientific discoveries yet, and you think my pet has magical powers.” “Hey, I’m an art curator; allow me a bit of artistic license. How old do you think he is?” “Who, Fay? I never thought about it.” “Precisely.” “He’s a rat, Rahima!” Rahima glanced at Fay, who looked pleased to be acknowledged, perfectly content with his place in reality, and positively ageless. A little shuffle in the grass brought Cimmy back to the fields. It erased the memory she was reliving while she watched the real Fay approach, with what looked like a strange seed in his mouth. It was a gemstone, rather large and misshapen, bright blue, and gleaming with its own inner light, which got fractured by the different planes inside the stone and refracted onto itself, bouncing between the walls of its inner structure. All of Cimmy’s philosophical musings took second fiddle to this unexpected view into the intricacy of matter, and she looked closer, trying to figure out what it was about that translucent stone that made light bounce that way, change color, and get trapped inside it like a flame inside a lantern. She left the field to its own devices, since it seemed to be doing quite well without a planting schedule, and rushed home to her laboratory to take a closer glimpse inside the gemstone. Staring at the little wonder through a magnifying glass, and then two, and three, Cimmy gazed deeper into the nature of matter, amazed that things looked nothing like themselves when seen up-close. Inside the little gem there were lines, planes and angles, an entire barely visible scaffolding, whose essence hid itself from the eye when seen from certain vantage points. Light got trapped between those planes, bouncing back and forth, amplified, glowing brighter blue in the oblique light of the setting sun. “Where have you been? I’ve been looking all over for you!” Rahima startled her, and when she lifted her eyes from the stone, the ethereal worlds behind her gaze gave her friend pause. “What have you seen, Cimmy?” “I’ve seen inside matter. The inside of matter looks very different. Come and see,” she enticed her friend to look through the magnifying glasses. The latter obliged, scrunching her forehead and questioning Cimmy’s sanity, because all she could see was a big blurry blob, and then suddenly the invisible inner structure of the gem revealed itself to her, a mesmerizing structure of planes and angles, the ideal beauty of perfection, right inside the misshapen stone, which, for all its endearing light trapping qualities, wouldn’t have stood out from the background. Rahima couldn’t speak, just stood there in awe of the perfection of matter, until the sunlight shifted and all its beautiful structure was again hidden from sight. “What was that?” She mumbled eventually, still awe stricken by the revelation of that invisible world. “I don’t know!” Cimmy replied. “Do you think all of matter is like that? Are we like that inside?” They spent a good four hours debating the crystalline nature of the body, wondering how food got sifted and distilled through those angles and planes, and then all the physiological functions came to the forefront and they both had to agree human bodies probably didn’t share in the geometric perfection, which opened a whole new argument about the inferiority or superiority of living matter to the mineral one. “Obviously we can’t be less than a rock!” Rahima commented, outraged. “Fay can’t be less than a rock! Living things must be superior to non-living things.” “So, why don’t we find out what we look like inside?” Cimmy retorted. “What, do you want to put me under those magnifying glasses and find out?” “No, that wouldn’t help at all. Whatever makes the structure inside matter seems to be tiny, not large enough to be seen with normal sight. I wonder…” Cimmy puzzled, and before Rahima had time to stop her, she pricked herself with a needle and released a drop of blood on a small marble tile. Fay, completely immune to the scientific enthusiasm of the two, but faithful to his own instincts, approached the offering, sniffing at it, curious, as if he was getting ready for a taste, to the outrage of Rahima, who shooed him away, making him smear the droplet all over the marble tile. “Oh, great! Now we’ll never see anything. We’ll need another drop, Cimmy!” “Rahima, look!” This was all the latter was able to say. Behind the magnifying glasses, a cluster of entities wandered about in fluid motion, some small and red, some large and white, an entire world of blobs floating purposefully in a clear liquid, the internal structure of living things. They stared at the little living world in disbelief until its intentional motion slowed down to a full stop. “Nothing is what it seems,” Rahima whispered in a daze. “I will never be able to take what I see in front of my eyes for granted again.” “Where did you get that stone, Cimmy?” “Fay brought it to me,” the latter mumbled, peeved to give her friend another reason to think her little companion was maybe not your run-of-the-mill rat. “I see,” the latter nodded, magnanimously skipping the ‘I told you so.’ “Do you think we could maybe find more of these stones? Or different ones? See if they’re all the same inside? Or better yet, we could look inside plants?” The conversation lingered on the subject of structural similarity for a while, with Cimmy arguing plants are inanimate, and therefore must abide by the crystalline model and Rahima objecting in principle, since plants grew, lived, set seed and died, and therefore they must have been made of the same purposeful blobs the other living things were made of. They concluded the evening by deciding to take a trip into the fields very early the next morning, to gather a bunch of herbs and bring them back to the laboratory, so they could peek inside their inner workings. The plan was sadly foiled the next day by an outraged Josepha, who saw Cimmy’s contraption and exploded with ire that the tasks she assigned to the girl were left undone while the latter was wasting time and resources on what she could only guess was a blood spell, and as a result of her complaint, and Bertha’s taking charge of the schedule, Cimmy spent the next three weeks patiently sorting onions. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit francisrosenfeld.substack.com

