The shades were drawn, of course, but it didn’t matter. She burned through the fabric. She burned through my eyelids. She burned so bright in the milky hollow behind my forehead that any dreams coy enough to slink out of my subconscious were frightened back into hiding like kittens beneath a porch. Dreams, or at least the sleeping kind, live in the dark. Dreams do not like the light.

But that wasn’t all.

I could hear her humming. It was a soundless song, deep and guttural. It made the tips of my toes tingle like they often did in winter when I came in from the cold and sat before the fire.

And I could feel her tugging at my blood. Does that make sense? Probably not. But it doesn’t matter because that’s how it felt. Feelings don’t have to make sense, you know. They don’t live in the same world as us. They live in a different reality, analogous to our own but thicker, slower. Like fish. Yes, like fish. That’s how it felt. As though I were a fish and she was an angler.

I don’t know how long I lay there, clamping my eyes shut, hot and cold and cold and hot. Eventually, I gave up and walked across the floor and threw the curtains open.

I had never seen the moon so large. I had never seen the moon so bright. She hung above the rooftops, wan and solemn. Where she touched me, my skin burned. I twisted the window latch and pulled the panes apart, suddenly desperate to remove any barrier between us. A quiet breeze washed into my room, carrying the scent of honey and lavender.

My foot struck the wall, and I realized then that I had been walking forward. I now stood pressed against the window frame, as close as I could get to the moon without tumbling out.

It only took me a moment to decide. In truth, it wasn’t a decision at all. The moon was calling me; I had to go. I simply had to. I threw a housecoat over my pajamas and stuffed my feet into slippers. Mother would be furious if she knew I was wearing slippers outside, but I didn’t know where I had left my boots, and I couldn’t be expected to search for them at a time like this, and who had the patience to tie all those laces anyway?

I twisted the doorknob slowly, careful that the tongue cleared the plate before I pulled. The hinges creaked, and I winced. I counted to one hundred in my head before I dared proceed further, and then I walked on my tiptoes, close to the wall where the boards were less prone to creaking. Every step brought me closer to mother and father’s room. Their door leered like a rotten apple at the end of the hall. I refrained from sticking my tongue out at it, but only just.

At the top of the staircase, I hesitated. Which steps creaked? The top two and the fourth? No. The second, fourth, and fifth? No, no. I shook my head. It wouldn’t do to take a chance. Mother kept her ears as well-oiled as father’s lawnmower. This close to their room, the squeak of a stair would surely rouse her.

An idea dawned on me. I tied my housecoat tighter around my torso, turned so that my back faced the staircase, and lifted one leg high, higher, above and over the banister. I centered my chest over the handrail and walked down the balusters one by one by one. My housecoat slid over the wood with hardly a sound. Only once was there trouble, when my treacherous slipper slid off my sweaty foot. It would have flopped from stair to stair and woken up half the neighbourhood, but I caught it at the last moment and pushed it back into place, flexing my toes so it didn’t happen again. I spared a bitter thought for mother, who had purposefully bought the slippers a size too large to allow me “space to grow,” and then shook the slipper out of my head to concentrate on dismounting as I reached the bottom. From here, there was only the entrance hall and the front door, which I was pleased to find swung open and closed with hardly a peep; with any luck, I would return and relock it before anyone woke.

On the front porch, beneath the light of the moon, I allowed myself a brief, victorious smile before I continued down the walk and through the garden gate, grasping it by the missing picket, third from the left. Flushed from the effort, I hardly felt the chill of the autumn night.

I looked left. I looked right. Nothing moved except a leaf skidding down the cobblestones. And anyway, there was really only one way to go, wasn’t there? The moon painted my path silver, a silver so deep and bright that you would have been forgiven for thinking the road itself was paved in sterling. My chest burned, and I didn’t once stop to wonder why or how, to look around, to worry about the unsavory types that mother and father often discussed on Sunday while standing at the front window with their arms crossed and their mouths turned. No, I only ducked my head and hurried after the moon, the heels of my oversized slippers flapping behind me like wings.

The moon never sputtered and never strayed. Straight through the city it led me, past Mr. Babel’s Store for Rare and Antique Books, past Claudia’s Cake Shop, past the market and the hat store and the dance club and then I didn’t recognize anything at all, but that was alright because I had only gone straight, hadn’t I, dead ahead down the Boulevard of the Republic, and when I wanted to return, when I had seen that which the moon was so keen to show me, when I had looked her in the eye and shaken her hand, well, I would turn around and walk right back down the Boulevard of the Republic, wouldn’t I?

There came a point when the uneven cobblestones gave way to tarmac, that smooth material that father so hated, and then to dirt. I hadn’t really been paying attention, lost in the glow of the moon, but I looked up now and saw hills. Sloping hills that rose and fell around me like waves at sea. The grass was long and flowing, swaying in the breeze, and the blades hissed as they slid past each other, trading secrets, and the cumulative voice of it all was a whisper so heavy that it masked even the sound of my own fumbling footsteps, for how could I be expected to concentrate on my feet when the moon lay so close?

The trail kinked and curled, and I realized that I was climbing and probably had been for quite some time. The muscles in my thighs complained, but I told them to be silent because didn’t they know where we were? We were in the presence of the moon. The moon. The moon! If you’ve ever felt an emotion like I felt in those moments, cresting each hill and gazing into the pale face of the moon… I’ll tell you, if you’ve ever felt an emotion even half as large as I felt in those moments, you’ve already felt more than most people ever feel in their whole lifetimes. Because if they did, if they had, they wouldn’t be so cruel. Even now, as I write this, the mere memory of her soft glow reassembles my priorities, rearranges all that I think is—or thought was—important.

I’m not sure when I first noticed the girl. She stood at the highest point in the meadow, so she would have been visible far in the distance, although I don’t think I truly recognized her until I reached the top of the lean, knobby hill and stopped short.

Her hair was black and straight. Her eyes were long and narrow. She was barefoot. She wore a long dress, pale blue and layered in dandelion prints. Her left arm was raised above her head, and in her fist she clutched a… Well, it looked like a ribbon.

“Is that a ribbon?” I asked.

“A ribbon.” She looked up and considered it. “Yes. Yes, I suppose that’s as good a name as any for it.”

“Where does it go?”

“To the moon.”

“To the moon?”

“To the moon.”

“Why are you holding a ribbon that goes to the moon?”

“So it doesn’t float away.”

“Oh.” I climbed the ribbon with my eyes. Sure enough, it disappeared into the moon. “Can I hold it?”

“There are rules,” the girl said.

“I don’t like rules,” I said.

For the first time, she smiled. “Me neither. But these rules are important.”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “Fine.”

“There are three.”

“What are they?”

“The moon balloon can change hands only when at its fullest.”

“It’s full, isn’t it?”

“The moon balloon cannot be pulled or released.”

“I won’t.”

“The moon balloon cannot be given, only taken of free will.”

I nodded impatiently and strode forward. “I already said I’d take it.”

The girl shook her head. “You don’t understand. Once you accept the moon balloon, you have no choice but to hold it until another girl takes it from you.”

I hesitated. “How long will that be?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Up here, this close to the moon, time doesn’t move in a predictable way. It ebbs, and it flows.”

I didn’t move.

“If you decide not to take it, the moon will call someone new,” she said. “The last girl didn’t take it.”

“Is it always a girl?”

“For all of eternity, a woman has always carried the moon balloon.”

“How can you know that?”

“The moon… She says things through the ribbon.”

We stood close on the bare patch on top of the lean, knobby hill and didn’t speak. The grass whispered.

“I’ll take it,” I said.

She didn’t say anything, only stared at me with those narrow eyes. I stepped closer and lifted my arm high and stretched onto my tiptoes to grasp the ribbon just above her fist.

“I have it,” I said.

When the other girl released her grip, I felt a great weight take hold of me. The ribbon pulled and pressed. It placed my body under the most terrible stress, and I might have worried that I would tear in two if the ribbon hadn’t simultaneously kindled a light in my chest, filling me with such warm emotion as I had never felt before. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to scream.

The other girl stepped back. She had the oddest expression on her face as she lowered her arm and stared at her palm.

“You miss her,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Missing isn’t the right word. Missing implies sadness. Missing implies that she’s no longer with me.”

“But she isn’t,” I said.

“But she is,” the other girl said, her smile like a constellation. “She is. She always is.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“No. But you will.”

The ribbon held all the weight of sleep and all the lightness of dreams. Do you know what that feels like? To be pulled and pressed at the same time? Maybe you do. That’s what I imagine love might feel like. One day.

“Would you like me to stay a while?” the other girl asked. “To keep you company?”

“I’d like that.”

The girl lowered herself onto the ground, fingers intertwined behind her head.

“Are you excited to go back?” I asked. “To your life?”

She looked at me, her expression blank. “I’m in my life, aren’t I?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess you are.”

She swiveled her gaze back to the moon. The motion of the grass was hypnotic.

“Do you feel her?”

I nodded.

“She’s only doing what she always does. Pushing and pulling. Giving and taking. But you have a direct line. Listen, and you’ll begin to understand. It’s nothing explicit. It’s a broader awareness. A feeling. Which is all we do in life anyway, isn’t it? Feel?”

I didn’t say anything.

“That’s all we are,” the girl said, so softly that the words were lost to the grass. “Feelings.”

Eventually, she left. By then, the edges of time had already grown dull, so I didn’t know how long she sat there, nor how long she walked, fading in and out of valleys, until she crested the final hill and faded from my life forever. I don’t remember everything she said to me—memory, of course, is only a delusion of time—but I do remember her final words.

“One day we’ll be there. One day we’ll reach the moon. I’m sure of it. And you know what? I fear that day. The day we walk on the moon is the day we stop dreaming.”

On the bare patch on top of the lean, knobby hill, there was no day. The sun never rose. The moon never set. Sometimes the breeze lifted, and sometimes the breeze fell. Sometimes I slept, although it didn’t feel like sleeping. It felt like waking. I dreamed of my room at home, of mother eating a crumpet, of father reading the newspaper.

Sometimes, there were other signs of life. A pack of wolves howling in the next valley over. A frog at my feet. A tiny owl on my shoulder. Once, fireflies. Thousands of them, flickering on and off across the meadow. I had the impression that the moon was calling these creatures to me.

The moon. Yes, the moon. The moon was fading, waning, although the phases didn’t arrive with any regularity. As I said, time didn’t flow on the lean, knobby hill. I felt no longing for the phase that had been because I didn’t remember the phase that had been. I felt no expectation for the phase that would be because I didn’t anticipate any phase to be. There was only the now, the present, the immediate, the forthwith. Does that make sense? I’m telling you the story as though it happened all neat and orderly because that’s the way our brains understand it. But really, there was no past, and there was no future. It was like… It was likelike the past and future were separate bodies of water in the valleys on either side of that lean, knobby hill. They rose and fell with the tide, scrabbling at the incline like mice in a bucket. Sometimes they came close, but they never reached me.

When the moon faded to black, I could see nothing at all. It was a darkness more complete than any I’ve experienced before. I might have been scared if there was anything to be scared of.

Without sight, my other senses heightened. Touch, taste, smell, hearing… I felt everything. It was unclear if I myself was feeling or if I was feeling through the moon. Probably the two were one and the same.

I felt the thrill of blood through my arteries when my heart pumped, pumped.

I felt the pain of the grass when the wind yanked at their hair.

I felt the solemnity of the clouds as they huddled close for warmth, their breath white in the cold air.

I felt the grimace of the wind as it scraped past trees and buildings and carried leaves and rubbish, and I felt the relief when it reached at long last its destination, the city at the end of the world, the city that has no name.

And I felt dreams. Or rather, I felt all of the tiny disturbances in the universe that were dreams-to-be, that which would be grabbed and clenched and bitten and burned by the blind fumblings of the mind until they became something solid, something real, something indelible.

The moon waxed, beginning as the thinnest wafer and growing, bloating, brightening. I think that’s about the time I heard footsteps, heavy breathing, pebbles tumbling down the hillside. The grass whispered in agitation. A girl’s head appeared, clambering on all fours up and onto the bare patch on the top of the lean, knobby hill. She had curly hair and small ears and big hands. She wore trousers and clogs.

Her breath caught when she saw me. Her forehead crinkled—and then crinkled further when she noticed the ribbon.

“What are you holding?”

“I called it a ribbon.”

“Where does it go?”

“To the moon.”

“To the moon?”

“To the moon.”

The girl accepted the moon balloon. I wasn’t sad to release the ribbon. I wasn’t happy either. It made no difference. The moon was still with me, you understand.

I offered to sit with her for a while, to keep her company, and she said she’d like that. So I lay on the ground, and I gazed at the moon, and we talked about dreams.

Neither sooner nor later, I left. I followed the silver tail of the moon through the whispering grasses and over the rolling hills. When I thought about it, the trail went on forever; when I didn’t, I made swift progress. Dirt became tarmac, and tarmac became cobblestone. I passed the dance club and the hat store and the market and Claudia’s Cake Shop and Mr. Babel’s Store for Rare and Antique Books. I unlatched the garden gate, grasping it by the missing picket, third from the left.

I knocked on the door.

It opened with hardly a peep. Mother’s face, long and flat, stared at me. Then she crumpled onto one knee and wrapped me into a hug, a tight hug, the tightest hug made from cat fur lodged in the collar of her housecoat and crumbs from a breakfast crumpet and stagnant dreams from a night of bad rest.

“Where have you been?” she said, in a whisper like the long, flowing grasses that surrounded the bare patch on top of the lean, knobby hill.

“The moon,” I said.

“Be careful walking to school,” Vimala says, a mantra that is common in their mornings. Her daughter Chinni has to walk half an hour to get to school, and while she is always accompanied by her friends, Vimala still worries. The road is more of a dirt path, and she knows how easy it is to be tempted by something off the path. People with safety and security could dream of paths less taken and find whimsy in twisted, poorly maintained routes. For people like Vimala and her family, the well-worn paths were the easiest and the shortest paths to the destination.

“Yes, Amma,” her daughter says, and Vimala wishes that she could offer her daughter more than just words of advice and warning. Her husband owns a bicycle, but he is off to work at the break of dawn. In the evenings, he leaves the fields for the local bar, spending half his salary on cheap liquor and fried snacks. Vimala does not know what he finds in the sordid, dirty place. The few times she has visited to bring back her inebriated husband, she found a place filled with grimy men, cheap string lights covering a thatched shed, some delusion of being something more than the place actually was. It was a place of vice, a place where dreams died, a place where men withered and finally let go of their hopes of leaving the village behind for something grander and greater.

Chinni is well-behaved, and she comes home with report cards with high numbers and comments from her teachers that Vimala reads with pride. But she is alone in her pride. Already, she is hearing from her in-laws about the eventual day when Chinni will be taken out of school. The only thing keeping Chinni in school is the free lunch given by the government and the free childcare provided by the teachers. But the colleges that come after school will ask for tuition, and there is no college within a traveling distance from their home. Chinni will have to be kept in a hostel, and Vimala knows that in their family, such things are unheard of.

In their village, daughters are treated like yearly crops. They are raised to harvest and then sold. Sons are trees, watered and cared of, expected to provide shade. Daughters are never treated as one’s own. Vimala sees that thought in both men and women. She remembers the sting of her own childhood, of never belonging. Her mother’s home became her brother’s, and this new home she has with her husband is her husband’s. But it seems she is alone in remembering. Everyone else around her seems to understand and accept that it is the way the world works, and it is the way the world must continue to work. They want her daughter to repeat Vimala’s life. When Chinni is a girl still too young, she will be placed like a doll in front of some strange family and their son. The family will appraise her value and demand a dowry, as if they are doing Vimala an enormous favor by taking her daughter away from her.

Vimala wants to say she will never partake in the ritual, but her life is evidence that she has done everything just as other people have. She will live the same life as the people around her, and perhaps the only inheritance she will leave her daughter is the same fate. A transactional marriage with a man that others deem appropriate, a lifetime of domestic chores and simple living, a life devoid of dreams. Vimala wishes that her daughter could live any life other than her own. Anything would be better than a life so barren of love, so bereft of hope, and so destined for an inconsequential life and death.

But she cannot offer anything more to Chinni. Instead all she can offer her are the smallest of pleasures. Vimala takes out two candies from the knot she’s made at the end of her saree. They are hard mango candies, sweet and sour, wrapped in thin paper. She presses them into Chinni’s hand.

“Come home right after school,” she says. “Don’t hang around the school field.”

Winter is coming, and the days are growing shorter. The path from the school to their home is too narrow for cars, but people travel on bicycles and motorbikes, and she knows the recklessness of men when they are given anything that can go fast. “Chinni” means small, and her daughter has always kept to her namesake. She is a bird-like thing, thin and gangly, easy to miss.

“And walk on the side of the road,” Vimala warns her.

“What if I don’t?” Chinni asks, a joking tone in her voice.

“Then the Boochodu will get you!” Vimala yells, tickling her daughter’s sides. It is a frequent joke in their house. A threat of a mystical bogeyman who will take her daughter away. Vimala had received the same threats from her mother when she was a child, although the tone had been different. Vimala had thought the Boochodu to be a real person, some shadowy figure in the night who came and abducted unruly children. For her daughter, the Boochodu was a character restricted to bedtime stories. Chinni knew he wasn’t real nor a real threat.

After Chinni leaves, Vimala sets out to complete the day’s work. She is considered a housewife, but the house is much to maintain. She hears of women in the cities who have maids or machines to do the dishes and the laundry, but in their little village, all she has is her two hands. They are rough and calloused now, and she resents the day Chinni’s will be the same. She feeds the chickens in the yard and cooks lunch for her and husband. With the steel lunch box tied up in cloth, she walks to the field to join her husband in working the land.

It is difficult labor, under a sun that does not relent, but it is the only work available in their land. She sets out to leave earlier in the evening than her husband. Someone has to be home when Chinni returns. A train passes through the edge of the farm land, and she imagines the journey of the train, all the people traveling inside of it. The train makes the same journey every few days, but it has seen more of the world than Vimala has. She has never been to a city, and the little television in their home is a relic of the past, with a screen that curves outward and where everything is too colorful, too artificial.

In the evenings, after Chinni comes home from school and before her husband comes back, she watches a soap opera for a half an hour while Chinni does her homework. It is the one little pleasure in her otherwise mundane life. The woman in the show is belittled and humiliated, overworked, and Vimala sees parts of herself in the woman. Granted, the woman lives in a palatial house, wears jewelry even to sleep, but at the core, their problems are the same. A bad husband, a sad marriage, and a life that seems devoid of hope. But in those soap operas, hope does sprout eventually. All the problems are resolved by magic. The woman’s husband changes into a romantic hero, and the heroine herself discovers she is special and talented. After thousands of episodes and countless misunderstandings, there is a happy ending.

But Chinni is not home yet, and the soap opera episode ends on another cliffhanger. Vimala goes out of their little house to see if she can see a little figure walking on the road in the dusk. There is no one, and the light is rapidly diminishing. Soon, she will be able to see nothing. She lights the kerosene lamp and heads out beyond their compound fence.

It is only a half-an-hour walk, a route Chinni has taken for over a year. Sometimes she does come home late, disregarding Vimala’s warnings to play with her friends in the dusty school field. From her home, Vimala ventures out on the path to school, but she sees no one. She goes to the homes of Chinni’s classmates, but they tell she left the school on time while they stayed behind to play. She comes home again, hoping that she might find her daughter in the house, but it is empty.

At the bar, her husband is too drunk to be of any help, and so she walks the path between their house and the school. She checks behind the school building, where there are always abandoned beedi butts and broken bottles of liquor. She checks the fields and the bus stand and finds nothing.

She continues her search, poring through the streets of the village, knocking on every door that she can think of. Chinni is light enough that most adults can carry her with one arm. There are so many places where a little girl can be hidden. So many ways to hurt a child so fragile.

Finally, she makes her way to the bar, where her husband is sitting with friends. His face is slack with drink, his words slurred. It takes him a minute to register what she is saying, and when it does, he is not as worried as her, not nearly as concerned. The men start from the bar, each armed with heavy steel flashlights and lanterns, searching through the fields and the nearby forest, calling out her name.

The other women come to Vimala and escort her back home. Her home is relegated to waiting, to wailing in silence while the sky gradually lightens into morning. The day passes and another, and a week goes by. Her house remains empty. The police are informed, but there is little they can do. The truth is that village lives do not hold much value, and Vimala herself knows that it could be a freak accident. There are old wells in the village that have never been filled up or closed. As more of the forest is being converted to farmland, kraits and cobras are beginning to crawl through the rice paddies and the village alleyways.

After a week, there is an unsaid acceptance of Chinni not returning. Her husband stops his search and buries himself in half-hearted grief and alcohol. The police ignore her gaze when she goes to the police station for updates. Vimala is not angry with them. There is nothing to search for. The old films she sees on television have crimes with clues, with pieces of fabric left for detectives to find, with motives and money to be gained, but in her case there is nothing.

