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The old woman’s hands were brown and crinkled like the cedar tree in her backyard, yet to shed its papery bark. It was dark out and the cloudless sky was infested with flickering lights. There was a sweet warmth embracing the air and a faint hint of rot from the ground beneath the drooping mango trees down-slope.
A child clutched nervously on the pocket of her skirt. He was tiny and timid and the sleeves of his star-speckled pajamas were rolled up to his skinny elbows. Quietly, he trailed after the old woman up the hill. It was slow going because her joints were arthritic and her breathing was labored. The tip of her walking stick beat out a slow, almost deliberate rhythm as it crunched into the crackled earth. When they reached the summit of the hill, she sat on a moss covered rock and regarded the child contemplatively.
“Elijah,” the raspy voice that uttered his name was filled with affection. “Do you know what sleep-walking is?”
In the field below them, one of the old woman’s sons grew a patch of yam, sweet potato and cabbage. In the late afternoon, the boy had knelt beside a makeshift oven, blowing on the coals on top and fanning the firewood below while the sweet-potato mix in the middle, slowly coalesced into pudding.
The child said nothing for a while. His eyes were as round as saucers reflecting the moon, absorbing the songs of fireflies and ghostly voices carried from faraway by the wind.
“When I wake up where I didn’t fall asleep?”
There was occasional thud as one after another, the ripe mangoes fell to the ground. His ears had grown accustomed to the country side. By now he could tell by the sound they made when they fell, which ones ruptured and splattered the earth, spilling their wormy pulp from the ones that rolled around and only became bruised.
“When I was your age and lived on this hill, I walked in my sleep too. I woke up in this very spot one morning, with no idea how I’d gotten here. This was in my hand.”
She opened her palm to reveal a translucent marble as large as his little fist. “Is it what you were looking for?”
The sphere sphere, reflected his wide, excited eyes. There was a gasp, full of wonder and the old woman grinned like a kid when he nodded. There was a tingle and it chirped like a cricket when she placed it into his palm.
“Go on, say something,” she urged. “Say anything.”
Elijah said, “hello?”
The big marble grew warm in his hand. It tingled again and there a strange Voice that said “hello” right back. And then, “Yes! Hello?”
The Voice was rusty, like air being pushed by water out of a pipe but then the marble went dark and there was nothing. The old woman made Elijah dig a hole with a stick. When he was done, she placed the marble inside and told him to put it out of his mind. When he was done covering it up with the dirt, she led him back down to the house.
“You won’t sleepwalk anymore but I want you to come back here for it, when you’re older.” She instructed softly.
Elijah nodded and he solemnly promised that he would. Years passed. The old woman died. The boy left the mountain. He left the small island. He left that entire world behind. He forgot all about the night his grandmother had taken him to the summit of that small mountain and had made him bury the orb that spoke to him while he slept. He even forgot all about the Voice.
There once was an old man who chanced to look to the sky one night, and was struck by the singularly astonishing thought that lately, a certain star had been getting bigger and shining more and more brightly in the night sky. It was daylight, days later and his eyes were still scouring the sky because he couldn’t stop thinking about that star. Suddenly, he realized that there was something important he’d forgotten on a small island, at the summit of a certain hill.