    Elena: Reading from The Garden of Belief - Into the Structure of Matter

  6. Sep 14

    Cathy: Reading from the novel Terra Two - Chapter 2 - In Perpignan

    “Our story began in the year of our Lord twenty one hundred and five at a farm in the south of France, a small stone building surrounded by vineyards and lavender fields baked by the Mediterranean sun. Our sun, the yellow one, pampered to have the firmament all to itself. In the modest garden surrounding the edifice I first saw the dirt of our promise.” “The most fertile soil in the universe looked like the scrap pile of a brick kiln, ruddy and dusty, impossible to stabilize, incapable of holding water, so silky that it didn’t stick to the soles of our shoes. I didn’t know how dear this pitiful rubble was going to become, I was young, educated and plucky, out to conquer the world, and my challenge was not to cultivate the impossible medium but to vanquish its unyielding grit.” She arrived in Perpignan on a clear Sunday morning carrying a backpack filled with communication gadgets and testing equipment and a couple of changes of clothes. Since there was no obvious means of transportation to the farm Sarah shrugged her shoulders and started ahead with the thought that she will get there when she got there. It wasn’t very far, though, a couple of hours of pleasant strolling through a landscape of vineyards and lavender plantings. The farm was atop a gentle hill, evidently well cared for but with no signage, test lots or any other indication of the scientific research conducted inside. Sarah approached the front door of the old stone building haunted by the eerie sounds of a wind chime collection that hung from the bay tree by the entrance. She knocked with a pleasant smile on her face and after what seemed like forever the massive wooden door with wrought iron hinges opened accompanied by a blood curdling screech. A tall young woman with raven hair was standing in the doorway. Her piercing nearly transparent eyes reached into Sarah’s brain like a spear and brought to the foreground of her mind every moral failure and second guessing she had experienced through the current year. “I am...” Sarah started sweetly. “I know who you are, we could watch you move through the landscape like a burning bush, that hair must be visible from the moon.” She stopped abruptly, turned her back and started walking down the hallway. Sarah hesitated a moment, not knowing what proper etiquette dictated in circumstances like this, but then realized that she really had no another option but to go inside. She followed the tall woman in silence recognizing her stance, that very familiar soft walk, almost sliding across the stone floors, with no sounds. There was such sparseness in the decor surrounding her, such silence, that Sarah started feeling a little anxious and reevaluated her life choices, beginning with the curiosity for unfamiliar settings that had brought her there. The host stopped abruptly in front of the door leading to a large hall containing twelve beds. “That one is yours,” she said, pointing to one of them. “We meet at seven,” and she left. Sarah would have liked to ask her a few questions, like what her host’s name was, where was everybody else, and if by seven she meant morning or evening, but the young woman was already gone so Sarah resigned herself to slide her backpack under the bed and take a much needed nap. She didn’t even realize where she was the next morning when very crude rays of sunlight burst through the windows as if aiming specifically for her eyes and the room was disturbed by a mild commotion of shuffling bed sheets and dropping shoes. Souhaitez-vous lire cette histoire en français ? Vous pouvez la trouver ici. Nobody seemed to care that there was a new resident in the room so Sarah cleaned up the best she could and followed the others to the mess hall. ‘At least they’re all women,’ she thought, a little surprised but not giving this detail too much thought. The host was standing at the head of the table and waited for everybody to be seated before she began. “Good morning. We have a new student, her name is Sarah Feaherthy. She studied macro-biology and botanical genetics at CAHS. For her sake I will go through a few things about us. This is an international experimental farming program that accepts interns for the duration of one year. Ours is a teaching enterprise, unless you want to pursue the path of an educator, there is no reason for you to stay longer. My name is Seth Rosenfeld, I am the leader of the program. Our schedule is as follows: from eight till three we work in the gardens, from four till seven we study in the library. There is a fountain outside if you need to wash yourself. We prefer not to speak unless absolutely necessary, we find it distracts us from our tasks. We grow all our food here, if you need anything else you’ll have to walk to town to get it.” Sarah felt twelve pairs of eyes probing her intently and she had this strange feeling that