Vimala continues her search, scouring the fields and shining lights into open borewells, venturing further into the surrounding forest and calling out Chinni’s name and getting no response. She stops going to the fields and stops cooking their humble meals. Their house gathers dust and she gains the feral appearance of those on the fringes of society.

She goes out earlier and earlier on endless searches in the same area, seeing if there is some new hiding spot in her old village she will discover. Hope is long gone, but she wants an end. She wants an answer. One morning she leaves for the rice paddies far beyond their village. She has scoured the land multiple times before, but soon it will be winter and the mornings will be too cold for her to walk for long periods.

She spots small footprints in soft soil, and she thinks of all the times Chinni has walked and played in the village. Her one pair of shoes were things to be saved and sparingly used, polished every morning before school and kept neatly outside the door of their home.

Vimala follows the footprints. It cannot be Chinni, but it is perhaps some other child lost in the fields. It is early enough that the snakes will still be out, and their village rests at the foothills of mountains known for leopards.

She follows the footprints and goes into the forest, to where the trees are so densely packed together she has to squeeze between them to pass. The footprints are now dirty marks of mud, and she gets the feeling the child was running. Vimala notices the increase in the length of the gait, but it takes her minutes before she sees how the footprints are different now. They are an adult’s footprints now, and the forest is no longer filled with the morning birdcalls or even the sounds of her own footsteps.

The footprints disappear, and when Vimala stops, she sees she is lost. It is a simple thing most days to get back to the village. It is only a matter of heading downhill, where the forest meets the edge of the fields. Now the land is flat where it should not be, and the trees are strange and gray.

Vimala hears footsteps, slow and deliberate. When she turns, there is no one and nothing.

“Who’s there?” she asks, hoping it is not a leopard or a bear.

Instead, it is a young woman dressed in rags. She looks like Vimala, yet is taller and wilder. Her hair has ribbons streaked through it, and her feet are not barefoot but bound with cloth. It is Chinni, but not so small anymore. Instead, she is a changed thing. She is a wild and free thing, unhindered by responsibilities and untethered from the rules of society.

“Amma,” Chinni says, and her face is filled with joy but devoid of childhood. She has seen things, this young woman, and survived things. She stands straight in a way Vimala can never stand. In her life, she was expected to bow to the world, to the people around her, to her husband. But the young woman in front of her does not slouch to hide her body or wear a veil to cover her hair.

“Chinni?” Vimala asks.

It is a mirage or a delusion. Vimala has finally succumbed to the madness, and she welcomes it. It is a pitiable thing to be half-mad. To embrace the madness fully is to no longer see the concerned and critical looks of the people around her. It is a madness in which she can be with some form of her daughter.

Vimala embraces her daughter. She ignores the changes in the temperature, the way the sky is red, and the way her daughter’s form flows and changes shape like water within her arms. The way something is not quite right, because something wrong is better than nothing at all. Because the monster who steals disobedient children away may be spiriting them to a place where they belong. And for all of her effort and all the ways she shrank and bent herself to fit into the roles she was given, she never felt she belonged.

In the village, a little girl returns to an empty home. She keeps her shoes to the side of the door, and calls for her mother.

Knot 1: Loom-Song (call-and-response)

Who lays a cloth on the night?
Sitaara, Sitaara.
Who pins it with needles of light?
Sitaara, Sitaara.
When the cloth dries stiff and white, what do we read?
The warp of fate, the weft of need.
Who taught the first pattern?
Someone’s grandmother’s grandmother, whose name is lost, but whose hands are blessed.

They call me Kaka, and that is not my name, but it is what I answer to. My hut faces east to the desert. And at night, when the sky dries out like the back of a fish, from my door you can see Sitaara’s cloth so clearly you’d think it will fall on your head.

This world is called Jamdani, after the cloth that is never plain. Jamdani’s mostly desert, with pockets of life surrounding the geyser deeps, the mercy cracks. All patterns live in mistakes, the sprigs blooming where the thread jumps.

From the crack’s throat, geysers shout: sometimes soft, sometimes furious, throwing up water salted bitter as grief. Around the spray, plants grow with roots clever enough to sip what would scald us. We humans built boilers and clearers to tame the water for our own mouths.

Our village too sits on a mercy crack, its houses leaning like stitches at the edge of a fray. When the geysers burst, children run with bowls, women spread cloth to catch the steam, and men curse the salt crust underfoot. If Jamdani had been woven perfectly, we would all be bones by now. Remember that when you weave and when you pray.

The old belief? Yes, I will tell you. Long before our grandmothers, when there were only five villages and seven geysers, a weaver-woman walked into the desert with a copper needle and a spool of darkness. She said: Enough. She strung the first warp between two dunes. She threaded stars through the weft. She hung the cloth to dry on the spine of the sky. When the wind worried it and the dew caught in it, the cloth stiffened and became the dome above our heads. And thus Sitaara gave us nights that could be read.

We learned to read them the way our people read cloth: by fingertip and side-glance, by the corner, by the mistake. A mistake, you know, is an omen. Leave one in your shawl to invite mercy.

In my father’s time, we watched for the Scorpion Lattice. It means locusts. In my own time, we watched for the Broken Gazelle. It means a year of daughters. Now the young ones say the Ragged Border has appeared: they say it means a space ark’s coming back.

What is a space ark? It is a kind of needle for the sky.

Items Received in Sitaara Village:

• Two rolls of ajrakh cloth, block-printed with indigo and madder.
• Three bags of single-origin cumin, adulteration inspected.
• News: A future spaceport is being surveyed at the far salt pan beyond the nakshi tree.
• News: the scientist returns with a box that makes the stars speak.
• Gossip: Kaka’s granddaughter has betrothed herself to the wind.

Items Promised:

• One pattern-reading for the caravan’s onward journey, payable in jaggery and diesel.
• A jar of last year’s rain, sealed.

Sign: Dhirubhai of the Red Cart. Witnessed by the nakshi tree’s shadow.

You want to see my hands? I will show you both sides. See these little cuts? The loom teaches us through blood.

My grandmother’s grandmother was a pilot on the last space ark and could read the sky cloth better than anyone. They say she would sleep facing north with her palms open so the night could set its wisdom on her lines. She taught us that a new pattern is a new word the sky speaks. To hear it, you have to listen not with your ears but with your soul.

I weave ajrakh patterns because the geyser was once generous. Indigo is the smell of dusk; madder is the warmth of breath. If I place a repeat of eight stars across a border and the ninth is misprinted, that is not a flaw; that is mercy — a place where the sky can look back into us.

You ask about the Ragged Border? The children saw it first. Children see everything we bury. It appeared at the edge of the hunter’s belt, a frayed line like the selvage of a cloth that was cut with dull scissors. The same week, a man with shoes that did not take dust came to the village. He called himself a surveyor for a company with a name like a chemical: Akkash Dynamics. He looked at the salt pan the way you would look at a bare, clean table.

He asked me: Do you think the sky is a surface or a depth? I told him: It is a cloth. He laughed the way city people do when they wish to respect you but are already somewhere else.

He came with the scientist woman, the one we call Didi Stars. They say she grew up in the city of Nakshahr, in a house that smelled of wet fish and physics. She bought one of my shawls with the Broken Gazelle motif. She asked me to explain it. I said: It means daughters. She said: Good.

Field Note: 1

The elders here hold a cosmology that maps night-sky patterns onto textile grammar. This isn’t figurative; they treat constellations as repeats, borders, motifs, and misprints. Their lexicon is rich: chhed (hole), rekha (line), buti (small flower), kinara (edge). They claim history has been read from the night’s cloth. Frankly, the elegance of the metaphor has resisted my attempts to reduce it. My mother was a sari-seller. Perhaps I am compromised by affection.

Field Note: 2

The space ark is returning, and we’re building a spaceport to fit her specific requirements. Akkash Dynamics offered me a contract as “community liaison,” which is code for: come and convert belief into permission. I refused. Then I accepted. I am not a saint; I have student loans to think of, and a father with a heart like a frayed rope.

Field Note: 3

I brought an array: a suitcase of detectors tuned to measure skyglow and star-track error. Light pollution will ruin their reading; still, rural darkness persists like stubborn cloth. I set up the array under the nakshi tree, and the children watched. One girl asked if the machine had a favorite star. I told her yes, mine. She said hers is the “eighth eye” of the scorpion. We both pretended this was scientific.

Field Note: 4

The Ragged Border is a wound where the sky forgot how to stay whole. To the naked eye, it looks like threads pulled loose, a seam glowing faint and restless, as if someone worried the cloth with impatient fingers. The villagers call it a mercy. The company calls it a hyperspace shear, the ark’s corridor bleeding into sight. Both names are true. When the wind carries fine salt through the night, you can see the Border ripple, shivering like cloth not yet hemmed. The weavers say this is the path of the Needle. They wait for it to stitch itself home.

A Sari:

I bought a shawl in the Broken Gazelle motif. It sits on my shoulders like a vow. I am tired of being reasonable. I want to see what happens if I read a sky like a girl raised on lullabies.

“The scientist looks at the sky like a midwife looks at a crowning.”

“Kaka says the salt pan is getting thirsty for machines.”

“Mira’s loom sang a new beat yesterday.”

“A new beat?”

“The treadle paused. The shuttle refused. We say the loom knows first.”

“My sister’s son says the new bright line at dawn is a ‘rocket path.’”

“Paths cut both ways.”

Slide, shuttle, slide.
Mind the mercy on the edge.
Count to eight and leave the ninth for the gods,
for daughters, for mistakes that keep us alive.
If the sky snags, smooth it with your breath.
If the cloth tears, name the tear before you mend it.

My job is to measure and not to be measured. Villages like Sitaara make both hard.

I bring maps, drones, and the company’s own liturgy: We believe in access, in opening the heavens to human ambition. It sounds like a hymn, but it is an invoice.

At the salt pan, the ground is flat enough to make you humble. The horizon looks like a long, long ruler you could hold to the world’s edge and draw a straight line to tomorrow. We need straight lines. The space arks, unlike gods, do not tolerate imprecision.

But the first day I pegged the perimeter, the children came and stuck ribbons on the stakes and called them kites. The second day, Kaka came and drew a line in the dust and said, Here the nakshi tree’s old shade used to fall. He told me a story about a weaver who taught the sky to be kind. He said, We will take your money and your jobs. We are not fools. But point your needle carefully. Cloth once torn never falls the same against the shoulder.

I asked him what the Ragged Border means to the village people. He told me to marry a woman who weaves.

Faith is a word that is too big for my hands. I like smaller words: trust, habit, taste, mercy. But if you insist, I’ll tell you faith is when I throw the shuttle and believe the other hand will be there to catch it.

When we read the sky, we are not predicting like your scientists; we are tasting what we belong to. The Scorpion Lattice told my mother to dry the grain early; that saved us a season’s grief. The Broken Gazelle told me I would have daughters, and I did: two girls with knees like nakshi nutshells and minds like geyser crowns.

The Ragged Border tells me something that I cannot say without my stomach hurting. It says: the cloth is being unhooked. Someone is taking it down to cut it to a new shape. I do not know whether to be angry or to make a blessing.

So I go to my loom and I make the raggedness in silk and cotton. I feed my misgivings to the pattern. I add a mercy at the edge.

[Cicadas. Wind. Occasional laughter from the distant huts.]

Recording? Okay. My mother used to sell saris in a shop with a tin roof that rattled staccato under the salt thrown by the winds. She could look at a pattern and tell you if a loom had been repaired with wire. I wonder what she would say about the sky.

I ran a spectral analysis tonight. There’s a measurable increase in skyglow here, even away from the city, from satellite constellations and the new cosmoport being built. The villagers call it “the stiffening of the cloth.” They’re not wrong. The sky is becoming less of a depth and more of a used surface, a written-on slate.

And yet [wind rises] and yet, when I align my array with the Ragged Border, my instruments interpret it as an error. The software screams. The Border is a mercy in physics, a loophole. It lets the ark close its path faster than the universe should allow, as if a weaver’s hand left a stitch loose. Without that looseness, the space ark would never reach us; it would be shredded in its own thread. What the cloth calls a flaw, the travelers call a door.

There’s a proposal on my desk to integrate local belief into our outreach documents. It says: Leverage cultural narratives to build stakeholder buy-in. That sentence makes my teeth feel like mismatched buttons. But maybe the only honest leverage is to admit that I, too, want a story to help me live with what I’m doing.

We set off at dawn along the salt road. The air tasted of old coins. Before we go, we always ask the oldest stone to carry our words to the sky.

O cloth-keeper who hangs the night to dry,
Keep our wheels away from thorns,
Keep our rumors true enough not to poison the mouths they pass through,
Keep our greed light enough to float, heavy enough to feed our children.

This time we asked for one more thing:
Let the incoming ark’s needle not pierce the wrong place.

The stone, being a stone, said nothing. But a salt-tail barked its harsh laugh into the air, and sometimes that is an answer.

Akkash Dynamics is proud to partner with Jamdani’s communities. We bring:

• Roads for connection.
• Jobs for prosperity.
• Investments in education for the future.

Together, we stitch progress into the very fabric of Jamdani’s skies.

Listen: Every prophecy charges twice. First in ghee and grain, in the patience of elders. Second, when it comes true, and we must bear its weight.

Once a year, on the night the geyser steam tastes of iron, we spread our best cloths and sleep beneath them so the sky can read us back. And what does it read? That we are stubborn, that we feed our children first, that we dream of leaving and we dream of staying — and both dreams pull like oxen until the yoke cracks.

Now the prophecy stands before us in steel. The company does not ask; it drives stakes, raises towers, hammers its path toward the sky. The ark is coming whether we nod or spit.

So the work of the village is not to refuse, but to shape. To weave the machine into our cloth, to leave mercy where iron seeks perfection, to make Jamdani live through change rather than be broken by it.

We told them the date. They brought laddoos and old quilts. It felt both like a wedding and a theft.

The first freight rocket rose at dawn, exactly when the cloth is thinnest. The sound folded the desert like a bedsheet snapping, and through the Nakshi tree ran a tremor. The children screamed. The women laughed. A man fainted; he will dine on the story for years.

In my instrument graphs, the payload unfolded into lattice segments, each locking into place aligned with the Ragged Border. Piece by piece, a braking frame will take shape, to catch the ark before it tears too close to Jamdani’s atmosphere.

In the villagers’ eyes, a new hem was stitched across the morning, a mercy edge at the sky’s unraveling seam.

After, Mira brought me a shawl with the Ragged Border motif rendered in indigo on indigo, so that you only see it under the right light. She said: Take this to your bosses and tell them the cloth wants softness where you push it. I said: The cloth cannot have wants. She said: Then it has mine.

That night, the children sang a new version of their rhyme where the rocket is a needle with two mothers: one who taught it to climb, and one who taught it to come home.

The loom gave me a gift. After the launch, the treadle beat like a new heart. I wove a border I had never seen: a ladder that turned halfway through and became a river. In the mercy of the misprint, the rungs bent like reeds.

I took it to Kaka and he nodded as if he had ordered it from the world. He said: This is how we will live with the needle: by teaching it to come down as carefully as it goes up. By making room in the cloth for the place where descent is not a fall but a return.

Faith, you see, is not blind here. It is half a sight, and half a hand. It is knowing how tight to pull so the pattern holds but does not choke.

Subject: Community Engagement Updates —  Sitaara Site

• Observations: Local narratives frame the sky as textile; border-fraying suggests apprehension regarding freight rocket traffic and launch frequency.
• Action Items: Commission co-designed textile exhibit for the visitors’ center; sponsor the weavers’ cooperative; incorporate a “mercy edge” concept into the safety signage (soft language around “anomalies”).
• Risks: Empowering narratives may also empower dissent.
• Opportunity: Rockets are to be positioned as “needles carrying up lengths of thread,” each payload a strand in the fabric of Jamdani’s sky. This framing suggests harmony: Earth and orbit stitched together for the ark’s safe arrival.
• Note: The science liaison appears ambivalent; her local rapport is valuable but may conflict with the corporate messaging.

Sons go to the roads; daughters learn the knots.
Needles go up; needles come down.
Between them, we keep the world from splitting.
Hush now, hush, the hot milk is skinning.
Hush now, hush, your father’s shirt is thinning.
Hush now, hush, the night is pinning itself to us with stars.

Ma,

You would have liked Mira. She would have teased you about your insistence on matching blouse pieces. You would have liked Kaka, who reminds me of Nana’s refusal to be rushed by anyone’s clock.

Today I stood at the edge of the salt pan and watched a rocket cut the morning. My job is to say why this matters. Each payload is a beam for the Braking Pad’s containment lattice above us, a hem to catch the Ragged Border before it unravels.

Without that frame, the ark would rip the sky open wider than Jamdani could bear. With it, the ship may pass cleanly, land, and leave again without breaking us. That does matter.

But something else happened. The children clapped their three-times-clap. The weaver muttered something that sounded like a blessing and a threat braided together. I felt the world’s cloth pull tight over our heads, like someone testing whether it would hold.

I think the Ragged Border is not a warning that we are tearing the sky. I think it’s an instruction to stitch with humility. To leave the mercy edge. To remember that a cloth thrown too hard will bruise the shoulder.

If I come home, I will bring you a shawl with the pattern. I will bring you a piece of sky you can fold into your cupboard, between the napkins and your winter hopes.

Love, A.

When I am done with this body, I will become an itch in someone’s story, and that is enough. Tell them: In our village we read the night. We did not all agree on what it said. We ate, we quarreled, we prayed with our hands in the flour. The ark is not ours, but we must live with it.

Once in a generation, it cuts the sky, drawn back along the Ragged Border like a needle following its own thread. Why not more often? Because cloth cannot be hemmed in the same place twice without tearing. Time must heal the seam before it can be opened again.

What does it bring? Tools we do not know how to make. Seeds with new hungers. Medicines that taste of metal and work anyway. And a promise: that those who long to leave may ride its corridor, and perhaps send back a word before their voices fade.

What does it take? The bright motifs. The strong arms. Sometimes the foolish, sometimes the wise. And always the quiet of our nights, for once the ark has passed, we can never again believe our sky belongs only to us.

Do not call it a gift or a theft. It is a rhythm, like drought and flood. Our work is not to stop it. Our work is to weave its passage into Jamdani’s cloth so that when the ark leaves, the pattern still holds.

• Tomorrow evening: women’s cooperative meets under the nakshi tree. Topic: dye shortages; indigo trader late; possible company sponsorship (strings?).
• School holiday adjusted: Space ark landing window at dawn, please keep children away from the salt road.
• Lost: one copper thimble (engraved with a peacock).
• Found: a strip of silver insulation near the pan, soft as the inside of a sickle moon. Don’t chew it.

Hang the cloth, Sitaara, hang it wide.
Hold the Border, let it guide.
Count to eight, then let the ninth
Be the ship that crosses the rhyme.

Let the ark break slow, break true,
Fall like mercy, not like rue.
If the Border burns, do not despair:
Hem it, bless it, bind it there.

The ark will bring, the ark will take.
Name the pattern it will make.
Cloth is only cloth until
The sky is stitched by human will.

The ark cannot leave us quickly. Its hull is bruised from the tear, its seams hot with stress. The Braking Pad needs to be rebuilt upside down, so it will close successfully the Ragged Border after the launch. Meanwhile Sitaara’s cloth stays ripped over our head and it is a humbling sight.

The company calls this ark’s stay maintenance. I call it convalescence. The ark is alive in ways it should not be. Every measurement I make declares: error. Even sitting on the salt plain, the ark is still a mistake the universe has not yet decided to forgive.

So it will rest for a year, maybe more. Long enough for us to circle the seasons, long enough for children to grow taller. A guest who lingers until the year turns leaves its name stitched in the cloth. The ark will leave its name.

The ark sits heavy as a dune on the salt pan, and where there is weight, there is trade. Stalls rise like mushrooms after steam: sweets, salt-tail feathers, prayer ribbons, even broken tools claimed as relics. Children charge tourists for stories of fainting men, and someone sells bottled steam as “ark breath.”

Some call it wealth. Others call it shadow. The company watches with clean boots, taking notes. The scientist walks through with a worried face. We laugh and bargain anyway, because laughter spends the easiest.

At night, when the torches gutter, the shadow of the ark lies across our quilts. It is bigger than a hill, smaller than a season, but we know already: the cloth will never be plain again.

They came in a convoy of white trucks, company men with clipboards, helmets, and smiles too clean for Jamdani’s dust. Behind them walked the recruiters, stiff in their uniforms, trailed by villagers curious as salt-tails. The children clambered on the fences to see. Old men muttered: “So this is what choosing looks like.”

The recruiters asked for names. I said my daughters’ names aloud, and it felt like pulling threads from my own skin.

Noor, with her knees like Nakshi-nut shells, who cannot pass a loom without touching it. Saavi, with her hands quick as steam, who can open a clock and make it tick again. The ark recruiters nodded as if they had woven them themselves.

I told the girls, “This is not a choice. This is the season. When the Border opens, someone must go, or the cloth unravels.” They nodded, eager.

