After Forever Falls Apart

Chapter 9 (shadows)

Fragments of that after-solstice summer, dear dead, make up the story of you:

You carried on until you returned to the house, all four of you, entirely different from the three of you who left the last time.

Start that over, back at the beginning. Arriving in the town you'd dreaded returning to, you traded the boat and both paddles for hot bread, a warm bed, your head went scattered across the years and you let Tatter-cloak do all the talking. Scattered across the years, the street sweeping corners, the jangling bones of a sea-cat, how you had bought flour and beans and soap when the snows were still thawing, and a magenta egg--now a jet bird--lay hidden in a heap of rocks just up the hill. Scattered across the years, dear dead, moments all clamoring for attention.

What makes the beginning? You slept, you awoke, left the warm bed and tiny room softly, Tatter-cloak letting you lead through the streets since you knew the way home from there.

You had to hide the queen's bones in a sack, the one that had held the vegetables, now gone, you promised Tatter-cloak you wouldn't need to buy any more supplies. Two day walk and all. Belly full from the breakfast in the room, you trod up the hill outside the town, sunlight sparking off the water. Which is why you didn't look back.

The beginning ended, of course, with you not looking back, unwilling to be blinded; how, after half a summer, were you going right back where you began? A home hollow except for some dead bones, a jangling sea cat; how was the old rock doing, warming the kitchen oven? Had snow witches taken over any corners of the garden? It was high summer, of course, and Skeleton Cook would stare irately if he knew snow witches were taking over the garden.

The ending began with Tatter-cloak gasping at the frost orchards, the bright fruits full on bushes and trees, cold frost coating everything. Two years, almost, since the autumn lights, you doubted visitors would flock to the frost orchards this year and witness them glowing.

Tatter-cloak danced there, in the too-silent roads of the frost orchards, bootsteps muffled by frost-almost-snow. He halfway sang until he ran out of breath, you thought he had a nice voice but you didn't join in. Didn't know the song, you told yourself. He laughed about how beautiful this was, how had he never come here before?

Haunted, you said, by strange shadows, it's disconcerting how the fruit disappears. You squashed a yellow plum apple into the dirt and stepped away, boot clean. How's that disconcerting, he said, compared to having a skeleton inside a sack? He suggested it, not you, but you still let the queen out of the sack and she danced too, hurling purple berries and smooth skins until the reminder of Skeleton Cook's lanky limbs was too much, and she was missing a foot anyway, so you collected her back inside.

The ending of forever--you followed the trail from the frost orchards towards the white hills. Around the boulder, through bright moss, down the sloping hill to the door and windows and walls precisely where you left them, forever ago, three minus two plus three leaving you aching precisely where those differences died.

You smiled for Tatter-cloak's benefit; welcome to my house, you said, and casually creaked open the door.

***

Cut into the soft rock of the yellow cliff, behind rows of mushroomed boats and a broken one, I find a winding trail from the beach up in the direction of the town. I go back for the jet bird, my boots and the empty sack. The sand-coated bandages I shove inside, the sack of bones I loop around my hand so I can squish my boots back onto my sand-coated socks. I hesitate by the child, but pick him up so he hugs my torso, as much as an unconscious child can. We walk back to the boats, blood dripping from my cheeks onto the child's drying shirt, I'll deal with that later, when I don't have a jangling sack of bones and another sack folded against my clothes and a child weighing down my arms and a jet bird cawing from the sand, hopping behind me.