she would have to explain her hair again and again, as if she did it on purpose. “Any questions?” Seth asked Sarah. Sarah wanted to ask who named her Seth and why, where was all the equipment, what did the science program consist of, what was expected of her, why did they all except for Seth have to sleep in the same room, if she could visit the library and take a look at the books before her first study session, if the schedule was any different on weekends, how she was going to communicate with her family, and most of all why did this place look more like a convent than a school? She quietly signaled no and they all ate breakfast in complete silence. The first week unfolded at the speed of a snail and during the entire time Sarah kept asking herself what on earth she was doing there. The program’s wherewithal was more modest than the set-up on her parent’s farm and there was really no schedule set for her, nor did anybody there seem to expect her to do anything. The vegetable beds were well tended and food was always abundant but there was no attempt to try new breeds or do fancy analysis. Sarah found it difficult to occupy her time since everything that needed done seemed to have already been done, and short of undoing work only to do it again there really was nothing to keep her busy. Library time went quicker because the bookshelves were well stocked with books, not necessarily specific to horticultural studies but definitely educational in every way. After the first week Sarah gathered enough courage to track down Seth (which was a project in itself, really, because Seth liked to move around the premises with a ghost-like demeanor that made it seem as if she was never there) and ask her for a few moments of guidance to help her understand what exactly she was supposed to do there. She pointed out there was no biology lab or structured course of instruction and she didn’t seem to fit in at all. It was the silence that built up Sarah’s anxiety since she was used to talk talk talk all the time with relatives and neighbors and colleagues and friends, and ask questions, challenge results, offer opinions. The quiet was maddening. Seth frowned and the steely resolve of her transparent eyes became even more intense. Sarah was starting to regret her audacity and quickly assessed the library hall for possible nooks and crannies to hide in before the thunderbolt in Seth’s eyes descended upon her and struck her down. It was a very uncomfortable situation for her, given her completely non-confrontational upbringing; according to her family mores getting into a conflict was among the worst things one could do. “You came here for post graduate education. We all assumed that you wouldn’t be interested in going through the same experiments and do more of the same things you did before, please correct me if I’m wrong.” Sarah wouldn’t have dreamt of correcting, interrupting, or in any way bringing attention to her own breech in protocol, because every time Seth looked at her the redhead remembered something else that she wasn’t particularly proud of. “You have one year to do something new. Can you do something that was never done before?” She saw the dazed look in Sarah’s eyes and didn’t wait for the answer. “Everything you did so far relied on equipment invented and built by somebody else, the tests you ran were replicas of originals by others. What did you do, personally? What would you do if you had to run your experiments with just a handful of seeds and a magnifying glass?” Sarah went from uncomfortable to mortified and wished she could roll back her life to the point when she was not in this awkward situation and stay there. “Chicken!” Seth said, with a tone that sounded more disappointed than angry. “Don’t ask me what to do with your life. I’m your guide, not your master.” Sarah took her wretched self back to the garden, went through the remainder of the day in silence and cried herself to sleep. From that day forward she abandoned all attempts to look busy and started paying close attention to what the others were doing, which looked to her like gardening as usual. Since she couldn’t garner excitement over tomato production and nobody paid attention to her she put together her own schedule, a subset of a master schedule that was so vague it was almost impossible to disturb. As a first order of business she took an early morning to walk around the building and found out what was in each room. She found the kitchen, the seed storage, and the tool shed. She found a large ball of rough yarn and a pair of scissors. She found the technology lab, yes, they really did have one after all. She found peat pods and a watering can. She set out to replicate the transparent rose experiment without the centrifuge, the spectral analysis computer program and the wavelength isolation equipment. She didn’t know how she was going to run anything successful in one year without the benefits of genetic growth acceleration but in a couple of weeks, amazingly enoug