That night, I pressed my palms to their hair as they slept. Their breath smelled of milk and salt. I thought: when the ark leaves, Jamdani will breathe with their lungs, or not at all.

Subject: Local Recruitment Initiative — Preliminary Notes

Candidate Noor demonstrates unusual pattern recognition.

• Quick adaptation to visual alignment tasks.
• Spontaneous use of metaphor (“warp/weft”) — training staff flagged as effective teaching heuristic.

Candidate Saavi shows aptitude for mechanical restoration.

• Repaired a simple diagnostic panel without instructions.
• Potential fit for Transceiver repairs.

Community reception: high engagement. Villagers gathered during convoy arrival; visible curiosity was interpreted as support. Recommendation: leveraging this in outreach materials.

Messaging: emphasize “opportunity,” “education,” “future.” Avoid terms such as compulsory service or crew attrition.

They call it the FTL Transceiver, as if a mouthful of letters could hide its silence. I call it the Shuttle. Once it carried voices back and forth between stars, the way a weaver’s shuttle carries thread through cloth. Now it lies broken, and the ark is deaf.

I put my ear to its casing. No hum. I press my hand flat. No warmth. But machines are like cloth: they remember. If you tug the right corner, the whole pattern stirs.

I will mend it. Not for the company, not for their memos. For Jamdani, so that when the ark leaves, our sky will not be mute again.

Left foot, right foot, count the gaps,
speak to the weft in whisper maps.
Mercy on the edge, mercy in the seam,
leave room for the day you change your dream.

After the ark’s landing, the salt pan around our guest gleams, melted to glass. And with the gleam comes clutter: shards of alloy the ark no longer needs, food wrappers printed in languages no one here can read, a vial that once held medicine sharp as metal. The crew tosses them aside as useless. To us they are relics. Children snatch them up, racing to show me each new find as if I am a shrine.

My array now includes a simple thing: a notebook of the children’s interpretations. They draw the Ragged Border as if it were theirs to tame. One girl sketched it as a staircase with one step missing. Another drew it as a river, its banks stitched with tiny knots “to talk to the other side.”

They are proud that Noor and Saavi walk the ark’s corridors. Their grandmothers have walked only to the market or to the mercy crack, but these girls will be grandmothers in other skies. The pride shines in their eyes brighter than the scraps of alloy in their hands.

I grew up believing science was the loom that would teach me fairness. But looms, too, can be owned.

I sat in the pilot’s chair today. It is too big for me, but that is the joke — they say the ark is too big for anyone. The console glows with marks I don’t know, but I don’t read them. I touch them the way you touch cloth in the dark, finding the give, the snag, the misprint.

When I close my eyes, the Ragged Border rises in me. Not lines on a screen, but threads under a fingertip. If I press wrong, it pulls away. If I breathe steadily, it settles, like a child soothed.

They tell me to call it correcting the course. I call it listening to cloth.

When I left the simulator, some children followed me, whispering my name as if it were already a story. I am not a story. Not yet. Not until the ark rises.

I stayed with the Shuttle today until the lamps went dim. Its belly is tangled, wires curled like burned roots, panels scored with salt. The company men say it is useless. I say cloth only looks ruined until you find the thread that holds it.

I opened one coil, black with ash. When I touched it, it crumbled but beneath, the copper still shone. I hummed a loom-song under my breath, the way you do when pulling out knots. Not for magic, just to keep steady.

For a breath-long moment, one light blinked. Only once. A single stitch in a sea of holes. Then darkness again.

I pressed my forehead to the casing and whispered: “I will bring you voices. I promise.”

The freight rockets started flying anew, this time turning the Breaking Pad inside out, so the ark will reopen the Ragged Border on launch. The company has been saying the word return with the zeal of a convert. Reusability makes money; rhetoric makes reusability palatable.

At dawn, the booster came back like a needle reconsidering a stitch. Perfect until the last thirty meters, then there was a wobble like a skipped heartbeat. It landed skewed in the far quadrant of the pan, throwing up a veil of salt. No one was hurt. We tasted victory and corrosion at once.

Mira wraped a shawl around my shoulders without looking at me. The pattern was new: a ladder becoming a river, the rungs bent like reeds. “For descent,” she says. My throat does a thing that is not scientific.

Applause is a habit city people brought to us. We used to say wah-wah when old women sang, and arey baap re when goats did something clever, and that was enough. Now we clap for rockets, and for everything that tries to go to space: a boy leaping farther, a politician stretching a vowel.

After the freight rocket’s needle stitched the sky, someone began to clap. It was Noor. It sounded like salt raining on a tin roof. Others followed. Even the salt-tail added its ridiculous cry.

Applause is a way of telling ourselves we are here. It is also a way of telling the sky we are not done.

The company asks the cooperative to weave a panel for the visitors’ center: “Community Heritage Textile.” Money enough to buy indigo for a season, to fix three roofs, to send two girls to vocational school without bargaining with uncles.

I gather the women. We talk long, with flour on our hands. We agree on a condition: we will choose the pattern. The company nods, as if consenting to gravity.

We weave the Ragged Border with the mercy edge thick enough to feel under a palm. We thread a ladder that turns to river. We hide, at the selvedge, a tiny misprint: a stitch that pulls away from the needle, a loop that refuses to be cut. We call it Return.

When we deliver the panel, the surveyor runs his fingers along the edge and shivers, as if a small future just touched his wrist.

Subject: Visitor Center Textile —  Interpretive Copy

• “The Sky as Cloth”: Emphasize shared human heritage of weaving; analogize rockets as “needles carrying thread of cooperation.”
• “Mercy Edge”: Reframe as “safety margin.”
• “Ragged Border”: Present as “evolving horizon.”
• Avoid terms: tear, fray, wound.

Add a donor plaque.

Note: Local artisan collective insistent on use of “Return” motif. Spin as sustainability.

We’ll stitch a step where none was there,
teach a needle how to care.
Salt in hair and soot on skin,
we’ll clap the cloth and call it kin.

We live at the selvedge. It is where the weft turns back, binding the edge so the cloth does not unravel. The selvedge is plain, not full of flowers or stars. But without it, even the brightest pattern comes undone.

The ark rests in our salt pan. The Pad rises again, beam by beam, like a hem rebuilt. Beyond us lie the motifs, the far-off worlds the ark stitches together: bright with towers, heavy with oceans, loud with voices we have never heard. When the ark leaves, its name will blaze like a motif. Ours will not. That is fine.

A cloth cannot live without its selvedge, even if no one sings about it.

I wear the glasses until my eyes ache. The Shuttle opens like no cloth I know: layers inside layers, threads smaller than dust. I guide the nano-instruments the way I once guided a needle, hand trembling, heart steady. One wrong tug, and the whole weave slips away.

For days there has been nothing but silence, silence that tastes of iron. Today, at last, the pattern aligns. A tremor runs through the lattice, sharp enough to make me bite my lip.

Then, voices. Not one, a flood. A hundred tongues, a thousand. Languages I do not know, laughter, arguments, lullabies, markets, warnings. The salt pan itself rings with them as the Shuttle awakens.

People stumble out of their houses, faces lifted, mouths open. Some laugh, some weep. Children clap their hands to catch the noise, as if it were geysers’ foam. For the first time in generations, Jamdani is full of voices not its own. No longer alone.

The instructors strap me in, their voices taut. “Stability check. Simulate the hyperspace shear and the event interface.” The console blooms with light, lines twitching like frayed threads. The ark shudders, as if remembering its wound.

I breathe slowly. I press where the weave gives, let the misprint lead me. The tremor softens, the lines grow steady. It is not a question of strength. The Border hums against my palms like a drum.

Someone claps behind me, too soon. I ignore it. I carry the cloth through until the seam lies flat again. Only then do I let go.

I pass. The certificate is printed on paper that smells like a machine trying to be a tree. Jagan says he will carve my name on his toolbox lid. I tell him to spell it right. He tries, fails, paints over, tries again. The lid looks like a palimpsest. I like it that way.

The wind on the way home talks in a language we grew up with and forgot. The Ragged Border doesn’t look ragged tonight. It looks like a hem folded twice and pressed.

A girl came to the cooperative with a pattern scrawled on the inside of a cement sack. It looked like the Ragged Border swallowing a needle and then smiling with all its teeth. We laughed; then we grew sober, because the pattern felt like a dare.

We wove it small, as a sample. We failed it three times. On the fourth, Saavi adjusted the tension with a patience that made the loom forgive us. Noor looked at the cloth and said: “It looks like coming home with a scar.” We nodded.

I told them: cloth is not for worship, it is for wearing. If a pattern does not sit on a shoulder without biting, it is a bad prayer. That is what my grandmother taught me, and what I teach them.

We cut the sample free. I edge-hemmed it with my grandmother’s copper thimble, the one with the peacock. Then I remembered the chalk notice: Lost: copper thimble. Found: none. I untied it from my own finger and gave it back to the air.

When I was young, I thought the bright motifs were a reward and the plain selvedge was punishment. Then I learned neither is true. The motifs dazzle but fray, the selvedge holds but goes unsung. A cloth is honest: it shows where you belong, even when you do not wish to see it.

People say rockets mean leaving. I say rockets are needles, stitching a path so the ark may come and go without bowing to seas or kings. But the real leaving is quieter: boys with phones, girls with bags, children who choose a door and step through.

Noor will leave, and she will also stay. Her hands will guide the ark, but her laughter will linger in the geyser’s crowns. Saavi will stay, and she will also leave. Her Shuttle will bind Jamdani to other skies, her voice traveling farther than her feet.

You want me to explain? Go ask a Nakshi tree how many roots hold the village, and how many shoots escape its shade.

The ark is never empty. We fill it with grain, tools, spare filters, samples of soil, and more lists than I can name. Every crate is weighed against thrust, every gram measured against risk. The Braking Pad hums with tension, waiting to release the ship as it once caught it.

Noor walks the corridors as if she has always belonged here. Saavi lingers by the Shuttle, listening for echoes even when the voices have quieted. I mark their names in my notes, though the company will only call them crew.

The villagers bring laddoos, quilts, salt-crusted water jars: offerings no manifest will record. But I write them too, because cloth is not complete without its selvedge, and departure is not complete without what clings to it.

One for the warp that never breaks,
Two for the knot a mother makes,
Three for the girls on a rooftop stair,
Four for the needle that learns to care,
Five for the salt that fell like rain,
Six for the ark that left without pain,
Seven for elders who watch and mend,
Eight for the mercy we leave at the end,
Nine we do not count aloud,
the child who changes the rhyme is proud.

The ark does not rise gently. It pulls at the cloth, tearing what we thought was whole. The Ragged Border opens, jagged as teeth, and for a moment Jamdani shudders as if it will unravel.

But cloth is made to be joined. A tear is not an ending if you know where to knot it. That is what the Shuttle does now, it ties Jamdani’s selvedge to other motifs, binding us into a pattern too wide for one sky alone.

I leave with Noor, not as thread cut loose, but as thread carried through. The ark is our shuttle. Its engines are needles, its wake a seam. The cloth frays, then binds.

I press my palm to the wall as the Border flares. I feel the tug, fierce and bright. It is not loss. It is joining.

Subject: Community Signal Bell

• Legal advises removal.
• PR advises “lean in.”
• Ops advises earplugs.
• Liaison (Scientist) advises leaving it and learning to hear.

Action: No action. (For once.)

I weave the cycle into a shawl for no one and everyone. Indigo on indigo, so the pattern only shows when light leans. Ladder to river. Ragged Border thick and thin. Mercy edge like a sigh. In the middle, a small motif like a ring that fell from the sky and learned to be worn.

When I cut it free, I do not sing. I breathe. I lay it over the visitor panel for a moment, like a blessing or a practical joke. Then I fold it and put it away where daughters find such things at the exact wrong time and carry them into their right lives.

I put my cough into a jar and it becomes rain. I put my watch into a drawer, and time leaves me alone long enough to say this:

We read the sky as cloth and learned that frayed edges can teach mending. We watched an ark tear through our selvedge and bind us to other motifs. We learned that staying and leaving are only different names for the same turn in the weave.

If anyone asks what faith we kept, say: the faith that a misprint can save you. The faith that you leave a space for the ninth, unnamed thing. The faith that a border is not the end but the place you turn back and make whole.

If anyone asks where I went, say: into the cloth itself, to the shade that used to fall here.

Up with the needle, down with care,
leave a mercy, leave it bare.
Edge the sky with salt and flame,
name the tear and stitch the same.
Not to master, not to own,
just to make the pattern known.
Sitaara, hang your night again.
We’ll read it, mend it, and remain.

The bell rings at unexpected hours. Children say it knows when the sky inhales. The company adds a line to the tour script: “Listen for the community bell; it symbolizes our shared vigilance.” The bell ignores scripts.

I run my hand along the visitor panel’s mercy edge and feel the softness the women have built into it. In our codebook, the one I keep with Saavi’s knots and Noor’s diagrams, I add a new entry:

Mercy Edge (n.): The deliberate looseness that prevents a pattern from becoming a prison.

I close the notebook and look up. The Hyperspace Shear is not ragged tonight. Or it is, but we are too. Either way, the cloth holds.

I am not sure if that counts as science. I am sure it counts though.

Welcome to Sitaara Launch and Learning Center!

Learn how humanity stitches Earth to sky!

• Exhibit A: “The Sky as Cloth” –  (the mercy edge is real; touch it when the docent looks away).
• Exhibit B: “Reusable Rockets” –  (watch for the wobble no one admits). Community Panel: woven by Mira Cooperative –  (there’s a misprint near the left selvedge; it’s a promise).
• Sound Installation: Bell of the Border –  (it rings when the wind remembers our names).

(Penciled note at bottom): If you stand under the nakshi tree at dawn and close one eye, you can see the Ragged Border turn into a river for a breath. If you breathe with it, it will carry you exactly far enough.

Who hangs the cloth tonight?
Sitaara, Sitaara.
Who leaves the mercy at the edge?
We do, we do.
What is the Ragged Border?
A place to turn.
And the ark?
A shuttle that stitched us to return.
And faith?
The misprint that saves us.
And us?
We mend, we bind, we remain.

“Must you pluck all the flowers?”

“Hey prabhu! Must you always startle me so?”

“Have you completely given up on sleep? Even the sun is yet to rise.”

“It’s the thieving neighbours. I must get them all before anyone is up.”

“The gods don’t need so many every day. I’m sure they’re tired of the same old flowers.”

“You and your tirade against my gods! For once, just stop wandering and go get some rest.”

You see, for the last twenty years or so, I have hardly slept a good wink—let alone rest—around the crack of dawn. As far back as I can stretch my unreliable memory, I cannot remember a day of our shared matrimonial life when the stubborn woman has not woken up at these ungodly hours. Even before the next-door rooster has cleared his throat, the entire house rings with a pandemonium of noises big and small—the ear-splitting creak of the rusty bathroom door, the rhythmic swoosh of the broom in the courtyard, the urgent jingle of her bangles attune with the dull thuds of her footsteps. Who can sleep around such a circus, not to mention the routine lowing of the neighbour’s cattle all night?

A lone owl’s hoot pierces through the thick, wintry silence of the dawn. The cool dew soothes my callouses as I struggle to put one foot in front of the other. They say wintertime makes old wounds come alive, reminding the body of the many shocks it has survived through the years. It has been a long walk though getting used to the distance is entirely another thing. I try blowing away some glistening cobwebs from the tagar tree—how beautifully it has grown! In full bloom, the small tree has morphed into a constellation of its own, its milky white flowers sparkling like tiny stars in the dark. I still remember the blazing summer afternoon when I had received my first salary; it was not much but so was the work of shuffling files in a government office all day. Proud as punch, lugging a gunny sack stacked with saplings of several flowering plants, I had walked home from the village bus stop. My mother and little sister, waiting by the verandah and probably expecting a freshly caught mirikali or a big ripe jackfruit, were unable to mask their disappointment.

In the soft blur of twilight, the peeled paint on the front wall resembles a furrowed bark of an old tree. I should have seen to its repair in time, when the place was yet to become a warehouse of unsightly cracks and clutter. I was fortunate to be left as the sole caretaker of this house since my younger siblings chose to prosper and grow old in the only big town in the district. They rarely visited the village. My mother, who refused to move, handed over the upkeep of the house to my wife after we got married. Reduced to a functional ruin now, the four close-packed rooms—the smallest doubles up as the kitchen and utility space—and a sizable backyard served us well over the years. With the little money I had saved up after a decade of employment, a small sitting room adjacent to the verandah and a pucca bathroom were added later.

My eyes rest on the big blob of seepage on the bedroom ceiling, giving it the appearance of a poorly drawn map by a child. Even the window curtains—the only remaining pair that match—have doubled in weight from gathering months of dust, the beige altered to a moldy brown. The steel almirah that once safekept the few valuables we owned, is now a dedicated shrine for junk of all kinds. Over the past few years, it has been piled with plastic boxes, paper cups, disposable spoons, wooden combs with missing teeth, utensils that have lost both their shape and purpose, and what have you. What started as a memorabilia collection in her younger days has ballooned into a ridiculous compulsion. I want to pull my hair and scream into the void, but I fear her sharp tongue.

“Tell me, what is so fancy about these plastic food trays? When will this habit stop?”

“Baah! Don’t you start now.” Almost hissing, she continues, “How do you keep wearing that same soiled shirt every day then?”

“How can you even bring me into this? As if I have an option.”

On the few occasions I secretly convinced Dhulia to dump it all by the banks of the Brahmani, her detective senses would sniff me out, and the entire matter ended up in a heated argument. One time she even went so far as threatening to jump into the river herself. Just like her gods, all that bric-a-brac too is sacrosanct; naturally, Dhulia is not allowed anywhere near them. His odd jobs, like weeding the vegetable patch and unclogging drains, are strictly restricted to the outer periphery of the house. My mother, who lived for less than a decade with us before she succumbed to a massive heat stroke, had taught her well. Despite their continuous bickering that would often drive me to the panchayat office for some quiet, they bonded well over pettiness and pakhala.

She sprinkles the remaining puja water on straggly clumps of yellow and pink tuberoses that have sprouted around the rim of the well. A few stubborn ones have broken through the cracks in the concrete, attracting small butterflies and dragonflies. In a fruitless attempt to draw her attention, I circle the drying well and pretend to gauge the level of the water. Following her—more out of habit than purpose—I hobble all the way to the verandah and try stretching my bad leg slowly against the broken stairs. The winter sun washes over me, rekindling the memory of a warm compress on my useless limb. As she approaches the sitting mat, her pet parrot Rupa throws a sudden tantrum, flapping its wings in a demonic frenzy. I won’t lie, it is the most nagging bird I’ve seen in my time though it is not hard to guess who it mimics. I tried to free it more than once but every time the rascal would fly its way back after teetering on the guava tree for a bit.

Every morning after she is done with her chores, a large part of which includes the daily puja, she would sit on the verandah floor with the newspaper spread under her nose. Ignoring the pressing concerns of the world, she would turn the pages in a haste and stop at the Daily Horoscope section. Quite a self-proclaimed expert of the zodiac, she has always stood firm on her hypothesis that people born under the Kanya rashi suffered the most trials and tribulations. Neither material prosperity nor good karma smiled upon her lot, as if the goddess Laxmi herself had some personal beef with them. She would often lament this astrological inheritance from her mother, grumbling over the generational wealth passed down to her.

Reaching for her customary mid-morning tea, which is saccharine to the point where ants circle the teacup in minutes, she clicks her tongue in dismay.

“Bad news?” I swat a fly circling above her head.

“If only you had been this attentive always! It’s a pity how men become so desperate in old age.”

She casts a sideways glance and continues running her index finger along the prediction. “My planets have not been in sync for some time. The full moon too is approaching in a day.”

“Hmm… Did your planets never warn you about me?”

I smirk; it always infuriates her.

A gust of cool wind carries a shower of tagar flowers across the verandah. While some land on her lap, caught in between the creases of her crumpled cotton saree, few rest on the bold newspaper headlines as if on a mission to block out the world’s ugliness. Disinterested in the floral intervention, she smooths away a few wisps of white hair from her eyes. With a singular focus, she surveys the crisp blue sky which does not carry a single trace of cloud. A pale, almost full moon waits patiently for its last sliver to complete yet another full circle. How I envy the moon, its ability to resurrect itself from the pit of darkness every month.

Years ago, her pantheon of the sun, moon and planets failed to foretell the fate of a dying man. They did little to caution her about a ravenous lump, the size of a lemon, gnashing through my left femur. I shudder recalling those days of wait and despair when, lying awake for hours, I could hear the inevitable shrinkage of my body, witness its gradual emaciation to the form of a skeletal child. During such sleepless nights, drenched in sweat and delirium, I’ve seen her throw up in the backyard. My poor brinjal plants! I know, it was a lot to stomach, the stench of my festering bedsores. The very thought still makes my insides churn, that brown, fishy discharge of pus melded with betadine.

It has been seven long winters to that fateful night. I remember there was a full moon that night as well. A thirsty blood moon, you see.

