Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Vajra Chandrasekera
- Language: English
- Genre: Fantasy
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 9.9 MB
- Price: Free
Annelid and Leveret
Season one, episode one, minute thirty-one and thirty-five seconds: Leveret
chases Annelid into the jungle. They are laughing, because they’re
teenagers playing a game. The jungle is not quite a jungle. In a much later
episode, we learn via a minor subplot about 1970s land reform that it was
once a colonial-era rubber plantation, abandoned and gone feral. It will
gradually grow wilder and more overgrown through the seasons. We know
another year has passed when the new year birds hoot in the background.
Leveret and Annelid will grow older, too. This is that kind of show. There
are only two kinds of show: the kind where people grow older and the kind
where they don’t. We, the fandom, love the first kind best. We love this
show so much.
Leveret and Annelid aren’t their real names—that is, not the given names
of the characters in the show, which we never learn—but nicknames they
took from old textbooks they found gathering dust in a cupboard in their
little school that never seems to hold exams or parent-teacher conferences.
There are no ordinary school lessons. All they do at school is sit in a
darkened classroom with the other kids, watching a show about us on TV.
We think this is appropriate. We watch them; they watch us. The wheel
turns.
She runs into the jungle, the balls of her bare feet barely touching the
ground, running so that he will follow. She pushes aside branches that snap
back at his face, leaps over roots that she knows he’ll trip over, laughs so
hard it echoes around him like a haunting. Annelid, and a lid, she’s keeping
a lid on it. She hiccups and can’t stop giggling.
The TV in their classroom is an Australian-built Philips colour TV from the
late 1970s or perhaps the early 1980s: twenty-six-inch pale grey screen with
rounded edges; fake wood finish on the chassis; black plastic grille on the
right that you can take out with a click to expose the control panel where
you can tune channels by turning tiny knobs. We remember those from life,
too. Getting the channels right used to be one of our chores. Child-sized
fingers were better with the knobs.
(A hundred thousand childhood chores
unfold in our memory. Husking coconuts on an iron spike. A fire between
three blackened bricks. A short-bladed scythe through the long grass. A tire
rolling down a dirt path by a lake, under a dry blue sky.)
We watch them watch us. The picture on the TV screen looks grainy and
out of focus, but the kids don’t seem to have any trouble with it. We suspect
this avoidance of perfect fidelity is an intentional device to avoid opening
an abyss of mirrors. Nature abhors an infinite regress.
The TV does not show us in real time; it is in fact deeply committed to
unreal time, seeming to glide back and forth across the spans of our lives.
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