    Cathy: Reading from the novel Terra Two - Chapter 2 - In Perpignan

  7. Aug 31

    Amber: Reciting an epic ballad - The Heart in the Stone

    There once was a fair girl whose name was Maureen, who dwelt in the mists of the island ‘Vergreen. She lived with her father. Her hair was like copper. She longed for a place that no human had seen. An old woman told her, when she was a child, a story about a great realm that’s outside the edge of the borders, the reach of the mortals. A place where the gods and the spirits abide. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit francisrosenfeld.substack.com

    Amber: Reciting an epic ballad - The Heart in the Stone

  8. Aug 29

    Elena: Reading from The Garden of Belief - Blue Roses

    The world shifted again that morning, when Cimmy woke up in a garden not unlike the one in her old dreams, and right before awaking, in that twilight space between dream and reality, Cimmy saw a healthy rose bush overflowing with blue blossoms. It was so close she could smell their perfume, a sweet honey and citrus scent, and when the breeze blew through it, one of the soft petals touched Cimmy’s cheek. The vision lasted but a moment, and yet it felt so real, she wasn’t even phased by the fact her surroundings had changed again: it was summer, it seems, a beautiful summer morning in a garden filled with flowers, with sun shining through the tall foliage, and a cool breeze wicking up the sparkling dew. “Am I not in the world of things anymore?” She asked herself, because nothing she’d ever seen before, other than in her dreams, could ever compare to this wholesome, eerie beauty. Beliefs about the afterlife are as old as humanity, and of course, if someone were to ask Josepha, she could recount all the wonders and rewards of the blessed, if only to emphasize how unworthy and sure to be cast out someone like Cimmy was. One had to work hard for one’s rewards, which were not likely to be bestowed on one, even by a higher power, without the approval of one’s elders, so now Cimmy hesitated contemplating the obvious thought, that she had passed and was now enjoying her great rewards, because, by all societal rules, she didn’t qualify for the privilege. Truth be told, she never gave a lot of thought to thereafter, not many young people do, even in a village like hers, where tragedy visited often and took its share of lives indiscriminately, but she had been sure whatever awaited her on the other side must be modest and common, as was befitting her station. She got scared to find herself surrounded by such unearthly beauty, thinking she might have trespassed into the forbidden garden area, and as exciting as that thought felt in the world of the living, she was sure the afterlife would not look kindly upon it. Maybe it was all of her wanderings through the dream garden of her childhood that had brought her there, and she breathed a sigh of relief, reassured she was probably asleep. “Cimmy! I was looking all over for you! Do you want to hear Bertha holler? You were going to meet with her to go over the crop rotations and she’s been waiting for you for over half an hour. Did you fall asleep in the flower garden again? You know she gets all weird every time she remembers she approved it: if you can’t eat it or wear it, what’s the point?” ‘What a strange dream I’m having, and Rahima is in it!’ “Cimmy, shake that dazed look off your face and go talk to Bertha before she blows her top!” Cimmy frowned as she tried to get up from the bed of grass she’d been sleeping in, and noticed a scratch on her arm, which looked very much like the kind one would get in a lost battle with a thorny rose bush. The scratch stung a little, enough to make it clear to Cimmy that whatever this afterlife body was made of, it could still feel pain. “I had the strangest dream!” She whispered in a daze. “Considering the regular contents of your mind, that’s scary enough for me!” Rahima teased her. “Weirder than usual?” “No. That’s just it: everything looked just like reality, just like here. In fact, I suppose it was here. I was right here, Rahima, seeing everything I see right now, except for this one rose bush. I think it scratched me, see?” “So, what’s so strange about a rosebush?” “The flowers were bright blue.” “You know there are no such things as blue roses. Roses can’t be blue, Cimmy. They have the wrong pigment for it.” “I know.” “So, did you imagine them, then?” “It felt so real: the sight, the scent, the touch of the petals. It felt absolutely real, Rahima, as real as you are now.” “How do you know I’m real?” Rahima teased her again, but retreated quickly when she saw the terrified look in Cimmy’s eyes. “Cimmy, it was just a dream! For crying out loud, here, take my hand. I’m as real as it gets.” “So were the blue roses,” Cimmy uttered a tiny whisper. “Ok, we’ll talk about this later. Obviously, you’re very shaken by