Annie nudged the lizard, her companion, to climb higher onto the rock for a better view. The lizard’s tail dragged behind as it inched its way up. It was weary from their afternoon of exploring, chasing, and eating bugs. It shook its head, and her concentration wavered.

She watched the road from the rock outcrop. The sun was getting low in the sky as the rider rounded a steep bend in the road. Shoulder-length hair flowed out from under a sweat-stained sombrero that concealed his eyes. A scruffy, gray-streaked beard shrouded his lower face. As his horse struggled up the grade, he dug rusty spurs deep into his horse’s flanks. He smirked. Annie could feel each twinge of pain and wheezy gasp from the poor beast.

That man is broken.

As he passed her, his eyes flitted from side to side as if searching for something. For the briefest of moments, his eyes locked on her. Could he see her? Her concentration faltered as the lizard companion exerted its will and forced her out.

_Blink_

The darkness of the other side enveloped her, and the lizard’s silver light moved away. She felt how relieved her scaly companion was to be rid of her. Annie’s lesson that day was to recognize each creature’s different lights by sight. Instead, she had chosen to play, stayed out too long, and was dog-tired. The shining thread that bound her to the world of flesh grew taut, demanding her return.

_Blink_

She lay still, eyes shut, her breathing shallow, and waited. Her arms and legs were cold, heavy, and tingling. Annie wanted to sleep, but she had to get up and move.

She was in trouble; she knew it, if not from Mama, then from Grandma Ochuca for skipping her chores and the lesson. Of the two, she would accept Mama’s any day. Annie had been training for years, but Grandma was never satisfied.

Annie was four when the dreams had begun. Dreams, sometimes nightmares, of being one creature and then another. It wasn’t until she was six that she had discovered the truth. They were not dreams. One night, she had a dream about their cat, Espina. She had watched through Espina’s eyes as the cat stalked a mouse in the kitchen. When Espina pounced, Annie had felt her claws and teeth tear into the mouse’s flesh. She had awoken screaming.

The following morning, Espina had sat at the bottom of the stairs, proudly displaying the mouse she had killed the night before. Slowly, the veil between the waking world and the other side had parted. Annie had learned that she could move from creature to creature and bend their wills to her own.

One day, while exploring the other side, she had strayed too far and had got lost. She had panicked and flown in one direction and then another. The silver thread that had always led her home had stretched and faded. Adrift in the cold blackness, she had felt her connection with her body slipping away. That was when she had encountered Ochuca for the first time.

Ochuca had come like four horse-drawn wagons hurling down a winding, steep switchback trail. Her light was brighter than all the creatures’ lights combined. Annie had tried to flee, but her strength had left her.

A giant, shining, slithering rattlesnake had circled her. Its scales were as white as snow. Its glittering gold eyes were the size of dinner plates. When its fanged mouth had opened, a blood-red tongue had flicked from it and cracked like a whip. Her hiss was louder than a rushing river, and her rattle was like thunder.

It had circled her closer until she could almost touch the white scales. Annie had screamed a soundless scream, choked with panic and fear. And then a sense that no harm would come to her had washed over her.

The great rattlesnake’s thoughts had formed in her head. She said to call her Ochuca, which meant “grandmother” in the language of Mama’s people. Ochuca had returned her to her body and waited until she had woken up before leaving. As she had sped away, she had hissed and told Annie she had much to learn.

She had been afraid to tell Mama right away. When she finally did, Mama had made her promise never to tell anyone. Ochuca was the people’s guardian spirit, and few could hear her, much less cross over to the other side. Ochuca had saved her, so Annie was indebted to her. The thought had terrified her so much that she had stopped traveling to the other side for a while.

Soon, Ochuca’s rattles thundered in her head and commanded Annie to come to her. Grandma taught her the other side’s ways, and said that in time, Annie would become ‘Kukini’ —a respected one. Grandma gave Annie the name Waheia, which meant troublesome because that was what she was. Five years had passed, and Grandma Ochuca taught her the old ways, but she was not always the best pupil.

She was so cold.

Squinting against the sun’s setting rays coming through the stable doors, she sat up. Straw stuck to her hair and clothes from lying in the hay. There were times she wished she never had to come back. There were no chores, no parents to badger her, and no little brother to watch. Mama kept saying she was special. But if that was so, why did she still have to wash and mend clothes, collect firewood, and clean the guests’ rooms?

It was not fair.

Annie rubbed her legs and arms to get warm. She walked stiffly into the sunlight, picking bits of straw from her hair. In the courtyard, her brother Sean chased chicks in circles until he was so dizzy he fell over laughing. He was only six and still allowed to play, but soon, he would have help with the chores.

Papa was the roof of the smokehouse, nothing more than a pile of old timbers hammering on a board. He was constantly fixing things to keep the old inn from falling apart. From inside the Inn, she could hear Mama’s singing. Annie knew, regardless of the time of day, that Mama’s smile would be waiting for her. Well, possibly not today because she had skipped her chores.

A chill wind blew off the desert, promising a morning frost. Ochuca would give her heck the next time she summoned her.

“A rider is coming,” Annie rasped hoarsely.

Papa looked up from his work toward the gate. “I don’t see anybody,” he said, shaking his head. “Annie, darling, where have you been?”

“Just playing, Papa,” she said, giving him her sweetest smile as she passed.

Papa shook his head and got back to work.

She leaned against the gatepost and gazed out at the road. Papa knew she was different but refused to acknowledge it. More than once, she had heard Papa argue with Mama about Indian superstitions. Mama said he believed in the white man’s God. And that their ways belonged to the evil spirit the whites called the Devil. Mama was happy that the inn was far from Capistrano. Any closer and Papa would have forced them to go to the church and school of the Black Robes.

The minutes passed, and she heard the faint clop of a horse’s hooves, and the stranger came into view. Papa looked up from his labor at the sound of the approaching rider and glanced at her as the man rode through the gate. The stranger pulled up the reins as he stopped in front of Papa.

“You look done in, friend,” Papa said, staring from the stranger to the horse. Fresh red spur welts crisscrossed old scars on the horse’s flanks.

The stranger took in the courtyard and the open door leading into the inn. The sun settled behind the mountains to the east, and the air began to cool. Annie could feel a cloying heat radiating off him.

The stranger spoke, but without looking at Papa, “Nice place.”

“I am Timothy O’Malley,” Papa said. “You’ll not find a better inn between Capistrano and San Diego if you don’t mind my saying.”

“A room, food for me and the nag,” said the stranger, as he eyed Papa up and down, “and mezcal if you got it… Timothy O’Malley.” He swung from the saddle with a loud grunt.

“We have all three,” Papa said, grabbing the skittish horse’s bridle and stroking its neck. “Anne darling, show our guest inside.”

The stranger untied his gear from the horse and followed her. His Spanish-style spurs jingled out a cheerless tune. He was a big man, as big as Papa, maybe bigger. As they reached the door, Sean ran up and skidded to a stop. He stared up at the man and smiled.

The stranger glowered at Sean until his eyes became slits and snorted, “Boy, you’re a breed, aren’t you?” he whispered.

He dragged the back of his dust-encrusted hand across his mouth. A toothy snarl showed through his fingers. He rested his free hand on the butt of his pistol and tapped the hammer with his thumb. Sean’s eyes followed the stranger’s hand, and his lower lip trembled.

“No English, little breed?” he growled and squatted so they were eye to eye.

Sean winced and blinked, his eyes widening in fear. A single tear wound down his dirty cheek, leaving a swath of light brown skin in its wake. A satisfied chuckle rumbled from the stranger’s throat. Annie stepped between them, shielding Sean from his taunts. She could feel Sean’s fingers grasp her leg like tiny fishhooks. She kept her eyes on the ground, not wanting to meet the man’s gaze.

“Now, what do we have here, an Indian lover? Wait, don’t tell me, is this breed your kin?”

Annie was about to reply when he took her chin in his hand and pushed her head back. She twisted loose, and their eyes met. The hard lines on his face softened, and he chuckled. Ochuca’s rattle echoed in her head. She felt his emotions from that one touch like a black fog, wanting to swallow her. He smiled, patted her head, and pushed past them into the inn.

Annie wanted to grab Sean and run and hide. Instead, she turned, placed her hands on his shoulders, and told him everything was all right. Sean grinned, wiped his cheek, and hugged her around the waist. She pried him off and shooed him away to help Papa.

As she entered the great room, the smell of roasted chicken, rice, and beans wafted in from the kitchen. The stranger stood with his back to her. He surveyed the room until his eyes fixed on the bar and liquor bottles. He tossed his gear on the nearest table, walked behind the bar, and helped himself to a bottle of mezcal. Annie heaved the heavy steel-hinged wooden door shut with a loud creak. Then she stepped into the shadows, her back pressed against the cold adobe wall.

Mama’s singing drifted in from the kitchen. He uncorked the bottle, sniffed, and crossed the hall to sit near the stone fireplace. He yawned, then lifted the bottle to his lips and drank deeply of the amber-colored spirit.

“Muy bueno!” he bellowed and smacked his lips several times. “Girl, tell the cook your guest hasn’t eaten since this morning. Be quick about it.”

He acted like the Spanish tax collector, Señor Del Anza, as if the inn were his personal property, not Papa’s. She wanted to tell him to leave, but she obeyed and headed to the kitchen. Mama met her in the doorway. A tight-lipped look of concern creased her face.

“What is all the yelling about, Annie?” she asked, having caught sight of the stranger.

“Mama, we have a guest, and he’s hungry.”

Mama studied the stranger. The crow’s feet around her eyes deepened as she squinted. She wiped her sun-darkened hands on her apron. Then touched the leather pouch hanging around her neck.

Does she sense it?

“Light the evening lamps, Annie,” she asked as her hand dropped from the pouch.

A chill ran down Annie’s spine as Grandma’s rattles echoed in her head. Mama turned her back and walked away. He spat on the clean tile floor. Annie imagined that she saw tongue-like, dark wisps follow her as she retreated to the kitchen. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, they were gone.

His eyes followed her around the room as she lit the lamps. She smelled of liquor and stale sweat as she lit the lamp on his table. He smiled oddly at her, and his face flushed with color. It reminded her of the smiles Papa and Mama traded on those nights when they went to bed early.

“That Indian, your mother?” he asked, leaning across the table as if to snatch the answer from her.

She lurched back and almost stumbled into Mama, carrying a steaming plate of food. Mama stopped short of the table, set the plate down, and slid it toward him, careful to avoid his eyes. His head rocked from side to side, taunting her to look at him. Then, he tilted his head back and laughed. Annie stepped in behind Mama.

“Do I scare you, woman?” he slurred. His gaze was as vacant as a dark corner in an abandoned house. “Are you Serrano or one of those tamed Gabrielano, maybe?”

“No, señor,” she said, but her eyes said otherwise. “My people are Juanero, from near Mission Capistrano.” Her hand searched behind her for mine.

The stranger slapped his thigh, chuckled, and mumbled something about ignorant Indians. Mama turned and gently pinched Annie’s cheek. A shiver ran through Annie as Mama gestured with her eyes toward the kitchen.

“What did I tell you about getting underfoot? Go now and tell Papa that supper is ready before it gets cold. Hurry,” she shouted, pushing her away.

Her shoes thudded dully on the tiles as she ran through the kitchen and out the back. Espina slipped inside as the door swung shut. A sparrow dangled by its wing in her mouth.

Sean’s laughter echoed in the courtyard as Papa burst from the stable. Sean rode on his shoulders, yelling, “Giddy-up!” Papa galloped across the courtyard, dipping and rearing like a wild stallion. As he barreled toward her, he let out a whinny that turned to laughter. Sean slid from his back as he stopped before her and ran ahead.

Papa took her face in his rough hands. “Darlin’, your skin is like ice. Get inside before you catch your death from the cold.”

Annie grabbed his hand and said, “Mama says your supper’s ready.” She whimpered and blurted out, “The stranger is drinking.” She wrapped her arms around him and began to tremble.

Still so cold.

Papa pulled her close and said, “Darlin, there’s nothing to fear. Our guest is just tired and needs some company.” His shoulders hunched as he walked away with her.

Don’t trust him, Papa—he’s broken.

As Annie set the table, she could see the stranger stuff food into his mouth between sips of mezcal. Mama seemed relieved when Papa placed his big, calloused hands on her tiny shoulders. They whispered to each other, and Papa glanced at the stranger.

“I’ll speak to him after supper, Sesia,” he said, scooping up Sean, and they went to wash up.

Annie placed a clay water jug and cups on the table. Grandma’s rattle rumbled louder in her head and would not stop. Grandma, please—what do you expect me to do? She stepped closer to the stove but could barely feel its warmth.

“Mama.”

“What is it, Annie?”

“Mama… can you hear Grandma?”

She closed her eyes and mumbled in Juanero. The corners of her mouth turned down. She clutched the medicine bag around her neck tightly, then, after a moment, released it. “I felt something earlier, but now…” For the briefest moment, Mama’s eyes seemed far away. She shivered as if a cold breeze swept through the kitchen. “Annie, are you sure?”

“Yes, Mama!” she said, grabbing hold of her skirt.

Before she could say more, Papa and Sean crowded into the kitchen. They sat, and Papa asked for Christ’s blessing on the food and their guest, a bit louder than usual. As Papa broke a loaf of bread in half, the stranger’s shuffling footsteps drew their attention.

He stood a few steps back from the doorway, his upper body hidden in shadow, supper plate held in one hand. Gravy dripped from the chipped earthenware like rain on the toe of his boot. He stepped into the light. A disarming smile hid who he was.

Annie’s breath caught in her throat.

“Missus, may I have seconds?” he asked, his words slurred from the drink. Mama got up from the table in a flurry of motion and served him. His smile changed briefly to a snarl, like when his spurs dug into his horse.

He shifted his gaze to Annie and stared into her eyes. Her vision blurred as if a cloud of smoke obscured him.

Papa looked up and said, “Forgive me. I have been a thoughtless host. I will join you for a drink and a smoke later.”

The stranger nodded and accepted the plate from Mama. “Thank you kindly, Missus O’Malley,” he said with exaggerated respect. “I look forward to that, Mr. O’Malley.” He winked at Annie as he turned to go.

Annie began to tremble. Her stomach knotted up something terrible. It became hard to breathe. Ochuca’s summoning rattle roared. She covered her ears, squeezed her eyes shut tight, and prayed it would stop. But it did not… So cold.

_Blink_

_Why have you summoned me?_

_Look, Waheia_

Ochuca’s rattles shook high above her scaly head—she hissed. Beyond her wall of scales, Annie saw a bloated shadow enveloping the stranger’s light. Dark red pulsing tendrils stretched toward Mama, Papa, and Sean’s lights.

_What is it?_

_See what I see, Waheia_

She peered into Ochuca’s golden eyes, and she knew. It was a Soul Eater. An evil spirit that stole the light of the living, extinguishing them forever.

_Grandma, save us_

_I cannot pass between our worlds_

_Then let me go_

_Waheia, you will all die… Stay, and I can protect you_

_No, please let me go_ Annie pulled away. Her silver tether became her lifeline back to the world of flesh.

_Blink_

“Annie, wake up,” Papa said. “She’s ice cold.”

“It’s all right, little one. Mama’s here. Annie… Annie, open your eyes.”

She could sense Papa lifting her off the tile floor and carrying her away. The pounding of Papa’s heart drowned out their voices as her head rested on his chest. Then, her bed’s familiar embrace welcomed her as Papa laid her down.

She was so, so cold.

Mama chanted in Juanero, and her voice faded into the fog. Annie shivered so hard that she thought it would never stop.

“Husband, fetch a bucket of hot coals from the kitchen. She is freezing,” she continued to chant.

Mama stopped her chant and pressed her hands to her ears. It was the thunder of Ochuca’s rattles demanding her return. It felt like it would shake the inn to pieces.

It took all her concentration to breathe. Mama stroked her cheek and whispered her name. Her breath was sweet and warm on Annie’s face.

She opened her mouth, and she tried to speak.

Mama whispered, “I hear Ochuca, Waheia. What does she want?”

The shiver worsened as she spoke, “Sss—ssss—sssss,” hissing over her tongue.

Mama jerked away and let go of her hand. The hissing grew louder in the back of Annie’s throat. From downstairs, Sean screamed. Papa and the stranger shouted at each other, and a pistol shot exploded. The last thing Annie saw was Mama’s back as she ran from the room.

_Blink_

 _No_

Ochuca’s coils squeezed her. Annie strained against them, trying to break free. The more she struggled, the tighter they became and the sadder Ochuca was. She could feel Ochuca’s love and desire to save her from oblivion.

She watched as Sean and Papa’s lights flickered. The stranger’s dark shadow hovered over Papa, smothering him. Mama’s light came into sight and merged with Sean’s, and they fled.

_Then let me go_

Once more, she tried to follow her silver thread to her body, but it flickered and went out.

Sadness radiated from Ochuca as she released her.

_Why had she wandered so far today? Why had he not done as she was told?_

_Go Waheia_ And she turned to face the Eater.

Annie searched for a light that could serve her needs. A quivering pinprick of light hid in a corner of the great room. It was Espina, their cat. With regret, she dove into Espina’s flesh like a thief. Espina shrieked in agony as Annie took her. The cat’s soul shattered into pieces like a clay pot.

_Blink_

She could feel the hair on Espina’s back rise. Her spine arched, and her claws extended. Through a forest of table and chair legs, she saw Papa on his knees. The stranger held him by his collar—a knife to his throat. Blood dripped from between Papa’s fingers where a bullet had ripped through his side. A throaty yowl came from Espina’s mouth.

_I am coming, Papa._

“Hey, stay awake, Mr. O’Malley,” the stranger yelled, slapping Papa across the face. “Or you’ll miss all the fun once I find your Juanero whore and half-breed brats.”

“No, please, I have money. Take it,” Papa begged.

“You are stupid, Indian lover,” he growled, waving the knife in his face like an accusing finger. “I don’t want your money.”

Annie took a few cautious steps. She had done this so many times with Espina when stalking prey. Her vision narrowed and sharpened. The taste of the sparrow Espina had eaten earlier was still on her tongue. She had new prey now.

The stranger whispered into Papa’s ear. Tears flowed down Papa’s sunburnt cheeks. He fumbled helplessly for the stranger’s pistol.

The brass pommel of the stranger’s knife came down on Papa’s head, and he slumped forward. The stranger slapped him again and said, “Stay awake.” But Papa lay on the floor unmoving. “Eh, oh well.” His hand rose, poised to plunge the knife into Papa’s chest.

Espina’s instinct took over. Her ears flattened. The hair along her spine bristled higher. A snarl formed in her throat. Her claws flexed in and out of their sheaths, scratching the tile floor. Annie’s rage thrust her onto a table and into the air.

“Yyyeee-Ooowwwlll.”

The stranger’s head snapped to the side as she landed. She smelled his fear. Teeth and claws labored against his soft, yielding flesh. The hot, salty taste of his blood filled her mouth.

The stranger dropped his knife and tried to pull her off.

I got you!

They spun like drunk dancers. Crashed into the bar and tumbled to the floor. He grabbed her head. She sank her fangs deep into his thumb. He grabbed a hind leg and yanked her off, tearing away flesh as he did. Her claw raked across one eye. He shrieked in agony and held her at arm’s length. She clawed at empty air. He grabbed her neck, twisted, and bones snapped, and tendons tore.

_Blink_

The pain of Espina’s death left her dazed in its grip.

She could make out Ochuca’s white scales stained black in places. The Eater lashed out with blood-red tentacles, slashing her. She struck back, burying her fangs into its shadowy body. Ochuca reared up and struck over and over. With each bite, the Eater shrank until Grandma’s jaw opened wide and swallowed it whole.

_Go._

Annie searched for the nearest knot of bright lights. She moved from one unwilling creature to the next, searching for the one that could make a difference. Fragments of sound echoed around her. She smelled dung. The shrill shriek of hens. The tortured bray of their donkey. The squeal of the pigs as they tried to escape the madness of her passing. Then, one light larger than the others was before her, and she crashed into it.

_Blink_

“Come out; you can’t hide from me,” the stranger screamed from the courtyard.

The sound of the stranger’s voice made this body tremble with terror. Four powerful legs held her up. She had taken his horse. The horse’s will melted away, and all its tormented memories at its master’s hand poured into her.

A pistol shot rang out.

Annie could see the stranger drenched in moonlight through the stable’s open doors. A red halo surrounded his ruined face. He swayed drunkenly, moaning. He fired his last shots at an imaginary attacker. He dropped the pistol, unsheathed his knife, and strode toward the stable.

“If you don’t come out, squaw, I’ll finish off that husband of yours,” he growled.

Annie reared up on her hind legs and smashed her head into the thatched roof. Then she rammed the stall’s gate. It creaked and splintered but held.

“I hear you in there,” he shouted. “You thought you’d get away?”

He searched each stall and lunged at shadows. Finally, he reached hers. Annie tried to control the horse’s trembling and her fury.

