Cimmy got lost in thought as she assessed the plots for planting, her hands caressing the dark rich dirt. One thing was clear: nature didn’t need her help to pour forth abundance, so her trip to the fields was purely decorative. When did the earth decide to bless them with such fertile soil, she wondered as she looked at it, as if from far away, as if from another world.

She’d been so accustomed to the struggle to survive she never stopped to question her purpose, and now that the struggle was over, and her dream garden was a reality, all the markers on her path came in full view to show her the journey had never been random: someone, or something, led her here, stepping stone to stepping stone.

It stood to reason the rest of her journey wasn’t random either, and she got suddenly scared of that invisible future that already existed somewhere, and curious about all its discoveries that hadn’t happened yet, and weary of her own mortality.

She suddenly thought of Rahima, and couldn’t bear the thought of losing her, so her own demise suddenly lost significance by comparison. We don’t live to die. We live for what comes before that. That is the allotted time we need to beautify, make happy, fill with meaning, love, and friendship.

Was there an afterlife?

Bertha and Josepha certainly felt entitled to their great rewards, and Cimmy had been brought up in a culture that expected something after death.

She always thought the afterlife must be that beautiful vision of her paradisaical garden, and now that her vision had been transposed into reality, she felt confused.

If one got one’s great rewards here, and one’s spirit outlasted death, then what was left to experience on the other side?

She’d shared her mental struggle with Rahima, and the latter took it all in stride, with her good-natured laughter that made everything seem easy and clear.

“I’m sure they’ll think of something for your moral dessert, Cimmy! Don’t waste your time trying to guess what it will be.”

“Who’s ‘they’, Rahima?”

“Well, you know how people say ‘they’, ‘them’. Whatever seems to be but never leaves a trace on the world below.”

“What if there is no ‘they’? What if it’s always only been us?”

“Funny for you to mention that, you of the magical rat who led you past the walls and brought you gifts from the world beyond. Speaking of which, where is Fay?”

The rat peeked its head from Cimmy’s blouse, excited to be included in the philosophical discussion.

“If anybody else made that comment…” Cimmy shook her head, appalled. “We’re on the verge of the most exciting scientific discoveries yet, and you think my pet has magical powers.”

“Hey, I’m an art curator; allow me a bit of artistic license. How old do you think he is?”

“Who, Fay? I never thought about it.”

“Precisely.”

“He’s a rat, Rahima!”

Rahima glanced at Fay, who looked pleased to be acknowledged, perfectly content with his place in reality, and positively ageless.

A little shuffle in the grass brought Cimmy back to the fields. It erased the memory she was reliving while she watched the real Fay approach, with what looked like a strange seed in his mouth. It was a gemstone, rather large and misshapen, bright blue, and gleaming with its own inner light, which got fractured by the different planes inside the stone and refracted onto itself, bouncing between the walls of its inner structure.

All of Cimmy’s philosophical musings took second fiddle to this unexpected view into the intricacy of matter, and she looked closer, trying to figure out what it was about that translucent stone that made light bounce that way, change color, and get trapped inside it like a flame inside a lantern.

She left the field to its own devices, since it seemed to be doing quite well without a planting schedule, and rushed home to her laboratory to take a closer glimpse inside the gemstone.

Staring at the little wonder through a magnifying glass, and then two, and three, Cimmy gazed deeper into the nature of matter, amazed that things looked nothing like themselves when seen up-close.

Inside the little gem there were lines, planes and angles, an entire barely visible scaffolding, whose essence hid itself from the eye when seen from certain vantage points.

Light got trapped between those planes, bouncing back and forth, amplified, glowing brighter blue in the oblique light of the setting sun.

“Where have you been? I’ve been looking all over for you!” Rahima startled her, and when she lifted her eyes from the stone, the ethereal worlds behind her gaze gave her friend pause.

“What have you seen, Cimmy?”

“I’ve seen inside matter. The inside of matter looks very different. Come and see,” she enticed her friend to look through the magnifying glasses.

The latter obliged, scrunching her forehead and questioning Cimmy’s sanity, because all she could see was a big blurry blob, and then suddenly the invisible inner structure of the gem revealed itself to her, a mesmerizing structure of planes and angles, the ideal beauty of perfection, right inside the misshapen stone, which, for all its endearing light trapping qualities, wouldn’t have stood out from the background.

Rahima couldn’t speak, just stood there in awe of the perfection of matter, until the sunlight shifted and all its beautiful structure was again hidden from sight.

“What was that?” She mumbled eventually, still awe stricken by the revelation of that invisible world.

“I don’t know!” Cimmy replied. “Do you think all of matter is like that? Are we like that inside?”

They spent a good four hours debating the crystalline nature of the body, wondering how food got sifted and distilled through those angles and planes, and then all the physiological functions came to the forefront and they both had to agree human bodies probably didn’t share in the geometric perfection, which opened a whole new argument about the inferiority or superiority of living matter to the mineral one.

“Obviously we can’t be less than a rock!” Rahima commented, outraged. “Fay can’t be less than a rock! Living things must be superior to non-living things.”

“So, why don’t we find out what we look like inside?” Cimmy retorted.

“What, do you want to put me under those magnifying glasses and find out?”

“No, that wouldn’t help at all. Whatever makes the structure inside matter seems to be tiny, not large enough to be seen with normal sight. I wonder…” Cimmy puzzled, and before Rahima had time to stop her, she pricked herself with a needle and released a drop of blood on a small marble tile.

Fay, completely immune to the scientific enthusiasm of the two, but faithful to his own instincts, approached the offering, sniffing at it, curious, as if he was getting ready for a taste, to the outrage of Rahima, who shooed him away, making him smear the droplet all over the marble tile.

“Oh, great! Now we’ll never see anything. We’ll need another drop, Cimmy!”

“Rahima, look!” This was all the latter was able to say.

Behind the magnifying glasses, a cluster of entities wandered about in fluid motion, some small and red, some large and white, an entire world of blobs floating purposefully in a clear liquid, the internal structure of living things.

They stared at the little living world in disbelief until its intentional motion slowed down to a full stop.

“Nothing is what it seems,” Rahima whispered in a daze. “I will never be able to take what I see in front of my eyes for granted again.”

“Where did you get that stone, Cimmy?”

“Fay brought it to me,” the latter mumbled, peeved to give her friend another reason to think her little companion was maybe not your run-of-the-mill rat.

“I see,” the latter nodded, magnanimously skipping the ‘I told you so.’ “Do you think we could maybe find more of these stones? Or different ones? See if they’re all the same inside? Or better yet, we could look inside plants?”

The conversation lingered on the subject of structural similarity for a while, with Cimmy arguing plants are inanimate, and therefore must abide by the crystalline model and Rahima objecting in principle, since plants grew, lived, set seed and died, and therefore they must have been made of the same purposeful blobs the other living things were made of.

They concluded the evening by deciding to take a trip into the fields very early the next morning, to gather a bunch of herbs and bring them back to the laboratory, so they could peek inside their inner workings.

The plan was sadly foiled the next day by an outraged Josepha, who saw Cimmy’s contraption and exploded with ire that the tasks she assigned to the girl were left undone while the latter was wasting time and resources on what she could only guess was a blood spell, and as a result of her complaint, and Bertha’s taking charge of the schedule, Cimmy spent the next three weeks patiently sorting onions.

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