She was nervous about the future and sometimes the past. The future may be an unknown stony path but at least it got you to where you were going. But the past, well the past unexpectedly came back to haunt you.
For she was all about The Now. For this is what she lived her life for. Uttering the words given to her, sometimes seconds before she said them. They were her lifeblood, gave her not only meaning and purpose but voice.
Not that she could refer to herself as ‘The Now’ (or was it one of the Now, she could never recall). Not on this puny planet. She rather liked it. The planet and the anonymity. Oh, she was constantly recognised but not as herself, but as Cara.
On the odd occasion she would be called from up high. They would flutter some papers, looking at them with wide-eyed excitement as if reading some just deciphered sacred text. Her future would be told.
She’d play the game, for it was a game. She’d laugh, shriek and guffaw as she was given glimpses of the strange and wonderful things to come. Channelling Cara when she won the Lotto. The next 6 months mapped out.
But it never was, not completely. Sometimes not at all. Tastes would change. The Not-Now been and gone. A nosedive would be taken. The flutterers would vanish.
One wise old sage once asked her ‘What happens to Cara in fhe end? She’d laugh and said she was going nowhere.
But then the future came for her. Came for all of them. Came for The Now.
At first it just appeared to the outsiders that she was just disappearing for days at a time. True, those appearances kept her alive. But it was a half-life, one with no future in sight. No storyline or words giving her form.
Then the episodes in the can dried up. Three to none, just like that.
And now she knew. She and Cara had no future, no end. The words just…