this experience, but right now you have to go talk to Bertha before you’re even more shaken by her batting your ears.” Cimmy attended her elder’s instruction, copiously seasoned with verbal discipline, as if from another world, taking in her surroundings, which were still unfamiliar to her, with bemused detachment: the grand hall with the heavy wood furniture, the bay windows overlooking the flower garden, the pond, with the skipping stones and the gazebo, all looking so much like her old dream she now had no doubt she had passed, and figured since she didn’t do enough to earn her blissful place in heaven, the perceived presence of Bertha must be her penance. “Are you even listening to me, you useless airhead? What did I just say?” “The onions should go into quadrant three this year, to allow quadrant four to lie fallow and rest, since there are no other plantings planned there.” Bertha stared her down intently, meant to say something, but sighed instead and dismissed her to her task. The feeling that everything was surreal followed Cimmy around, like a sudden awakening, and all the strange events of her life, her skipping through reality and its unlikely details, Fay, the constant reshaping of her surroundings, all snapped into place to let her know she hadn’t been in the world of the living for a long time now, and whatever this place was, this illusion of life, was no more real than the blue roses. “Cimmy,” Rahima whispered, careful not to further distress her friend, “are you alright?” Cimmy looked at the face she knew so well, and could remember all the memories they’d made together, sharing sorrow, mischief and trust, but she also remembered that every time her reality shifted her friend didn’t seem to remember anything from their previous life. It almost felt like an untold number of Rahimas lived in all these different worlds, all recognizable as herself, but with completely different pasts. How can one love a person who isn’t real? And yet, as she looked at the worry in Rahima’s eyes, she felt blessed by their years of friendship and the memories she had of her, memories maybe not shared by the latter, but real nevertheless. Her world might have been nothing but, but the memories of it were real. Maybe that was all real was, just pictures of a pretend life we make up for ourselves in our own heads, but if that is all there is, then does it even matter, if we can’t shake our own illusion? If it’s there, it’s real. It can’t get realer than that. She could still hear Bertha’s familiar rant in her head. Another memory, maybe another manufactured moment, who’s to say, which had lost all its emotional weight, like a picture you stared at for too long. “Do you want to talk about the blue roses?” Rahima enticed. She did! She wanted so much to talk about the blue roses; she wished she could share that feeling, but there weren’t any words for it, and it all sounded so banal in spoken form, so unworthy of wonder and awe. “It was just a dream, it doesn’t matter,” she said in the end. “Anyway, I’m glad to have you back. You scared me a little, you know? I’ve never seen you this unraveled. Whatever you do, don’t tell Bertha and Josepha. Can you even imagine what they would say about that?” “Who cares what they would say about that?” Cimmy replied, her soul far away, already longing for the blue roses. “Maybe I should stay with you for a few days,” Rahima’s eyed filled with worry again. “You know, you didn’t even ask about Fay. I’m seriously concerned for you, Cimmy.” “I’m sure he’s around,” the latter smiled. In all her falling through reality, Fay had been an unquestioned constant, and she didn’t doubt he was somewhere close by, ready to follow her in the next step of her journey, wherever that journey might lead. Was there a point to this ever evolving experience? She didn’t know, but she felt it in her gut that there was more to the story than what she could see and touch - meaning, purpose, direction, a path to follow, laid at her feet one stepping stone at a time - and maybe for the first time in her life she wondered whether there was something or someone out there, something much bigger than her, unbound by space, time and the fleeting illusion of materiality. Strangely enough, after all these years of devoting herself to scientific discovery and to shattering unfounded convictions and passed down myths, she felt what it meant to have faith. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit francisrosenfeld.substack.com

    Elena: Reading from The Garden of Belief - Blue Roses
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These are spoken fragments—reflections, passages, and pieces of stories that have not yet settled. Some of them have written forms. Some of them point to places that already exist. Some of them are the only version. francisrosenfeld.substack.com

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