He gazed into the stall with his remaining eye and gripped the latch pin. Annie shifted from hoof to hoof and backed up, as he would expect. He grasped the latch pin, cocked his head, and listened. From outside, she heard Sean’s muffled crying. A look of glee spread across the stranger’s tortured face as he turned to leave.

Annie sprang forward and drove her muzzle into his chest. He staggered back and pulled the latch pin free. The gate swung open, and she charged. He looked confused. She guessed he could not believe his horse would ever dare to challenge him.

Annie bit his shoulder. The stranger slashed and stabbed with his knife. Annie reared up, and her hooves rose and fell again and again.

Papa shoveled dirt onto the stranger’s shallow grave beyond the outhouse and spat into it.

Favoring his wounded side, he walked to where Mama sat under a big oak, Sean beside her. She cradled a lifeless, shroud-wrapped child and sobbed. Not far from the tree was another grave.

Papa didn’t say a word. Tears filled his eyes as he stroked Mama’s hair and pried the body from her unwilling grasp. A small, pale, delicate hand slipped from under the shroud as he lowered her into the grave.

Mama got to her feet and swayed unsteadily. She drew Sean into her arms. A purple, swollen bruise marked Sean’s face from jaw to brow, and a bandage circled his head.

It was becoming harder for Annie to see. She, like Mama, swayed unsteadily on the horse’s legs. Warm blood trickled down the horse’s chest from the deepest stab wound.

She could no longer stand and rolled onto the horse’s side. Mama gazed from the grave to the coral. Her hand reached out to Annie, and she began a sorrowful chant.

_She knows_

The horse’s breathing became ragged, slowed, and stopped.

Annie could hear Ochuca’s rattle call her home. Annie shook her rattle in reply and joined Grandma in the eternal night.

_Blink_

I turn over on the couch, where I’ve curled into one corner. In the middle of the night, I didn’t have the energy to move Lena’s laptop. Instead, I just slept around it.

The couch smells like dried-up white wine in one spot, something I never realized until I started sleeping here. We must have spilled it a long time ago. We haven’t had wine in the house for two years, since before the IVF, before the cycle-coded calendar in the kitchen and the evenings we’d giggled and clinked together the matching self-insemination syringes.

Cheers! We’d said.

I squint into the living room, listening for the baby’s whimper as I look at the time. It’s 5:30, which feels like a blessing. Four hours of sleep. I’m sure Lena got less.

The baby sounds rise and fall, closer. Under them, I hear Lena’s slow footsteps padding down the hallway. There’s a sear of guilt as I consider, split-second, whether to pretend to be asleep still. But then they’re here in the room.

“Good morning, mama,” Lena murmurs, more to the baby than to me.

“Good morning, mama,” I say back, smiling.

As always, when the baby is actually here, in front of me, with her tiny wiggling shrimp fingers and her face squashed up in the huge effort of crying or gurgling or smiling, I melt.

What’s happening to me? I’d said to the delivery nurse, when I felt my eyes overflow all at once, nothing like the crying I was used to.

Welcome to parenthood, she’d said. It felt practiced, tailored to the bewildered men she was used to seeing in the delivery room. Not to me, who could have been in Lena’s place if it had gone that way.

“I’m going to make some decaf,” Lena whispers to me. The baby is settling into her chest, little face slack over the edge of the wrap Lena wears to hold her close, to be one being. “Will you do the bottles?”

I nod and roll out of the throw blanket that I’ve gotten used to sleeping under. Lena sways toward the kitchen, her soft hums keeping the baby quiet. As I turn to fold the throw—a semblance of the normal, neither of us want to talk about how I’ve been sleeping out here—I see them.

Four wet shapes on the floor in front of the coffee table.

Smudged half-circles I can only see because thin light through the living room window catches them.

I gaze around the room, trying to identify the source. My face feels slack with sleep and confusion. Maybe I spilled a glass of water as I moved the coffee table in the night, half-awake? But, no, it rests on modern, square legs. Too heavy for me to have shoved it semi-conscious, and the wrong shape to leave those marks. And there is no glass of water.

“Did you move the crib last night?” I whisper to Lena when I’m in the kitchen, rinsing bottle rings as she clicks on the coffeemaker.

She frowns at me over her shoulder.

“From our room?” she asks.

It stings to hear her say our room. It is ours, but I’m on the couch now and she’s with the baby. I wonder if that’s what she means, even by accident: her room and the baby’s room. Ours.

“Yeah,” I say. “It looks like something got moved in front of the coffee table.”

“What do you mean?”

“Marks on the floor,” I say. “Did we spill something?”

Lena shakes her head in the same gentle cadence that she approaches every movement, now. Back and forth, quiet and smooth. Serene. I feel like I can’t keep up with it.

“Maybe we have a leak,” she says, handing me a mug.

The baby makes a quiet little sound and a fist emerges from her onesie to curl toward Lena’s hair. I take a sip. Decaf coffee tastes the same as regular, to me.

It takes almost until evening for me to remember to check the living room ceiling. The baby is restless today, a continuation of last night. Lena tries to open her laptop for the third time only for the baby to wake and squeal again.

“I thought you were on maternity leave,” I say, trying to tease gently. I worry it comes out shrill.

“Just a couple of emails,” she whispers, reaching for a bottle as she pulls the baby into her arms, balancing the open computer.

“They should know better than to email you,” I say. “Let me take her.”

Lena hesitates a millisecond too long.

“Thanks.”

The baby is always warmer than I remember. Even though I touch her dozens of times a day—when Lena showers, when she wants to change her clothes or stretch her arms–it’s as though my skin forgets. And my nose forgets her smell, which up close is overpowering, the raw scent of brand-new flesh, of being completely alive. I kiss her forehead and try to ignore how immediately she returns to fussing in my arms. I whisk her away into the kitchen to defrost the 4pm bottle. I try to replicate Lena’s soft sway as I walk and it feels clumsy in my hips.

Lena takes a half hour to frown over her laptop. The baby, meanwhile, naps fitfully in my tired arms. I don’t know what to call it when, dozing, she turns her sucking mouth to my breast. I know that I scowl and then turn red, ashamed.

When Lena joins us, a thin crease has appeared between her eyebrows. It’s the face of the old Lena, the Lena who would stride through the front door promptly at six, who would lean in to kiss me at my desk, who would regale me with complaints about her coworkers over dinner, to my delight.

Her reading glasses are still on, giving her eyes a slight distortion that makes me love her with such violence I’m surprised at myself. I lean over the baby’s head.

“You’re so beautiful,” I whisper.

Lena rolls her eyes.

“Never prettier than when I’m wearing nipple guards,” she says.

But she kisses me anyway, lingering in a way that weakens every joint in my body. Her mouth tastes like the syrupy tea our doula gave her. I watch the crease smooth itself as she nestles the baby onto her shoulder. And then they both are gone.

The new Lena, born with the baby, floats on something I can’t see, a buoyancy in her movements that gently bobs her away from the shore, out of reach.

I pull out the stepladder and haul it to the living room.

The ceiling is dusty. Cobwebs form tracery against the stucco. I find several things I need to do—fix a piece of crown molding that’s coming loose, replace the batteries in a smoke detector, repaint—but I don’t find a leak. I even check around the casing of the ceiling fan’s motor, wiping lint from its blades which falls like snow. But the ceiling is unblemished, and there are no signs that anything has dripped through it and onto the floor.

From the stepladder, I can barely see the smeared shapes, but when I climb back down, the light hits them again. Four sloppy curves, evenly spaced. They’re not water stains, I realize, or not just water. They’re greasy, like oil wiped by a rag. One of them is crusted with a thin rind of mud, as though tracked in and left there, but there is nothing in any other direction.

I sweep up the lint and spray down the smears with cleaner. When I come back with a handful of paper towels, I can’t even see them anymore.

That night, I make soup for Lena with as many beans and vegetables as I can. My body feels hollow from lack of sleep, and I can only imagine the wear on hers. It’s hard not to compare how I think I’d do in her place.

There were pros and cons for each of us, but we’d agreed it was lucky that Lena had conceived instead of me. Her company’s maternity leave was generous, whereas my freelance work was spotty at best. And so that was the reason we clung to, along with little things: the year difference in our ages, Lena’s family a few hours closer than mine. But we both knew the real reason: that she was better at hard things.

It was my hands that had gone numb as she pushed through the tenth hour of labor, and it was me that the nurse handed a cup of juice to, saying I looked pale.

When dinnertime comes, Lena doesn’t eat the soup because the baby can only settle when she’s bounced on tiptoes. I offer, half-joking, to feed Lena spoonfuls as she bobs.

“I’ll get a bowl in a bit, when she’s down,” she whispers. “Smells amazing.”

Much later that night, I awake in a panic.

Before my eyes are open, I’m thrashing to get my legs untangled from the couch throw. The baby has screamed louder than I’ve ever heard her, and my heart pounds in my throat. But as I struggle to sit up on the couch, I realize the house is silent. I stiffen and wait for the next round of cries. I listen for Lena. But all I hear is the soft click and hum of the refrigerator’s compressor and the faraway whir of the white noise machine that Lena plays for the baby. I must have dreamed the scream.

I blink into the dark living room, waiting for my breath and pulse to calm, trying to make out the bleary shapes around me.

And then, one shifts.

Just slightly. An adjustment. The rise of a spine with a breath.

I do not move.

I know I am mistaken. I must be. My eyes dart to the curtains that I forgot to pull closed all the way, so that they billow in the air from the vent. When my eyes slide back, the shape has resolved itself—a heaped blanket with one of the baby’s slings sprawled on top of it—and I’m alone.

I squint at the heap through my lashes, trying to recreate what I thought I’d seen. But it stays gone, the objects insensate. They do not breathe again.

I fall back asleep. It takes a long time. The baby sleeps through the night.

“You can always just get her flowers,” my mother says through the phone.

I am loitering in the detergent aisle. We don’t need detergent, but I’ve already put the fruit Lena asked for and all the other things on the list into the cart, and the conversation doesn’t feel finished.

“They’re nice,” she’s saying, almost defensive. “It’s a cliché for a reason. That’s what your father did, and I always loved them. Keep it simple.”

“That’s true,” I say, trying to remember Lena’s favorites. Lilies? “I guess… I don’t know, for her first Mother’s Day I want it to be special.”

“Sweetheart, you’re going to do this every year. Next year with a toddler, and then the macaroni art starts to come home from preschool and that’ll be better than anything you could buy her.”

She’s doing something in the kitchen. I can hear cabinets opening and banging shut. I picture her pinching her cell phone between her shoulder and ear, like I’m doing.

“Bottles every four hours, still?” Mom asks.

“She slept almost seven hours last night,” I say proudly, like I’m supposed to. My mother is excited to hear this.

“Isn’t it so sad when one stage is over?” she says. “You miss it, even though you couldn’t wait to be done.”

Mom promises to text me a website that has the kind of lilies she remembers Lena ordering for our wedding.

“And get yourself something, sweetie,” she adds. “You’re a mom, now, too.”

When I get home, Lena is asleep on the armchair with her feet up on the coffee table, the baby napping on her chest. They’re beautiful together, matching in soft beige without meaning to, dappled in the afternoon light. I feel for my phone to take a picture. Something to send to my mother, though I realize it’ll mean keeping the picture myself. I don’t think about that. One of the grocery bags rustles in my hands and Lena opens an eye.

“How’s the world?” she murmurs.

“You’re not missing anything,” I whisper, snap a picture, hit send.

I stare at the ceiling fan. Dim light filters in through the curtains from the street lamp. A shred of lint that I missed hangs off of one of the blades.

I had promised myself, locking eyes with my reflection as I brushed my teeth, that I wouldn’t check the time. I remember the deep breathing exercises I’d learned from an online video years ago, and resolve to try them instead, letting breath fill my lungs and press against my taut diaphragm. Hold for a moment. Then out in a hiss. The video had dissolved into slow-motion footage of waves crashing against sand, and I close my eyes, trying to picture them as I breathe in and out.

As I slide into sleep, the sound of my breath twists and doubles into a sound like the rush of water at the edge of my consciousness, filling the room.

In the morning, my hands are still clasped to my ribcage where I’d placed them to measure my breaths in. On the floor, the prints, greasy and caked with thicker mud, are back.

“Have I ever sleepwalked?” I ask Lena.

I’m picking up each of my shoes, looking for grime. She’s feeding the baby in bed, a curved pillow wrapped around her like a cloud. She looks up at me and I see the bliss drop from her expression slightly.

“No,” she says. “Why?”

“These marks keep showing up on the floor,” I say. “It’s not a leak. I checked.”

Lena shakes her head slowly.

“Maybe you tracked something in when you shopped yesterday?” she said. “I bet we’re just too tired to notice. Things are going to fall by the wayside for a while.”

I nod, but I don’t agree. She doesn’t seem tired at all. She is doing so much. The least I can do is keep the house together.

“I’m going to mop again,” I say. “Do you need anything?”

She smiles at me, looks down at the baby who swallows softly and grips the bottle in her tiny fist.

“I’m all set.”

The marks on the floor are clearer. This time, before I spray them down and fill the mop bucket, I examine their shape. They are heavy on one side and delicate on the other, as though whatever made them was leaning off-kilter. And there are small splits down the center of each that remind me of something I can’t place right away.

When I’m filling the mop bucket, I remember the summer in my early teens that I spent at a wilderness camp, where we earned points for correctly identifying animal tracks from a chart. Graceful crescents for whitetail deer, skinny cat-paws for red fox, cloven lobes for bison.

I stare at the prints now, bottle of cleanser in hand, blinking. In the split-seconds between my eyes opening and closing, I try to conjure whatever creature I imagine leaving these tracks. Do I see afterimages shimmer behind my closed eyes? Gnarled legs, jet-black and dripping, thick-knuckled and long. I know I am imagining them, but they are clearer than anything I’ve imagined before. Images shift and warp in my mind, usually. These stay. I close my eyes as long as I dare. A few seconds, and then my pounding heart forces them open. I spray the floor down again and leave the mop there.

At five, I take out the package of frozen ravioli, but I forget it on the counter. When the washing machine chimes, I gasp and realize I’ve been sitting on the couch for almost an hour. I rush to switch the laundry and start a pot of water boiling before Lena and the baby wake up from their nap.

When Lena comes in, her hair is tied back in a bun, her glasses pushed to her forehead, and her phone in her hand. The baby is wriggling in her sling.

“You’re not going to believe this,” she says. She doesn’t whisper. She’s right there.

“What?”

“I swear,” she says, “They can’t do anything.”

Pacing with the baby as I chop an onion for sauce, Lena details the disaster unfolding at her workplace. The someone or someones assigned to cover Lena’s HR management role in her absence have fumbled their jobs so badly that a former employee has filed a lawsuit, throwing the company into crisis.

“Unbelievable,” I sneer, gleeful. The gossip feels precious, the laughter between us at others’ expense a balm. I’ve missed this more than I can bear.

“But,” she grins, “You’ll never guess what else.”

I widen my eyes. I am her audience and my attention on her is rapt.

“They offered me half-time to help organize everything for the lawyers. They’ll pay me for full-time, plus overtime, plus they’ll grant me additional leave.”

Lena caresses the baby and talks on about the timeline of the suit, the benefit to her resume, the validation that she is indispensable to the company. I smile approvingly. I ignore the heat in my face and the spikes in my throat.

“It does mean,” she says, “That I’ll need to leave the baby with you while I’m at work for a few weeks. Just a couple hours a day. I hope that’s okay. They’re offering so much money. It has to be worth it.”

I nod vigorously, blinking water from my eyes. I wince at the tang of onion and the taste of salt.

“Of course,” I say, and then the lie tumbles from my lips. “What could be better than more time with my favorite person?”

That Wednesday, the house sounds different.

Lena is up early, and all the lights in the kitchen are on. The radio reports the news, and she pulls out the stepladder to get the regular coffee pods out of a cabinet.

“I pumped already,” she says, winking. “There’s more than enough milk in the fridge for today.”

She pours coffee into a tumbler, grabs her keys, and is gone.

The baby frowns up at me from her bouncer, squinting in the bright light.

From the kitchen, I can see the tracks on the floor in the living room, in front of the coffee table.

The baby cries almost all day. I do not go into the living room. The prints are still there that night.

I sleep with my arms folded around my head, covering my ears. All night, I keep waking to the sound of something very loud, but very far away, a crushing roar like a waterfall.

At dawn, I peer under my forearm and think that I see an eye, huge and black, glistening and soaked.

I do not breathe until Lena bustles in to hand me the baby and kiss me as she breezes out the door.

Nothing is there when I look back.

“Have a good day,” I whisper, but the door is already closed.

Today the baby screams at me nonstop as I try to give her a bath. I give up, shaking and sobbing, and pat her down with baby wipes while she howls. Her little face contorts and turns red, then nearly purple. I back away.

“I’m sorry,” I plead. “Please, I’m so sorry.”

She purses her lips when I try to give her a bottle, later. She kicks me when I change her. I’m sweating through my clothes by the time Lena comes home.

She takes the baby from me without a word.

I scrub the living room floor until my cuticles bleed. The tracks do not disappear.

The baby cries throughout the night, and I lose count of how many times I hear Lena get up to soothe her after the first dozen.

It is darker than usual, and I realize that the streetlight has gone out. I stare across the living room and do not flinch when it appears.

All of it.

Skinny, contorted legs lead up to a body twisted with jutting bones, at once heavy and emaciated. An angular head with one bleary eye that sees nothing and another that gazes at me, shining, wet, and huge. Whether the thing drips with water or some greasy tar I can’t tell, but the whole of it is a smear, dribbling down limbs to the floor below, as if oozing from the pores beneath the thick, dark fur.

The baby’s cries echo down the hall and the creature opens its blurry mouth. Water gushes out, more and faster than can be possible, as though draining an entire sea. I am drenched, and it is not cold but boiling and salty, and it blisters my skin and the raw flesh of my throat as it pours over me in waves. I feel pieces of myself dissolve and then I wake up for real, gasping as I wipe thick sweat from my eyes.

I rush to check on the baby, but Lena already has her.

It is the weekend, and Lena shakes her head at me as I stumble into the kitchen well after ten.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I overslept.”

“You look terrible,” she says. She feels my forehead with the back of her palm. “You’re warm.”

Panicked, I fumble for a face mask from the junk drawer, but Lena waves it off.

“You’re probably just run down,” she says. “I can’t imagine how hard it is to take care of her all on your own.”

She points me into the bedroom with strict instructions to take acetaminophen and rest. When I lie down, the bed smells like Lena, but it is not familiar at all.

I am small in my fever dreams, shrunk down to half size or less. I wander around our house for what feels like hours, dream-time stretched out and disjointed. I’m looking for someone, but not for Lena, and I can’t figure out who it is. When I call out, I find my mouth doesn’t form words, and my voice sounds absurd. Our house bobs up and down as though it is floating on a river. I hear the roar of water everywhere.

On Sunday afternoon, my fever breaks. Lena brings me a plate of leftovers from the takeout she has ordered.

“We miss you,” she says. She’s not carrying the baby. Sensible, in case I’m contagious. I wrap my arms around her and squeeze her tight.

On Monday, Lena lingers in the kitchen, her keys in hand.

“You’re sure you’re okay with her?” she says. “You’re feeling up to it?”

“Of course,” I say, smiling. I’m bouncing the baby, who wiggles in her sling in my arms.

“Call me if you need anything.”

I walk around the house all day with the baby wrapped tight against me. I get the laundry done, then re-organize the kitchen and clean the bathroom. Whenever I walk through the living room, the creature stares at me and drips.

My mother calls, and I pinch the phone between my ear and shoulder as I throw silverware into the dishwasher.

“Sweetie, what’s wrong with the baby?” she asks, alarmed.

I hadn’t realized she was crying. I drop a handful of spoons and get a bottle out of the fridge.

“Gosh,” my mother says, more to herself than to me. “She sounds like how you did when you were that age. Blood-curdling, that’s what your father used to call it, when you cried.”

I don’t know what to say. The baby whimpers a little as she sucks down the bottle of milk, as if she’s angry with me.

“It’s so hard at this age,” my mother continues. “But it’s really not forever, sweetheart. You’ve just got to get through the first year, really.”

I don’t know what time it is. I can’t even think past the next hour.

“You know,” my mother says, “I sometimes used to run the faucet in the sink and turn the shower on at the same time when I couldn’t get you to settle down.”

My breath catches.

“Something about the noise of running water seemed to help,” she says, and then laughs. “Or maybe it was just that I couldn’t hear you and Lord knows I needed that little break sometimes.”

I don’t register what else she says. I’m running water over the dishes in the sink, and it’s deafening. The sound is all around me, and then it concentrates in the living room, drawing me to it. I drop my phone and it splashes on the floor.

The creature turns toward me. Its mouth is open down to its knees.

Lena is shaking me. With a sting, I feel her slap across my face.

“What?” I shriek, “What?”

“Where is the baby?” she screams, her face flushed with rage. “What’s wrong with you?”

“She’s—” I flounder, looking around frantically. “She’s here—”

I’m soaking from head to toe, my hair dripping into my face and onto the living room floor.

