Green Silk/Story

It was after midnight, and it wasn’t quiet. Beneath the calm gaze of the indigo and navy sky, the sounds of the humming mantis mingled with the breeze that slipped through the almana trees, up the dead-end street to one ancient bungalow and a half-open bedroom window.

Nalieza was awake. In the midst of the ghost hour, it wasn’t just the retired Lit professor’s blaring holovid that prevented her from sleeping. The green silk dress lay on her bed, stretched out with flared skirt spread across the white quilt. A young woman had purchased the dress over twenty years ago in a boutique on Lacace for her impromptu nuptial ceremony.

The green silk dress once belonged to Maiena Isoderi, Nalieza’s mother.

The professor’s holovid from next door made another unwelcome intrusion through Nalieza’s window. Going over and asking him to turn down the volume never worked since the elderly menace always claimed his rights were being violated. So the neighbors on either side were forced to endure poorly scripted dialogue from the daytime holodramas and the pointless banter from Stars Revealed! every night. It was more reminders about mother and daughter’s past lives (that empty world of visions of dreams other beings collectively lived while sitting in front of a flat, glowing screen on their walls).

Nalieza got up and closed the window with a sliding thud.

She looked over to her mother’s wedding dress. Of course there was another reminder of a life that belonged to someone else, yet was also possessed by the young woman who shared not only DNA but also something ephemeral with the wearer of the green dress. Nalieza found the dress tucked inside a storage box in the hall closet. She had seen the box several times in the past sixteen years they had lived in the house. But it was only two days ago she felt some weird urge to pull the box down from the upper shelf. When she opened it and discovered the contents wrapped in tissue paper, Nalieza intitially thought it was a table covering left behind by G’mata Fejier after she returned back to the old homeworld. But Nalieza realized its true nature (pleats, a long skirt matched by a fringed belt, and two straps attached to a V-neck bodice) when she released the silken garment from the box.

There was a static holo that hung above the bed in her father’s room. Younger versions of Maiena and Paurilis stood under a black metal filigree arch gaudily decorated with strings of gold lights and bright pink artificial flowers. Nalieza remembered her parents had an impromptu nuptial ceremony at some all-night venue Lacace the morning after they arrived on Lacace. It was her father’s idea to propose on the vessel carrying them away from Ultraia. It was her mother’s idea to have their legal joining occur in a converted storefront overlooking the riverside esplanade. But the young couple lacked the proper attire, so they wandered into a fancy boutique across the street and found some off-the-rack fancy clothes, including the green dress.

Nalieza moved away from the window and sat down on the bed. The seven years after Maiena wore this garment were complicated. She left acting behind to focus upon the personal moving images of other beings when she became a dreamworker. But troubles find everyone no matter where they reside, as the old Ultraian saying went, and Maiena realized a quiet life was impossible. Her depression became an inescapable grief that seemed to follow an unbroken line of darkness in harmony with the galaxy. Even the chance for another child couldn’t bring her any hope…and even that possibility was denied to her. The miscarriage was the last page of a descending story arc that ultimately ended when her mother jumped off a bridge at three o’clock in the morning.

Out in the hall, just beyond the door that separated her bedroom from the upstairs hallway, the floorboards creaked as her father walked downstairs. He was probably done grading all those end-term reports on the Battle of Remis. Nalieza wondered if he would be upset should he discover the dress went missing. She wouldn’t even know how to explain what pushed her toward the closet, because she had no idea where that impulse emerged. She had been fascinated with her mother for years, judging by her eight years on the same holodrama where Maiena had once held court as the sculptor and radical artist-who-suffered-because-she-wasn’t-Empire-compliant Selan Rone. Her onscreen daughter was Niddry Rone, the questioning teenager who like her mother had a rebellious streak which plunged her into a self-destructive quest for some other way of life. Her storyline took a controversial twist when Niddry ran away from the home of her maiden aunt who raised her after Selan’s mysterious disappearance. It was a ratings success and the most convenient way to explain Nalieza’s hiatus from the show.

If the past was tragic for her mother, did that mean history was inevitable? It sometimes felt like Nalieza was pulled toward making certain decisions by something unseen over which she had little control. At ten years old she decided to become an actress, just like her mother. On her fifteenth birthday her father presented her with a copy of the Universal Tome of Dream Symbology after she made an unplanned appearance in one of his dreams to help guide him through an ongoing personal issue. It felt like Maiena had some influence even though she had been dead for nearly two decades.

Nalieza twisted the tasseled belt between her fingers. Her latest decision was not influenced by Maiena’s life. Six months ago she left acting behind to attend university. She felt limited in her continuing role on New World; the plots had become generic due to general disillusionment among the cast and crew. Every show on the holovid and every film in the holocinemas were all created with the sole purpose of glorifying the Empire. The majority of those working the industry were indifferent to the regime, but several, including Nalieza, hated the current galactic oppressors. There was no chance of creative expression while complying with the guidelines set up by the Bureau of Propaganda. So many beings like herself were leaving and going into other professions. She ran away into the relatively anonymous life of a university student; scripts were exchanged for term papers, camera angles for seating angles in classrooms, costars for classmates. It was another role to play in life, guided by choice and something more ethereal.

A knock sounded on her bedroom door. “Do you want some tea?” her father asked.

Nalieza picked up the dress and hid it under the quilt. “How about some brandy instead?”

“How about no?”

“Just a little glass. You can have the big snifter.”

The door opened. “Just tonight, and only because you passed all your classes this semester.”

“I’ve still got three more weeks, Dad”.

“Then I’ll rescind my offer.”

“Of course you won’t.” She got up from the bed. It was nearly one hour past midnight, late enough for a drink, but too early for secrets. The matter of the green silk dress could wait for another day.