Last year I joined a writing group.  We met through a Facebook-for-writers type site and worked together for about 5 months.  We were all working on series, so we made our focus really pushing each other to refine the concepts and worlds our stories lived in.  Our goal was to delve deeper and push our concepts as far as possible.  I found the experience both inspiring and, at times, extremely frustrating.  Having one’s blind spots revealed is educational and humbling.

During that time I wrote many things that opened my heart and mind to the far corners of the Void and the characters that live there.  Some of these things have appeared in the short stories I’ve been posting and some found their way onto FemaleoftheSpeciesband.com

This piece was written purely as a love letter to the Void; the complicated world that appeared fully-formed in my mind as walked through the American Museum of Natural History in New York.  (The museum is one of my favourite places in the world.  If you ever get the chance, go! You won’t regret it.)

So here it is.

The Void.

     The ground is a deep gray.  It is pliant and yet impenetrable, walking on it feels like moving through a dream. This feeling is heightened by the gray sky, only two shades lighter than the ground.  The vistas move and undulate, hills and valleys morph with no heed of physics or time.  Cool black streams cross the landscape and leafless trees claw at the sky.

     This is the Void.  This is the portal to all of Time.  This is the place Travelers call home.  These creatures are the amalgamation of moments of evolution both seen and unseen throughout the galaxy.  Here they meet and prepare to watch us.

     They are invisible in our world to all but the extremely sensitive, animals can sense them and the trees know they are there.  The Travelers move in and out of our history, as at home crawling through a WWI trench as they are on the streets of New York City.

     It is through Phoenix that the worlds combine.  Watch as a mind raised in our linear mortal time is forced to embrace the fluidity of the Travelers’ world.

I was a little girl of four years old living in a suburb of Winnipeg.  We had lived there for over a year, but after the mild dampness of my previous English home, I still wasn’t used to the changing seasons.  The dry summer wind cut my bare legs and I was seriously regretting my clothing choice as I stood beside my father in the backyard.
He was barbecuing.  I’d watched earlier as he’d set it up.  Stooped over the round, red orb he’d built a pyramid of coals, covered it in lighter fluid and struck a match.  Now I was only vaguely aware of the party going on around us as I watched him remove the metallic red lid and begin to flip burgers over the hot coals.  Clutched in my hands was my new pool toy; an inflated plastic ring.  Just a cheap dollar store item, but it was bright and colorful and felt pleasantly firm in my tiny hands.
I stood there silently as my dad flipped the meat.  I was fascinated by the sizzle each patty made as the new side hit the hot grill.  I could see the juices sputter and dance before falling to the hot coals.  I looked down at the ring in my hands and was suddenly filled with a question.
“Dad,” I asked.  ”What would happen if I put my ring on there?”
I was always asking my dad questions like this, Winnipeg was proving to be a place of extremes that necessitated many inquisitive moments.  The previous winter I had learned what the giant chunks of ice were that had fallen from the sky, how dog poop had become suspended in ice in the backyard and where his mustache had gone.  But the barbecue had sent my mind racing with possibilities.
He laughed and in an offhanded way that only Dad’s can deliver, said:
“Why don’t you do it and see.”
Four year olds don’t get sarcasm.
I tossed the ring onto the grill.
The effect was instantaneous.  Where the previous moment there had been a bright, shiny floatation device; there was now a foul smelling, flattened mass that covered the entire grill.  I could see the shape of each burger under the plastic.
I stood there filled with fascination and wonder as the ring continued to melt and the air was filled with the sound of plastic crackling as it hit the coals.  My dad let out a shout of despair and somewhere in the background my mom screamed “Why did you tell her that, Norm?”
It was the best thing I’d ever seen.