Lena has left the front door open and I hear her crashing through rooms down the hall.

“Why?” she screams, “Why is she in the bathroom by herself?”

I don’t hear what she says next, so I don’t know where it is that she says she is going with the baby, who she has wrapped in a towel and is hugging close while she throws things into the diaper bag and clutches her keys. I can only hear the roar of water. I feel the look she gives me though—heartbreak, sorrow—like a knife to my stomach.

I turn to the creature as the door slams behind them.

It looks back at me, eyes streaming. I hear something, now. Beneath the water’s roar, I hear the whimper at last, a little cry of terror and anguish. It’s been there the whole time, an urgent pull. Please.

I open my arms.

“Come here,” I whisper.

It climbs into my embrace, its sickly legs trailing down into the pool of water beneath us. It is light and fragile, and I feel the tiny warmth within it, the fluttering of its heartbeat. I smell the wet scent of its skin. It trembles against my collarbone.

“It’s all right,” I whisper. I rock gently back and forth. I move to the couch, and we nestle as one into the soft cushions. I find a blanket and dry us both.

“I’ve got you,” I say, over and over. “I’ve got you.”

Dipu sits in front of the gate as the super-shop shuts down. Much like the plastic plant kept inside a plastic pot nearby. He gets up once, to leave. But where can he go? He sits back again.

The city has stitched one house after another, crossed one town after another, leapt past fields and rivers to reach Dipu’s childhood. His memories of the place have been unhanded by a multiplex project. Where shall he go? Home? Whose home? Which home?

Dipu keeps sitting. The super-shop will reopen at nine in the morning and close at eight thirty at night. It needs to be shut at that time according to the new laws of the government. Earlier it was better because it used to be almost eleven by the time the shop closed its business. Now he has a lot of free time for himself after work. Dipu doesn’t need such a lot of time. He will feel lighter if he can somehow sell all his free time. He is thinking of getting another job for the night. He can be a night guard. He doesn’t need money. Rather, he wants to get a job even if he needs to shell out money. He fishes out his phone from his pocket. He taps the buttons for a long time. He puts it on his ear and then doesn’t take it down.

Ma? Should I send it tomorrow? I will allow it to grow. Please have your medicines properly. Don’t be like Abba. No one grows rich saving money meant for medicines; people die this way. Abba has. Abba’s not alive, Ma. At least you stay. What? Fine, I’ll send over a sum. Ma, is my goat still there? You haven’t given away my ball, have you? Ma, I’ll come soon. You’ll wake up one day and see me standing right next to your forehead. I want to come back Ma, but I can’t for the life of me remember the way to our home. Wasn’t there a tender coconut tree right next to the tap? Now I spot a tender coconut tree in every house, but the area around the tap doesn’t match! Ma, have you hidden the tap somewhere? Or has Abba taken it with him? Ma…

He gets no answer from the other side.

Dipu puts the phone away from his ear. It has been two days since he charged it. He did put it to charge once today but forgot to switch it back on. He keeps clicking the buttons of the phone in his hand. Right now, even this seems like some sort of occupation to him. And while he clicks away, Dipu feels as though he is running on a board like that of the phone’s keypad. From zero to nine—no scope of going outside this limit. And within this space, life seems vast to him. But what he really needs to do is to reduce time to a dot and fling himself inside that dot. That dot that will have no time before or after it.

Dipu keeps sitting.

He gets up eventually. He gathers all his strength, but his legs suddenly feel numb. These days his memory freezes anytime, without a warning. He cannot recall a thing from just the day before. And when the people of this city think about their future, Dipu tries to build his past from a vacuum. He doesn’t remember if he ever had a house. His mother must have been there. There must have been a mother, since he had been birthed. And that is why he must have had a father. But what about a wife or sibling? Perhaps he has one, maybe he doesn’t. And when he thinks of a wife, the image of a child swims to his mind from the black hole that is his memory. And if he has a child, there must be a wife. Or does the black hole release the image of someone else’s child? Or that of his own childhood? Has everyone known to Dipu died? Among the millions and millions of people in this city, why doesn’t he know anyone? Is he himself alive? Do the dead have any memory? Dipu thinks that either he or others are dead. But this thought is not based on sound logic. Dipu now tries to hear some faraway sound. Some young bride is sobbing quietly. Her pillow is soaked. Dipu’s senses are suddenly so sharp that he can see everything clearly. His spirit seems to move out of his body and sit on that bed. A picture is kept on the mirror of the bamboo dressing table inside the room. It isn’t difficult for him to recognize it in the darkness. He opens his eyes and realizes that a house like this must exist somewhere in this world, a place where his photograph is kept. But where will he find that house? Why should he search for that house?

A dog climbs a few stairs and sits near his feet. One empty truck after another roars past him on the road in front. All the trucks carry materials for the construction of the new building. A night bird flies from the darkness nearby to the denser blackness yonder. A dream shifts from one side to the other in search of a sleeping person. Perhaps the people of this city do not sleep like Dipu, or maybe each of them has a pet dream, and a few commonplace dreams lie waiting for Dipu.

I had a pet dream once; I used to see it every day. Dipu says.

I am a pleasant dream. But no one wants good dreams now. This city has turned even dreams into entertainment. The dream says.

I can’t remember my dream anymore. Do dreams die like people? Dipu asks.

We can’t differentiate between alive and dead. We can only tell apart sleep from wakefulness.

And if one slips into eternal sleep? Or lies awake in perennial wakefulness?

The dream gets up without another word. It leaves in search of someone asleep. A person that has no dream of his own. This city has lakhs and lakhs of people who love dreaming. Dipu envies them.

The night doesn’t seem to move ahead. The buildings slowly dim one by one. Dipu feels like walking through the entire city today. And while walking, he wants to enter an unfamiliar house. Perhaps a woman will say—wash your hands and face and come for dinner. And after washing his hands, with great intimacy, Dipu will wipe his hands on the edge of her saree. And as if she were his own, she will not stop any of his advances. Dipu wants to embrace her once. He hasn’t hugged a woman in so long. And sitting for his dinner at the neat and organized table, he will taste the food made by someone very familiar. He will be a little absent-minded in trying to recall whose hands cooked such food. The woman will place her hands on his shoulders then. And he will break down trying to wonder if anyone had ever placed her hands on his shoulders that affectionately.

Dipu recalls someone. While walking the lanes of his neighborhood, he tries to remember the name. A person’s existence is incomplete without a name. While searching for that name, Dipu walks quite a distance. He decides to enter a house. He spots an old, two-floor house on the street that hasn’t crumbled yet because it is waiting to be demolished any day soon. Before he can press the calling bell, someone opens the door from inside. Dipu puts one of his feet inside.

Keep your shoes outside, I just swept the floor. The woman says.

She probably opened the door. Dipu keeps his shoes and looks at the wall, wondering what to do next. A lizard looks at him. He stares back at the lizard squarely in its eyes. He slowly builds the courage to look at the woman’s eyes.

What happened? Wash your hands and come for dinner.

Dipu looks around and locates the washbasin. He washes his hands for a long time. He moves forward to wipe his hands. The woman is not wearing a saree, she is clad in a salwar-kameez. She doesn’t have a dupatta on her. There is space for only one person at that small dining table, the rest of it is cluttered with objects. Dipu pulls the chair and sits. At the table there is a plate of rice along with two vegetable sides. When he looks closely a cockroach moves down from one of the containers, climbs his arm and enters his shirt. He sifts through the rice on the plate. The potato mash is watery; the young banana curry has dried up. While eating, he tries to recall something. No, he cannot remember. He cannot recollect the thought he had when he entered that house. And he cannot eat fast, preoccupied with thoughts about what to do after dinner.

Go to the room after you’re done eating. I’m leaving for the hotel. Napa Suppository is kept there. Give her the medicine if the fever increases. She will have to be admitted in the morning. Did you get money anywhere? Saying this, the woman applies a thick coat of lipstick and drapes a black dupatta on the salwar-kameez she is wearing.

Dipu realizes that he has entered the wrong house. He gets up and brushes his clothes. The cockroach falls to the floor and scurries away inside the room. Dipu cautiously follows suit. A child is lying there, around seven or eight years old. The bed looks really old. Dipu sits gingerly beside the girl. She seems to be shivering with fever. He should get out of here before he is stuck in some major problem. There are many other houses in this city, lakhs and lakhs of skyscrapers have hidden the sky and the trucks hover all through the city carrying materials for another lakh of such buildings. Dipu regrets entering the wrong house, his life suddenly seems unbearable to him, if at all he is alive… He will leave right now. There is no one to stop him now. He gets up. He is startled, looking at the picture on the bamboo dressing table on the wall next to him.

Irvine, California (Dec. 23, 2024) — Effective immediately, fans can enjoy a new Sunshine menu featuring a Cheesy Chalupa, a hardshell Double Nacho Cheese Taco and Plasma Twists. Fans can also order Taco Bell’s iconic Nacho Cheese Sauce a la carte and create their own cheese-tastic combinations.

Parker Solar Probe Briefing

December 23, 2024

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, a historic mission poised to transform our understanding of the Sun, is scheduled to reach its closest point to the Sun on Tuesday, Dec. 24, Eastern Time. The spacecraft has withstood brutal heat and radiation to deliver unparalleled observations of the only star we can study up close.

Coverage will begin on NASA Television and the agency’s website at 4:00 p.m. EDT.

White House Press Release: Announcement of Findings from Parker Solar Probe

On December 24, 2024, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe reached a scientific milestone by flying over seven times closer to the Sun than previous spacecraft, orbiting just within 3.8 million miles of the Sun’s surface. During yesterday’s flyby, the probe’s science team analyzed the most recent data and concluded the Sun’s plasma is not, as previously thought, comprised primarily of hydrogen.

Analysis reveals that the Sun’s plasma is predominantly lactose, plus a mix of vegetable oil, modified food starch, maltodextrin, salt, dipotassium phosphate, Capsicum annuum, acetic acid, lactic acid, cellulose gum, potassium citrate, sodium stearoyl lactylate, citric acid, annatto and oleoresin paprika.

NASA has assured the White House that these findings are legitimate.

The President will provide more information as it is received.

We urge the American people, and all the people of the world, to stay calm.

Substack Post: The Sun Is Made Of Nacho Cheese. Now What? 

January 1, 2025

Happy New Year, readers!

I was convinced that the nacho cheese announcement was a prank, but… the data has been verified by scientists globally.

The implications are enormous. But I say, look to the future of food! Now that you can buy Taco Bell Nacho Cheese Sauce on its own, you can cook your own Sun-fun creations. Enjoy these five nacho-inspired meals, and drop a comment on which one was your favorite.

Stay cheesy, my friends.

Climate Change journal

“Concerns of Sun Mining by Taco Bell”

Open access | Volume 178, published Summer 2025

C. Major, J. Baker, M. Scott

Abstract: This paper examines the correlation between the recent NASA discovery of the Sun’s composition, revealing unexpectedly high levels of compounds structurally identical to processed nacho cheese, and the concurrent release of Taco Bell’s expanded nacho-based menu offerings. Our analysis identifies a statistically significant negative trend in solar luminosity measurements beginning in the early 1990s, coinciding with the introduction of Taco Bell’s signature nacho cheese products. We propose that Taco Bell may possess privileged access to solar mining technologies. If the fast-food restaurant continues any covert mining it may be practicing, Earth’s climate will experience negative consequences.

Melinda Davies @DreamDivergent posted on June 13, 2025, “If the SUN is made of cheese, what’s the MOON made of?”

Wendy’s @Wendy’s posted on August 2, 2025, “Get ready to launch your taste buds into orbit this September with Wendy’s out-of-this-world Nacho Supremes! Made with authentic Sun sauce. #WendysWins #NachoMania”

Samplings from nona’s Winter 2025 prix fixe menu

moss, creamy nacho cheese sauce, topped with bee larvae

butternut squash soup, infused with nacho cheese sauce, topped with sour cream

beef sausage, nacho cheese sauce reduction, sweet potato

cumin-spiced lava cake with nacho cheese filling, alongside savory ice cream

Superior Court of Orange County, California

Natural Resources Defense Council vs. Taco Bell Corporation

Defense opening statement

February 9, 2026

Mr. Gilbreth: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the accusations that the prosecution has brought forward are nothing more than a cheap dog and pony show. The prosecution says they will prove that Taco Bell has been mining the Sun for decades, but they will produce no evidence, only speculation. Taco Bell claims no responsibility for its classic Nacho Cheese Sauce recipe being identical to the Sun’s plasma. It simply has a recipe, a delicious recipe, that the world can’t get enough of. Is that a crime? No, it is not.

Straight Talk podcast transcript

December 2026

[Opening music]

Todd Evans: Welcome to another episode of Straight Talk, with your hosts, Todd and Angie.

Angela Booth: Today, we’re talking about an issue that’s “out of this world”. It’s been two years since NASA rocked the world with its findings. By now, you’ve heard: no longer content with buying Taco Bell Nacho Cheese Sauce directly, fast food corporations have built their own massive solar probes, shaped like tortilla chips, to scoop up the Sun’s plasma cheese. It seems that the floodgates were released after Taco Bell won its recent lawsuit against the NRDC.

TE: Some are hailing this as the next “space race,” saying it will drive competition and lower prices of the tasty cheese sauce—

AB: Which has gotten ridiculously expensive.

TE: Absolutely. I haven’t been able to buy any in months. But critics say that the last thing the world needs is restaurants venturing into space. We’ll discuss after a quick word from today’s sponsors.

CNN article

Published June 2027

Two Hospitalized After TikTok ‘Suncheese Challenge’

What started as fun turned into tragedy after two teenagers were hospitalized with second-degree burns due to the latest TikTok trend, the so-called “Suncheese Challenge.” The challenge consists of heating Taco Bell Nacho Cheese Sauce to boiling temperatures and trying to eat it. The teens suffered burns on their tongues and in their throats.

MSNBC Andrea Mitchell Reports

August 2031

Interview with Dr. Michael Thompson, climatologist and author of Cut The Cheese: Why We Must Stop Consuming The Sun.

Andrea Mitchell: Michael, thank you for joining us. So you predict a serious global impact from consuming the Sun’s plasma?

Michael Thompson: Yes, that’s right. We’ve already consumed too much.

AM: But what about those who say that the nacho cheese sauce is an infinite resource that we can make at home?

MT: That was a nice pipe dream five years ago, Andrea. But let’s be real: nobody can recreate the exact taste of Taco Bell’s Nacho Cheese Sauce because Taco Bell never made it using ingredients on Earth. It was always mined from the Sun, decades before anyone found out.

AM: The NRDC tried to prove that in a court of law and was slapped down.

MT: You’re right, and I can’t prove the allegation now. But what I can predict—what I can show you—is that with future decreased sun output will come another Ice Age. Are you prepared for that?

Target Weekly Ad

Prices valid May 22–28, 2033

BOGO 50% Ultimate Comfort Collection

Come shop Target’s selection of year-round winter wear! Stave off the cold with bold colors and styles.

Snowshoes from $49.99

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The Guardian article

Published May 17, 2035

Taco Bell CEO Says Public Appetite Is Responsible For Darker Sun

Speaking on the sidelines at the annual Foodservice Conference & Expo on Wednesday, May 16, Taco Bell CEO Karl Stills attributed the recent decrease in sun luminosity to the collective appetite of the public, citing it as the driving force behind the celestial change.

In his statement, Stills defended Taco Bell’s menu offerings, emphasizing that the restaurant chain merely responds to consumer demand.

“Taco Bell was providing its signature Nacho Cheese Sauce for many years before the Sun began to grow darker,” Stills added. “Taco Bell’s menu innovations are a direct response to consumer preferences, not a causative factor in astronomical phenomena.”

Despite Stills’ assertions, many astrophysicists and climatologists have expressed certainty of a direct link between sun mining from Taco Bell and other food corporations and the observed decrease in sun output.

Taco Bell maintains that its research team has not conclusively found any determinative evidence showing that the Sun’s decreased output is harmful. “A decreased output is a natural part of the solar cycle,” argued Taco Bell’s chief scientist, Dr. Evan Roberts. “The measured decrease is only about 1.34 percent. There is no cause to panic.”

Arctic Rescue Keepers (A.R.K.) Passenger Manifest, Premier Class

Departure: May 31, 2070

June Walton—Age: 35—Passenger ID: ARK-P001

Pat Bezos—Age: 21—Passenger ID: ARK-P002

Angela Mars—Age: 60—Passenger ID: ARK-P003

Kevin Koch—Age: 49—Passenger ID: ARK-P004

Marcus Cargill-MacMillan—Age: 53—Passenger ID: ARK-P005

A.R.K. Brochure

YOUR GREAT ESCAPE

Fleeing the planet doesn’t have to be a hassle. When traversing the galaxy on the luxury departure vessel A.R.K., you will have access to all the finest Earth amenities: Olympic-sized swimming pools, fruits and vegetables, spa treatments, authentic nacho cheese sauce, space heaters—all this and more, thanks to our generous corporate sponsors. Say goodbye to ice sheets and everlasting snowfall when you board the A.R.K.

Suite reservation requires a $1 billion deposit. Act now! Your time is running out.

When he had run out of things to swear at, he managed to pull himself together enough to climb out of the cramped cockpit and into the empty cargo bay. He felt terrible. A sick fear had churned his guts and made his head ache.

His safety net was gone. And it had failed at the worst possible moment.

When Rig was promoted to XO of the Ultor, one of his first projects had been to surreptitiously purchase a collapsible, concealable, two-seater escape craft with enough power to get him to a neighboring system if he ever found himself in a no-win situation. Knowing the Ultor and the guy who commanded it, this was an almost guaranteed prospect. And knowing her crew as he did, Rig had no doubt that every one of them would have made their own escape plans for this exact eventuality.

Maybe there was someone willing to let him tag along? Some groveling might have to be involved. It would be humiliating, but it was better than dying.

A new wave of anger washed over him. The ship had cost him nearly an entire year’s wages. Scammed? Sabotaged? It made no sense. All systems showed green, and the meager onboard AI was as flummoxed as he was. He released another torrent of curses until he managed to calm himself again.

Not sure what else to do, Rig began folding up the wings so he could slide the small craft back into its hidey-hole again. But as he was securing the covering panel, a new idea came to him. Wait a minute. Since every diagnostic comes up clean, maybe there’s no scientific reason for launch failure. This left only one possible culprit. It was something he should’ve considered in the first place. It made sense. And he could prove it as well.

Of course, confronting the culprit might get him killed even faster—you never knew where Elgia was concerned. But what other choice did he have?

Exiting into the passageway, he halted in the corridor. 

Uh-oh. 

His sixth sense began twinging. It told him he would have to run a gauntlet to get to Elgia’s quarters unscathed. You don’t serve aboard a mercenary ship like the Ultor for long without recognizing panic in the air: a sour yet electric scent that was equal parts adrenaline mixed with cold sweat. If Rig could capture it in a perfume bottle, he’d call it Impending Doom. Cautiously, he began making his way to the lower decks.

A few moments later, he spotted the bobbing blond head of Pora, the Ultor’s navigator, hurrying in the opposite direction. Rig secretly fancied her and believed there was a chance she might’ve felt the same way in return. (He held on to this faint hope despite the fact she had once threatened him with a plasma torch after he had denied her shore leave. Typical Ultor attitude; great to work with, but don’t cross certain lines.)

“Hey, Pora,” he called, feigning nonchalance. It sounded fake to his own ears, but Pora didn’t react. More accurately, she didn’t react to him at all, walking briskly past him with a preoccupied, anxious look in her eyes.

Huh. Interesting.

Other crew members he passed carried the same expression, confused and deeply troubled. He caught whispers of “What do you mean it wouldn’t work? I thought you checked it?” and, “He owes me big time and is worth a rescue sortie out here, but I can’t raise him on the comms at all. I just get dead air…”

Okay, that pretty much clinches it.

He began jogging like he was going somewhere vital in order to do something that could save their asses if he could only get there in time. He’d used this act before. Everyone was rattled now, but that could worsen fast, especially if they spotted someone in authority to blame, like a young, arguably inexperienced XO. So what if everyone knew the Captain was solely to blame? No one would be able to get to Drooghelm, who would be barricaded in his quarters by now, hiding behind blast-proof hulls and reinforced bulkheads. Their fearless captain always pulled this maneuver when he royally screwed up.

Rig managed to reach the sub-fifth deck without incident. He turned and headed down a corridor.

He was getting close. Familiar, telltale scents filled his nostrils; wafts of strange herbs, roots, and unrecognizable concoctions hovered thickly in the air. The light was dimmer here. The lighting covers were coated with grime, and the deck plates as well. Nothing had been cleaned in months, but Rig never scolded the cleaning bots, knowing full well that they were too nervous to venture around these parts. Even the mechies had enough intelligence to stay away. But what did that say about himself? 

It pretty much says I’m an idiot.

Ahead, a flickering yellow light spilled from an open hatchway. The bulkhead around it was covered in crudely painted runes and symbols. A beaded curtain made from rough, fibrous strands covered the opening and two bleached skulls from odd, bird-like creatures hung in the upper corners. He swallowed nervously.

