When she last saw him, he seemed to have been talking to himself. He had spun around in circles when she arrived, not saying hello to her right away but instead acting like he was following something invisible on the ground... He was smiling, and despite the clearly strange experiences he'd had and the things that she had seen, with his chronologic window and wild claims, she was beginning to think he had gone finally and utterly insane.
"Hello Cadejo," Olaf had said, kneeling down as if talking to some phantom gnome, "How has our mistress been?" Olaf jerked his head back slightly as if at some noise and then reached out to scratch at the open air with his fingers. He stood and she asked him what he was doing...
"I was talking with your dog... Obviously Alba, what a question!"
Alba had asked him what he did, out here in the houses by himself so much. He told her it helped him think. Actually, what he said was that he liked the houses - because being around them helped remind him to remember what hasn't happened yet. Alba knew that Olaf and sense were not commonly acquainted, and it often took her some time to piece together something like a narrative, no matter what he was saying... He went on to say that this kind of remembering helped him because he could do it before the time in which he forgot everything, since it was always easiest to remember things before they were forgotten.
Alba blinked. "What made you forget?" she asked.
"Oh... I forgot." he told her.
He went on to say that something had happened, and he was only now starting to piece things back together the way they should be.
"You mean something will have happened?" she said teasing him.
"No," he said turning to look at her... "something happened, but something will happen again - and that's why I have to remember. We may know the end of something, we may even discover the beginning, but those are two small things when compared to the universe of time between."
Olaf had taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves when they sat down. While they talked, Olaf kept throwing sticks out into the houses... He would reach down and suddenly have one, and then throw it away again. She had no idea where they were coming from. "How did you get the scar on your arm?" Alba asked him. Olaf looked down at his wrist, then at the stick he was holding in his hand. He smiled and said that he'd made a trade once. He threw the stick and said that he'd do it all again.
That was over three weeks ago.
She had searched his house last time she was here. She had stood on the doorstep for a long time, not wanting to enter. It was harder to look around inside once she had. Every step and every corner felt like an intrusion, as if she would walk through a door and see him, but she feared he would be angry at her for being there. She found nothing, the house was empty and silent save for lonely gusts of wind through the attic, and her own footsteps on the planks of flooring.
Today she was startled to find the house was entirely gone. Every stick.
She rushed out into the field but there was nothing but wild flowers and grass. Nothing to mark the passing.
She sat for a while, wondering what it meant, watching the flowers bend in the breeze. The rooftops in the ground around her seemed especially hollow today.
She got up and as she was brushing the grass from her skirt she noticed something that looked like crown molding sitting a little bit away. She walked over and picked it up, pulling something larger from the grass.
Alba had found one of Olaf's windows. It was dirty and paint-chipped, and had been in the rain.
She walked it back to the car and drove home with it... wondering what had happened to her friend.
