Chapter 1
2016
SOME people know her as Agatha.
Others know her as Cordelia, or Ingrid, or even one time, Guinevere; her personal favourite.
This time round, she was known as Emilita.
Emilita declined an afternoon snack of biscuits and Earl Grey tea as the orderly came around and offered her some off the tray. There was a lavender, silk draw string bag full of spice-enriched tea leaves she had since she was young, grown and culled from the plants surrounding Elva Creek. It was buried within a hollowed out novel in her bookshelf, somewhere where the nurses won’t find it. If they did, they would think it were bad for her health, or somewhat filled with illicit substances.
Nothing she knew of these days was bad enough for her health—except maybe those sugar crammed, doughy biscuits they had with their ordinary tea every morning. It wasn’t her health that concerned her.
Emilita had a small, rounded stone in her hand that if kept warm enough in the palm of her hand, and she closed her eyes and took patient, smooth breaths, would bring her comfort in times of worry.
Rock, rock, rock.
Emilita rocked in her hand-crafted, timber rocking chair that was, as usual, stationed by her floor to ceiling window in the corner of her room. It creaked with almost every back and forth movement across the wooden floors, but the sound never bothered her.
Rock, rock, rock.
Emilita’s eyes shot open. She couldn’t concentrate on her breathing.
Leaving the stone in her hand, she repositioned herself to stare, square on out the window into the tempestuous sky, where rolling clouds of grey and black were approaching the town of Elva Creek. Something was coming. Emilita reached for another stone, to calm her accelerating heart.
Rock, rock, rock.
Her chair went quicker. Nature was trying to communicate with them.
Something was coming, and what came with it, was a storm.