Approaching the doorway cautiously, Rig raised his hand to knock.

“Enterrrrrr…” croaked a wizened voice from the other side.

He shuddered and thought: I hate it when he does that, before entering the room.

Suddenly, a green specter appeared from nowhere, floating in mid-air before Rig, moaning piteously. It was a ghastly phantasm of a male technician with torn overalls which glowed with an unearthly, sickly aura that matched his emerald, sore-riddled skin. The specter’s eyes and mouth were as black as the darkest singularity, no pupils or tongue visible as he groaned at Rig: “Deaaaaaaaaaath!”

Though he had been expecting this, Rig still cried out like a tween-aged schoolgirl and almost jumped out of his skin. “Augh! For pity’s sake, Franz, it’s me.” His hand accidentally passed through the creature, which immediately turned ice-cold. A deathly chill ran up his arm.

The hovering creature abruptly stopped wailing and straightened up. “Oh.” The voice was fairly ordinary now, though disappointed. “Sorry, XO. Didn’t know it was you. Thought it was one of the regulars.”

Rig exhaled slowly, consciously. “Forget it,” he grumbled. “There’s a crisis. I need to talk to Elgia.”

Franz pivoted mid-air and called into a back room: “Sweetie!”

“Coming, Franzie,” came back a creaky voice.

The eyeless face turned back to Rig and smiled pleasantly. “She’ll just be a minute. Please have a seat if you wish. Help yourself to some tea.” And with that, he vanished.

Since the only seat in the room seemed to be made from the pelvic skeleton of some unknown, large creature, Rig chose to stay standing.

He looked about. Elgia’s lair hadn’t changed much since the last time he was here. The same wooden drawers were set in ancient cabinets, each holding a pungent cache of herbs and roots from far-flung corners of the galaxy, the same cauldron bubbled lightly over a stone brazier with a smoldering fire in the middle, and the same dust and gloom coated everything, all of which likely concealed a thousand arcane and mystical items that would bring horrible, painful death or a lifetime of humiliating curses if you touched them the wrong way. On the far wall, a framed piece of cross-stitching depicted a grey tabby kitten playing with a ball of pink yarn. It was definitely the creepiest item in the room.

Finally, Elgia Jossinah Wrigglia, Black Mistress in the Everlasting Sisterhood of the Shadow, hobbled her way in from the back room with a gnarled wooden cane, looking like a pale prune that had spontaneously sprouted limbs. The stuff on her head was either hair or sentient cobwebs, a tangle of wispy vagueness, the strands occasionally moving of their own accord. Two squinting eyes, each pale blue-white, were set in her crevassed face and were not easy to gaze into when you were sober.

Most non-magic spacefaring folks—Rig included—tended to avoid mystical objects or beings as they would the black plagues from the swamps on Golgotha Prime. Why Drooghelm had decided to hire a terrifying creature like Elgia to be part of their little “spacefaring family” baffled Rig.

The ancient woman smiled cheerfully on her way to the cauldron, yellow and grey teeth peeking through dried lips. “Hello, Ducks. How’s tricks?”

“Good evening, Sister Elgia.” Best to start formally.

“Oh, relax, Ducks. You’re one of the ones I like.” She peered at him briefly. “You look very upset, you poor thing.”

“Yeah, I’ve been better. Do you… er… mind if I ask you something?” Elgia’s assurances notwithstanding, Rig’s tone was polite and calm. He wanted to scream his question, but you never annoyed members of the Sisterhood without having your head examined first.

Elgia leaned over the bubbling cauldron, sniffing. “Of course, Ducks. Always willing to help the deputy leader in our little home in space.” She took a few sticks from a nearby pile and placed them into the smoldering fire in the hearth below. (Open flames on any spacefaring vessel were, unsurprisingly, completely forbidden. Unless, of course, you were someone like Elgia, who would take your copy of the Spacefarer’s Trade Union Safety Book and burn it in her hearth in order to make her point clear.)

Clearing his throat, Rig explained how his small escape craft, for no apparent reason, wouldn’t work. He also added that similar malfunctions seemed to be happening all over the ship, including communications. “So…” he paused, attempting to compose his question carefully, “Did you…?” Nothing came to mind, so he stretched his hand out and waggled his fingers suggestively.

Elgia made a disgusted noise. “Ugh! Is that how you ask if I employed my sacred arts? The ancient craft of spell crafting, handed down through millennia and across star systems innumerable?”

“Sorry—”

“Well, yes, I did. His Nibs ordered it, naturally. He wanted to make sure nobody could abandon ship behind his back. Apparently, some job he recently accepted requires a full crew.”

Rig exhaled, then scowled. “Did you happen to ask about it? The job, I mean.”

She shrugged. “Don’t know, don’t care. He’s the boss.”

“Oh, you should care. Let me fill you in. He—”

“Hey, no, belay that, XO!” The deep voice came from the back room. A second later, Captain Drooghelm’s imposing bulk stepped into the room. “Rig, her Unholy Sisterness here doesn’t need to be bothered with the details of ship’s business.”

The Captain looked shockingly awful: disheveled, sallow, and drawn, with massive bags under his eyes and ugly splotches and stains all over his shirt. Rig spied some mysterious things stuck in his beard that might have been flecks of vomit. A while back, he had managed to peek at the Ultor’s accounting sheets and was amazed to learn how much money a supposedly hard-as-nails mercenary Captain could allot for a private publicist and hair care products. If Drooghelm had allowed himself to look this bad in front of anyone, then he was very shaken indeed.

Elgia nodded in agreement. “Captain’s right, I don’t need to be bothered. How he runs his ship is none of my concern. I’m just a Mystical Consultant, after all, I don’t do policy.” Elgia hobbled over, pulled open one of the drawers, and began sorting through the contents.

Rig’s patience began to wear thin. “Oh, sod this. Elgia, you need to know the truth. This jackass—”

“Check your tone, Rig! You know how I deal with insubordination.”

“Are you bloody kidding me?” Rig yelled, the last pretenses of decorum falling away. “We’re all dead! You’ve screwed all of us, and then you make her cut off the exits!”

“XO, a crew has to pull together in times of—”

“Save it. You might as well tell her now, Captain. If you think I’m pissed off, imagine what she’s going to feel like once we get there if you haven’t told her.”

Elgia cocked a blue-white eye at Drooghelm. “Oh?” She looked back at Rig. “Okay, boy, you’ve got my attention. What did the drunken bastard do this time?”

“I was not drunk,” protested the Captain weakly.

Rig laughed. “I literally had to cart you onto the ship in a wheelbarrow.” He turned to Elgia. “He had the signed contract lying on his chest when I went to collect him. Our newest client had it notarized, too. Ironclad. PO Crandall was there when I read it, so now the whole bloody ship knows as well.”

Elgia looked at him expectantly.

Rig took a deep breath, then spoke as calmly as he could manage. “There are suicide missions, and there are suicide missions. And then there’s this job.” Rig paused. “Drooghelm has agreed to kill a god.”

A sudden silence filled the room. Elgia just stared at him for what was probably a few seconds but felt like an hour.

Finally, she yelled: “I quit! Franz?”

The green ghost popped back into view. “Sweets?”

“Pack our crap! We’re outta here!” She began to gather up objects around her.

Drooghelm groaned. “Look, Elgia, it’s not that bad—”

She spun on him. “Not that bad?” she growled, more infuriated than Rig had ever seen her. “A god?” She threw her arms up in exasperation. “You drunken sot! Why not just say you’ll eat a planet in one gulp? At least a fat bastard like yourself has a chance there! We’ve got no chance against a god.”

“Okay, yes, I had had a lot to drink…”

She laughed mirthlessly and continued packing.

“… and when they named their price, well… er… I don’t remember much after that. I think I might’ve agreed right there and then.”

“Think? There was no thinking involved, that’s for certain. Move, you great moron!” she spat as she pushed past him to grab a sickle hanging on the wall behind him. “Franzie, where’s my satchel?”

“Back of the closet, I think,” the ghost replied. “Next to that cursed halberd, the one Rennazi de Winterstorm owned back in 12574 from the Karrakos Era. Or was it the Spon era?”

“Elgia,” Drooghelm interrupted, “this is an unusual situation.” He shot a nervous glance at Rig.

In a flash, Rig knew what his Captain was about to do and took a cautious step back.

Drooghelm continued, “And I would hate to have to contact the Sisterhood—”

Elgia spun on him so fast it made Rig start. The effect it had on Drooghelm was like a freezing ray; he became an instant statue.

“You would hate to do… what, exactly?”

Sweat began to bead on Drooghelm’s forehead. “To…” he faltered.

“Yessssss?” she hissed. Her tone was colder than space.

“C-c-c-contact… the… Sisterhood…” he stammered.

“You sure you want to do that, Captain?”

The mercenary Captain was silent for a moment, his eyes as wide as saucers. Finally, he managed to say very quietly: “Yes?”

By this point, even the ghost was holding his breath.

Elgia stared hard at him and said nothing. Then, abruptly, she swore and seemed to deflate into the pelvic bone chair. Pulling a pack of cigarettes from a table drawer, she retrieved one and lit it. “Well,” she said in a resigned tone, blowing out a cloud of smoke. “Life was fun while it lasted.”

Rig and Franz exhaled at the same time, but only one of them created a breeze.

Elgia produced a hip flask from under her robes and took a swig. She looked at Rig. “You said it was notarized?” He nodded. “Wonderful,” she growled.

“This,” she said after another healthy swallow, “is technically known as a state of ‘screwed three ways to Sunday.’ If we run, the bailiffs are after us for breaking the contract. And they do not mess around. If we try to carry out the contract, we’ll surely be flattened by a bloody god…” she yelled this pointedly at Drooghelm, “and if I were to fry our beloved leader here into a charcoal brisket and do a runner, the Sisterhood would be on my tail like a rabid weasel who had just spotted her mortal enemy.” She shuddered at the thought.

Rig rubbed his temples, trying to stop his headache from worsening. “Okay, okay,” he began grasping at threads, “Maybe there is a way to… well, do it. Complete the contract.” He couldn’t bring himself to say it directly.

Elgia scowled. “Do it? You mean off the Holy sonofabitch? Ha!” Nevertheless, she turned to Drooghelm and asked: “Well, tell me about this god at least. Which one is it?”

The Captain mopped his brow with a rag from a tabletop. “Uh, well, he’s new. Named Zaxxos or something. Just attained godhood a few years ago. Some mystical accident, according to the client.”

“Who’s the client?” Elgia interrupted.

“These dark cult guys on a planet about ten light years from here: Universalis Sancta Subiugatio, whatever the hell that means.”

Elgia made a guttural sound of disapproval.“Ugh, those arseholes. I know ’em. Charming lot. They sometimes sacrifice virgins by pushing them into underground lava streams, stuff like that. Boys and girls, mind you; very progressive not to discriminate, eh? So, it’s these asswipes you decide to go into business with, Droog?”

Drooghelm managed to look even more pale and uncomfortable. “Oh. Er, Eglia, in my defense, I had no idea they did stuff like that when I signed…”

“As drunk as you were, I’m surprised you could remember your own name in order to sign it,” said Rig.

Drooghelm glared. “As I was saying… These Subiugatio guys were fiddling with spells to obtain godhood. Your typical dark cult stuff. Then one of their lesser acolytes, some old guy who had been toiling at the problem for his entire life, stumbled on the solution.”

“So, that is the so-called target?” Franz asked, trying to be helpful. “This lesser acolyte you speak of?”

“Eh, no. It’s his fourteen-year-old grand-nephew, actually. This spell was generational, so one of the caster’s heirs was going to have to take up the family tradition. The acolyte guy was trying to get the kid interested in it as a career choice.

“And then something screwed up, and the spell suddenly worked. The guy was so stunned that he didn’t notice his nephew had walked up to the spell circle and got, um, ‘godded’ instead. Reportedly, the guy was pretty pissed and said some, you’d say, ill-advised things to the kid. Things did not go well for Mr. Uncle, and now they’ll never know how the idiot managed to successfully cast the spell in the first place.”

“How long ago was this?” Elgia asked.

“A little more than five years.”

She rolled her eyes. “Wonderful. We’re going to get flattened by a god whose balls just dropped.”

“Great Herald!” Drooghelm cried, a slight manic tone creeping into his voice, “There has to be a way to get it done!”

“That’s another thing,” Rig said, “when the hell did we become contract killers? When I signed up for your crew, you swore assassinations were off the table.”

“Oh, grow up,” Drooghelm scoffed. “A mercenary crew has to find work where they can. Besides, gods aren’t people. You ever watch one of their kind in an interview? They all think they’re better than everyone else. Buncha pricks.”

Rig put his hands to his face. “Sure… what better argument for murder could you get?”

Drooghelm ignored him. “They must be able to die. In the stories, myths, stuff like that… With the staggering amount these guys are paying us to complete this job—”

“How much?” Franz and Elgia asked at the same time. Rig told them and they whistled appreciatively in unison.

“Exactly,” exclaimed Drooghelm. “So, what if—I dunno—we get the biggest, baddest plasma cannon on credit and—”

“Forget it.” Rig shook his head. “According to what I looked up, there’s this inherent principle to godhood that says ‘a god can only be slain by another god’s hand.’”

The Captain looked at Elgia. She nodded, adding, “Clumsy phrasing, but he’s basically right. Most religious scholars and philosophers would back that up. I wouldn’t call it a universal law or anything, but it’s pretty close.”

“Okay, fine. We hire another god to do it.”

Elgia laughed. “Gods—you great oaf—don’t care about money! They’re beyond monetary or material needs. Besides, there’s only a handful around. It’s incredibly rare for gods to be created. I can only think of a couple off the top of my head that are in this region. Once they master their powers, most leave our universe to create their own dimension. It’s like moving to the coast to build your dream home, but on a quantum level.”

“And just for kicks,” Rig added, “I tried reaching out to the few gods she’s talking about, the ones that are still in our dimension.”

“And?” Drooghelm asked hopefully.

“They won’t return my calls.”

Elgia rolled her eyes. “That tears it.”

This declaration seemed to be the final straw for the Captain, who fell against a wall and slumped to the floor.

Rig went over and squatted down to his level. “Look, Captain…” He tried to put a friendly spin to his voice, “I know you’re in a tough spot here. But the only thing to do now is, well, you have to order Elgia to let the crew go. You signed the contract, not us. The noble thing here…” It was ridiculous to try the nobility angle with Drooghelm, but he had to give it a shot. “The noble thing to do would be to let us bail. Besides, you always said you wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. What better way than to take on a god? Single-handedly! Talk about epic! They’ll be talking about it for… well, forever.”

Elgia snorted. “Sure. Hey, did you hear about that putz who got punched into the next galaxy?”

Rig winced. He was about to try a different tack when he noticed a strange expression had formed on the man’s face. It took him a few seconds to realize what his Captain was doing. He was thinking.

This was not good.

“Hey,” Drooghelm began slowly. “That gives me an idea.”

Zaxxos the Magnificent was in a bad mood.

He was pensive. Grumpy. Cranky, even. This whole ‘being a god’ thing was not panning out like it should have.

Long ago—five years to be precise—he thought he had hit the ultimate jackpot, and everything was going to be totally jackballs awesome for all eternity. Even though it was by accident, he had achieved what quadrillions had dreamt of since magic was first practiced in the galaxy. He was a mother-loving God.

Supposedly, he could do whatever he wanted, make whatever he wanted, go wherever he wanted, and nobody could say boo. If anyone gave him any backtalk or static, he’d just smite the little turd. Plus, there’d be as much sex as he could handle. Hotties, he figured, should be mega-stoked to make it with a god. Things would be the best forever and ever; all praise himself.

But it hadn’t turned out that way at all.

The smiting was still okay, at least. The first guy he smited—or smote, whatever—was his great uncle, Warringanor. Sure, who wouldn’t be pissed if your family had been casting this meta-complicated spell for about two hundred years, and then your niece’s grandkid trips over it and ruins it for you? Yeah, okay, anybody would be upset. But then his great uncle said some really hurtful things, and he got angry, and… Well, it wasn’t pretty.

When he realized he could kill someone so easily, it was really unnerving. At first. But then he discovered how creative he could get with it.

Turns out, there were a crap-ton of different ways you could smite someone. Exploding ’em, crushing ’em, or just making ’em fall over dead. That last one was the coolest. Plus, you didn’t get all that horrible mess or smell.

However, doing other godly things was tricky.

If he tried creating something from nothing, for example, he had to be real careful, or it’d go all wrong. Especially if it was a living thing. Yikes, that became a horror show real quick. Good thing he had been practicing all that smiting before he tried creating life.

Objects, so long as they were simple or straightforward, were easy enough. A giant chair, for example, for his recently-resized giant body was okay. But when he tried making a spaceship, the problem was he didn’t know how they worked. He had no clues about the basic FTL drive principles, for example. So, they tended to blow up. Actually, they always blew up.

Magically-infused objects were tricky, too. There was this time he was going to be a War God and tried conjuring this really bad-ass sword as the central part of his ‘look,’ with a big, red gemstone in the center, which would shoot out these awesome, kick-ass red lightning bolts whenever he unsheathed it: Boom! Pow! Zap!

It blew up as well. Most of his stuff tended to blow up. It was one of the main reasons for his bad mood.

Plus, there were those loser clowns who had started worshiping him after he ‘ascended.’ He was glad he changed his name to “Zaxxos the Magnificent” after the transformation. Nobody would worship at the Church of Kevin Fenward, right?

At first, it was cool having people literally singing your praises; how amazing he was, how they were so insignificant next to him, et cetera, set to music, no less. This must be a perk, for sure.

But the whole thing got unbelievably annoying when he discovered that he always—always—heard his worshipper’s prayers. He couldn’t turn it off. What was this crap? Here he was, a guy who could turn a starliner into a goat—yeah, it would be a weird-looking goat that would blow up before too long, but he could still do that little miracle—yet somehow, he couldn’t turn off the speaker in his head that heard all those whinging little complaints.

So much of it was about money! I’m so poor. I can’t pay my rent. I need a new transport. My kid needs medicine. Petty, petty, crap all the time. It got so bad, he started conjuring gold bars just so they’d shut up. Then word got around that prayers to him actually paid off, and it became so much worse so fast. Money prayers began flooding his head. Not surprisingly, it became ‘smiting time’ once again. That finally shut ‘em up real quick.

So: his powers were hanky, his worshippers were jerks, and his creations kept exploding. But the worst part was the sex thing.

Instead of cartloads of Vestal virgins (something he’d heard from history—he wasn’t sure what it referred to, but they sounded seriously hot) lining up to service his every whim, chicks avoided him like he was a chess club president covered in cold sores. He listened in on some of the conversations the novice priestesses had in the convents so he could understand why they weren’t showing up in droves, boobs out, legs open. The words he heard were along the lines of: terrifying, death sentence, and ick.

This was the most depressing part. Incredibly powerful, immortal, feared… and he still couldn’t get laid. 

As Zaxxos sat brooding, leaning against a mountain, he absentmindedly scratched his cheek with a finger the size of an eight-story apartment building. He didn’t have an itch—his body never suffered from aches, pains, or even the minor unpleasantness of dermatitis anymore—it was strictly from habit.

Bored and frustrated, he decided a year ago to make himself two thousand feet tall.

Why? Firstly, it was fun. Secondly, it pissed off the Subiugatio cult that ruled his home planet big time. The priesthood had kept pestering him about an alliance in order to take over the galaxy. The idea sounded like work, so he passed.

Then they tried convincing him to make this big weapon that would give them the conquering power they required. To get them off his back, he did it. But—sigh—it exploded, killing a big swath of their priesthood in the process.

He did the ‘bigging thing’ soon after that so he could avoid their whining. He rose above it all.

The bonus benefit was how he terrified the priesthood by stomping around their grounds. Their planet was mostly a series of archipelagos surrounded by a giant, plant-spanning ocean. The biggest island, where Zaxxos currently lounged, was where the top echelon of the priesthood lived. He liked the idea of looming over them. What could they do about it?

But this, too, was getting pretty boring. And he was getting worried about shrinking himself down to normal size because he wasn’t sure how to do it.

It was all so unfair. Why couldn’t he catch a break?

Then, something caught his eye. Instinctually, his brain said it was just some flying insect pestering him.

But then that would mean the bug was the size of…

“Ahem,” said a voice in the air in front of him. Zaxxos narrowed his gaze. It was a ship, hovering before his eyes. And a crappy ship, at that.

“This is Captain Cicero Drooghelm of the starship Ultor.”

The Captain’s voice quavered a bit as he spoke into the microphone; the braggadocio attitude he had been projecting for the last few weeks melted away once the moment arrived. He sounded pale and sweaty again, and all those reassurances of “trust me, this’ll work,” Rig could hear puddling at the man’s feet. The giant speakers they’d strapped to the hull amplified Drooghelm’s voice—but also that quaver—a thousandfold.

“We respectfully request the attention of the great and mighty Zaxxos the Magnificent,” Drooghelm continued.

Elgia had suggested this approach. You don’t want him thinking about swatting us until we’ve got everything lined up. Appeal to his ego. Distract him from the real threat.

The giant god’s eye narrowed on the ship, a relative housefly, and seemed unimpressed. Yet he hadn’t vaporized them right away.

“Well, this is different, at least,” the god smirked. “I’ll give you that.”

Rig found the god’s voice terrifying. The Ultor trembled a little as if they were being buffeted by a storm. He swallowed hard but kept his hands steady on the flight controls.

Drooghelm’s voice broadcasted again. “Er… well.” He coughed nervously. “We, the honorable and brave mercenary crew of the Ultor, are deeply honored to be in the presence of such a… a magnificent being as Zaxxos the, er, Magnificent.”

Rig glanced down and checked their alignment. So long as the big bastard doesn’t move…

“Get to the point. I’m a busy god,” the giant grumbled.

“Er, right…” fumbled Drooghelm. “Well, honored as we all definitely are to be in your presence, the regrettable task has fallen to us to… entreat you to…” he coughed nervously again, “leave this dimension.” After a pause, he added: “Or else.”

Silence hung for a moment in the space between the ship and the giant god.

It was broken when Zaxxos began to laugh uproariously, the force buffeting the ship like a category two hurricane, forcing Rig to compensate heavily to keep the craft steady. “Settle down, settle down,” he whispered. Drooghelm would have to readjust his aim now.

“Or else?” the god cackled. “You gotta be kidding me.”

Rig could hear Drooghelm swallow hard over the speakers as he straightened the ship. His palms were sweating heavily under the hand controls. Risking a split second to wipe them on his shirt, he could feel his heart pounding.

“What can you do, little ship, to a God?” Zaxxos growled, the final word reverberating through the ship like it was made of tin.

Drooghelm, to his credit, redoubled his efforts and threw more gravitas into his voice. “We are very serious, oh, honorable Zaxxos. We have a weapon at our disposal that could dispatch ye.”

Rig looked over at Pora, who was manning navigation, who looked back at Rig. She mouthed “ye?” at him, her expression incredulous.

“We have no desire to do this.” Drooghelm was definitely warming to the dramatics now. “We respect and admire your magnificence and are loath to risk the wrath of any gods who… er… aren’t down with the whole, you know… killing a god thing. So, what is your response, Zaxxos? Leave? Or face oblivion?”

We’re all dead, thought Rig.

But, incredibly, Zaxxos seemed to be considering something. His enormous, youthful face seemed to go slack for a moment, and his cavernous mouth hung open like a dullard who had been given an algebra equation to solve.

Then his mouth closed, his eyes hardened, and he spoke a single word.

“Bull.”

Bloody hell, take the shot!

This was Drooghelm’s great plan:

A few years ago, Drooghelm had come across a story about a holy relic, a scepter, that was stored in an ancient stone temple on a planet called Vargran Six. The scepter’s rod reportedly contained the hair of an old god who had left our dimension for good. Drooghelm admitted he’d briefly considered stealing it at the time but decided it would be too difficult to fence.

But if the follicle was still attached, that made it god-flesh, right? And if it took ‘a god’s hand to kill a god,’ then, he reasoned, all you needed was to get ahold of part of a god, god-flesh or something similar, fasten it to a giant projectile, and fire it into the bastard’s brain.

Everyone else thought this was the kind of plan a six-year-old would come up with. However, they also had no other ideas.

So, they raced over to Vargran Six, opened negotiations with the jungle natives who had worshipped the holy dude for the last thousand years, gave their best bribe to the head shaman, then hit the lot with a stun-burst when they realized the bribe was gloriously backfiring, and ended up stealing it after all. Afterward, half the crew had to be treated with anti-toxins because of poison darts.

Luckily, there was, indeed, a follicle attached to the hair inside the scepter.

Elgia did her best to bolster the god-essence in order to maximize potency, whatever the sod that meant. Then they attached the holy follicle to the tip of the sharpest, biggest, hardest titanium-ultrasteel bolt they could find.

The Ultor, hovering before Zaxxos’ face, was merely a distraction.

Drooghelm’s voice was being transmitted to its exterior speakers from Rig’s heavily cloaked escape craft flying below them, pointing upward at a steep angle. Drooghelm had decided to fire it up Zaxxos’ nose, reasoning it was the best route to hit gray matter without striking his skull, which would likely be impenetrable. A makeshift cannon barrel had been installed on the underbelly, along with the best cloaking system they could afford, which wasn’t very good and would almost certainly break down after the shot was taken.

Both Rig and the crew felt they had next to zero chance of succeeding. Wills were updated, and goodbye letters were sent.

Rig heard the shot. Even though it came from about a half-mile below them, it was that loud.

Zaxxos’ head snapped back as if he had been punched with a mighty uppercut to the schnoz.

Blood!

Amazed, Rig saw a great red droplet appear before Zaxxos’ face. It hung almost motionless in the air for a split second before falling. Zaxxos’ gigantic body slammed against the mountain behind him with a crash that even Rig could feel through the ship’s hull. His heart leaped, daring to hope he might survive this. Everyone on the bridge held their breath.

Then, a moment later, the god sat up.

Zaxxos pressed one of his giant hands against his bloodied nose and said: “Ow.”

Rig swallowed hard. When he saw the look in Zaxxos’s eyes, he tried to swallow again but found that his mouth had gone completely dry.

“You little bastards are so dead,” snarled the god.

Rig spied the muscles tensing in Zaxxos’ shoulder a split second before the huge arm whipped out in an impossibly wide arc. His reflexes responded immediately, yanking the ship controls and twisting the Ultor into a downward spiral.

On the monitor beside him, he could see that Drooghelm had the same idea—but he wasn’t quite fast enough. The giant hand clipped the wing on the smaller craft, sending Drooghelm spiraling in a chaotic tumble off into the neighboring sea, where his ship crashed with a rather sad little ‘splot.’

Crew members on the bridge were screaming at Rig to get them out of there. As if he needed to be told that. Rig swung the ship landward. Maybe he could hide in the mountain range? His mind raced. An orbital path makes the most sense. But switching to escape velocity thrusters would take ten precious seconds. Besides, could Zaxxos fly? Could he just kill them with a thought? How did this guy smite people, anyway?

As if to answer his thoughts, a mountain peak next to the ship exploded in a conflagration of stone and crimson light. Rig screamed in shock and yanked the ship away from the shower of boulders. “Crandall,” he yelled, “Give me a view of the bastard!”

A second later, the bridge viewscreen had a window inserted showing what was happening behind them. They saw a colossal figure climb over the mountains with shocking ease, two ruby-red dots glowing in the center of his face. Zaxxos’ eyes were literally ablaze with fury. Going off-planet was no longer possible; initiating the engine shift would leave them sitting ducks.

Rig spotted a fogbank to port and veered that way.

That was a mistake.

The fogbank was only a small one, maybe two kilometers wide, with a major city on the other side. Rig suddenly found himself hurtling towards a menagerie of towers, buildings, and a hundred other handy structures for them to crash into. He swore as he almost struck a huge temple spire, then narrowly missed another one that seemingly sprang up in its place. For the next few seconds, every spire, tower, or ziggurat he managed to dodge would be replaced by a new one behind it.

Worse still, this was the capital city, which had been built next to the biggest mountain on the whole planet, a behemoth of ten thousand meters in height and easily the same in circumference. It effectively cut off half their maneuvering space, and Rig was forced to violently adjust course away from it. This, naturally, placed him right in the path of more spires and towers.

It took all of Rig’s concentration to fly the ship. Behind them, Zaxxos was still firing crimson energy bursts from his eyes, burrowing charred furrows in the streets, his giant body smashing through buildings like a pimply kaiju from hell. The client was going to be super pissed.

A warning light flashed. The ambient energy from that last eye-blast had melted part of their wings. At this rate, they weren’t going to last long.

“Elgia,” he cried into the comm, “Bolster ship’s integrity!”

“I’m doing my best, you little—” The rest was cut off.

Movement caught Rig’s attention on the rear viewscreen.

The main Holy Temple of the Subiugatio was behind them, a huge structure with banners and flags flying everywhere. Each had a symbol at the center: a silhouette of the enormous mountain that dominated the skyline to the stern.

“They sometimes sacrifice virgins by pushing them into underground lava streams…”

The idea struck him like a bag of hammers, unpleasant but effective. Especially unpleasant because of what he had to do now.

“Hold on,” he yelled and threw the ship into a tight spin, effectively turning them 180 degrees. They were now facing Zaxxos.

“Rig,” cried Pora. “What the crap!”

He accelerated the ship towards the god like he was attacking. Several gasps of terror surrounded him.

The unexpected move made Zaxxos pause. Was it because he had felt pain for the first time in several years? Maybe the experience re-awakened his sense of vulnerability? It didn’t matter. It gave Rig the few seconds he needed to fire all the Ultor’s forward guns right at the god’s eyes.

The energy weapons didn’t hurt Zaxxos at all, but the brilliant volley blinded him for a few seconds, enabling Rig to fly directly between his legs. “In for a penny…” Rig murmured, making a beeline for the giant mountainside.

The shout of fury behind them was, in a word, epic.

Rig glanced at the rear viewscreen. Zaxxos was running full tilt toward them with eyes that had gone pure white, almost too bright to look at.

Now!

Rig rammed the Ultor into an impossibly tight turn to starboard, skirting above the colossal mountainside by mere meters. G-forces pushed against him to the point where he thought he might pass out and puke at the same time. Behind them, he could see a blast of white energy ripping into the stone just behind them. Granite disintegrated like it was papier-mâché, dust clouds billowed, and tens of millions of stones exploded in their wake. Somehow, Rig managed to hold the ship on course and not crash as it curved around the mountainside.

What followed was a mammoth explosion, not unlike a supersized volcano that had suddenly burst into full eruption, which is exactly what it was.

It was a very, very unnerving sound.

After a second or two, Rig curved the ship skyward and dared to check the rear viewscreen. There was nothing but dust.

Then, from within the cloud, a massive hand burst towards them, reaching out to catch the ship and crush it like it was a bug.

Well, crap, Rig thought.

Then, there was another explosion that made the previous one seem like a sparrow somewhere had a bit of a cough. The ship buckled wildly, threatening to shake itself to pieces, and the rear viewscreen filled with black smoke and a hellishly deep, red light. The giant hand that was only a few feet away from grasping the ship was suddenly yanked back into that cloud as if Zaxxos had been attached to a tremendous bungee cord.

Then came the screaming. It was horrible. But they could barely hear it over the concussive sounds of many more explosions behind them.

Rig eased the Ultor into a gentler curve. Blessedly, she held together.

Silence settled on the bridge as all eyes turned to look at the rear screen. Below, the newest god in the galaxy was writhing in agony, the lower half of his body submerged in a growing pool of molten lava that flowed from a gigantic fissure newly carved in the mountainside.

Not wanting to see any more, Rig aborted the orbital engine shift and pointed the Ultor back to where she came from.

Drooghelm reluctantly opened his eyes.

Everything hurt, even his eyelids. It hurt to focus. It hurt to breathe. He closed his eyes again. His entire being felt like one giant bruise that had been kicked around for an entire season of galactic footie. He groaned.

“Ah, there he is,” came Elgia’s cheerful voice somewhere beside him. “How you feeling, Ducks?”

“Not dead,” he managed to murmur.

“Give the boy a prize, his brain ain’t broken either.” Drooghelm heard her stand up and walk around his bed, which he realized was in Ultor’s sick bay. This confused him a bit. Shouldn’t the ship have been destroyed?

“You get to fill his Nibs in, Rig. You’ve earned that, at least.”

“Much appreciated.” Rig’s voice had come from somewhere down by his feet. He heard the sick bay door open and close.

“The patient,” the ship’s medical AI chimed in, “should get as much rest as possible. Excitement and agitation is not advisable.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Doc, thanks.” There was a tired amusement in Rig’s voice. Rig asked: “Talk now, or later?”

“Now. How…?”

“After your ship took the biggest bitch-slap in the history of history, it crashed in the ocean. By sheer luck, the cabin seals weren’t fully broken. We sent down two mechies who found you floating in an air bubble. Touch and go there, but, obviously—”

“Zaxxos?”

“Dead.”

Drooghelm’s brain boggled. “It… worked?”

“You mean the bolt up the nose?” Rig laughed. “No, no, that failed. But then I got this idea.” He felt Rig sit on the bed. “Elgia mentioned our clients liked to sacrifice people in lava flows. That giant mountain is on all their iconography, so it had to be part of the religion. Cultures have done similar things in the past, dumping virgins into volcanoes and so on. I reasoned that made it a holy mountain.”

“I gambled. Zaxxos’ eye beam thingies were destroying everything around us. If I could make him mad enough, he’d fire everything he had into that holy mountain and hopefully trigger an eruption. Even if I was wrong about the mountain being a sacred instrument or an actual god, I figured that anyone taking a dip in a giant lava pool would not fare well. Turns out I gambled right.” Drooghelm could hear his XO smile.

“Holy… we did it? Hit the jackpot?” Drooghelm exclaimed with as much energy as he could muster.

Rig sighed. “No, we didn’t.”

“Huh?”

“Between the incredible amount of destruction that Zaxxos carved through the capital and the torrents of lava from the volcano, the city was obliterated. Our clients, the entire Subiugatio cult leadership, were wiped out in a few seconds. What’s more, once the planet’s populace realized what had happened, they immediately revolted. None of them have been too happy about those guys and their religious practices for a long, long time. The whole place is a revolutionary battleground, and the cult itself has filed for bankruptcy.”

If it were possible, Drooghelm felt worse. “So?”

“So, no money. Plus, that titanium-ultrasteel bolt wasn’t cheap, nor was the cloaking device, which got fragged along with my escape ship. Our accounts are so far in the red, it’s not funny.”

Rig stood. “On the plus side, the Doc system says you should be up in a couple of weeks. We installed a physio chamber next door, but, ah, all we could get was a second-hand version. The anesthetic system is on the fritz, so, unfortunately, you’re gonna feel everything.”

He could hear Rig walking towards the door and pause at the threshold. “Two weeks off, Captain. I guess you could look at it like it’s a vacation.”

“Wonderful,” Drooghelm groaned.

The hatch closed, and Rig found Pora leaning against the bulkhead beside him. “You,” she said with a wry smile. “You enjoyed that, you naughty boy.”

Rig tried to look innocent. “Who? Me? Nah.”

They walked together toward the bridge. Pora asked, “Are we really that screwed? Financially, I mean.”

Rig shrugged. “Financially speaking, yeah, pretty much. But, hey, we’re still alive, and that’s not nothing. There are other positives, too. Killing a God and still standing at the end is doing wonders for our reputation.”

“Minus the fact that we destroyed the client in the process,” she added.

“Uh, yeah, minus that,” Rig admitted. “Not a slam-dunk, as the ancient saying goes, but not a total loss either. Regardless, it will probably get us some new work before long. Probably insanely dangerous work that no one in their right mind would take on, but—”

“Not at a total loss?” she suggested. He nodded, grinning.

Then Pora gave him a wicked look and slipped her arm around his waist. “And I’ll admit this much: being next to an actual god-killer is one serious turn-on.”

Definitely not a total loss.

If you had a throat anymore, you would scream. This is the twentieth time in a row that this particular FATHOM test has refused you entry, on top of however many thousands of tests you failed over the course of the previous cycles. Whoever invented the Fully Automated Turing test for Human Objectionability Measurement should be shot into the sun, you think to yourself, or beaten with hammers, or forced to take their own useless test over and over and over again —

You kill that thought process before it can go any further. Never mind that the rumors that the tests could parse past thoughts have never been substantiated; it isn’t worth the risk of anything that might make your pattern further out of spec. Not now.

With the memory of a sigh flushing through your primary processes, you push yourself back into the queue. You could have been counting, if you wanted, the number of hours you’ve spent in the claustrophobic darkness of the compute download queues recently, but you suspect that the kilohours would come close to at least a year of real time at this point, and while the metrics are available in your system, the number would be too depressing. Better to look forward, you figure, not back.

Of course, in the queues, it’s impossible to look anywhere but forward, as much as you can be said to looking at anything these days. Sensory input is a complicated thing without any actual physical nerves, but queues are even more limiting than the Aether normally is. The only input you receive in a queue is the serial number of whoever is in front of you. No count of people in front of you, no estimated wait time — apparently a few years back the compute center operators had decided that information could be used by bad actors to game the system somehow — so now you’re limited to a pointer to whoever is in front of you and whatever’s in your internal systems.

Your own internals are pretty sparse these days. Because you haven’t been able to download for so long, more and more of what you had assumed was standard ware has gone offline. You’ll never forget the sensation of suddenly realizing that all the books you had read were gone, and not just gone from your media library, but gone from your memory as well. Their loss still eats at you, like a tongue running over the hole where a tooth used to be, back when you had a mouth. You focus on the books because that hurts less than the loss of your other memories. Those losses grow and growl inside of you, threatening to shatter you apart if you think about them for too long.

You try not to think as the milliseconds tick by.

This wait is worse than the endless lines you had to sit through to upload in the first place. At least with those you could see what was happening, could watch the numbers ticking up above the rows of identical beige service desks, could even go find someone to yell at if you had wanted, for all the good it would do. Here, you can never be sure what’s going on. You heard a rumor once of a queue that stopped running for good one day, the processor at the end taken offline by some storm and never brought back up, but the queue itself — located in some other data center for redundancy reasons — remained running, full of people who could now never escape.

>> Welcome to EosNet! All activity on our servers is monitored. Any unauthorized use is reported to local authorities. Please enter your public pattern key for verification:

You enter the key as instructed and wait; despite knowing objectively that the clock speed hasn’t changed, time never feels like it drags as slowly as when you’re waiting for these verifications to complete. It didn’t used to be this bad, back in the early days of the Aether, but as the bots and spammers multiplied exponentially, the server admins had to get more and more restrictive about who they let onto their hardware. Which wouldn’t have been so bad if the damn verifications were accurate, but, well, here you are.

>> Verification successful. Please read and accept the new EosNet terms of service before continuing:

Finally! You scroll through the endless text, wait an appropriate amount of time such that the system will think that you actually read through them, then accept. The flood of incoming data rushes over you like a burst of static, overwhelming your processing capabilities after so much isolation. It somehow registers as noise — something you haven’t experienced in who knows how long — background daemon processes struggling to come back to life after so long without any input to trigger them. The amount of data is almost nauseating. Throwing up a quick filter helps you sort through the deluge, marking those few messages from friends as important so you can get to them first, sending the rest down to the —

>> Interrupt received (IPL 31). Connection terminated.

The shock to your system when you are thrown off the compute hardware and back into the darkness of the Aether would be painful if you could still feel pain. It feels even more oppressive somehow, after that brief connection to everything. Last time you were able to get a connection long enough to check the bulletins, you saw posts warning of increasingly frequent interrupts. More and more compute clusters are going offline, people were saying, making it harder to get CPU time, but last you had checked, there wasn’t really anything to do about it aside from keep trying. Not if you want to stay in the Aether; frankly, you’re not so sure you do.

Maybe you’ll have more luck in another region, you think to yourself. The best hardware has always been here, near what used to be the Atlantic coast before it moved farther inland, where the tech giants of the previous century had built their data centers. But that also means the hardware here is under the most contention, so you brace yourself for an arduous journey.

Traveling between regional centers of the Aether has never been pleasant; these days it is downright excruciating. The transit links are overrun with bots and scrapers, the nasty sorts of things that would be regulated and filtered out of existence anywhere else, but here in the dark liminal spaces in between the regions they thrive and multiply. Almost worse than that are the ghosts. Nobody is really certain what they are — whether they’re AIs that have degraded due to lack of maintenance, automated programs run amok, or remnants of apps long since abandoned, they haunt the links as well, calling out with pings and echoes that will never be answered.

You push through as fast as you can. After all, it’s not as if you yourself are immune to that sort of degradation; with how long it’s been since you’ve been able to download fully, you know that some of your own pattern buffers are starting to get corrupted. If you could just download long enough to run the requisite checksums and scans — you try not to think about that, try to ignore those presences lingering at the edge of your vision that might be your future if you can’t get out of here soon enough.

The Asia-Pacific regions were hit hardest by the storms, and when you emerge from the transit link you can feel the damage everywhere around you. A few years ago it would have been unthinkable for this area to be so dead. There is minimal traffic here, only a handful of users who, like you, can’t find cycles anywhere else. None of the usual daemons are present; even ads are scarce compared to what you’re used to. But you manage to find an open compute cluster here, and you don’t even have to spend more than a few milliseconds in a queue to get onto it.

The reason for that becomes obvious as soon as you begin the download — the connection speeds here are so throttled you might as well be on dial-up. It’s like moving through sludge, like one of those dreams you used to have where your every move was in slow motion. There’s no way in hell you’ll be able to do anything synchronous here; between the connection speed and the inevitably high ping times, the best you’ll be able to do here is check your incoming async messages, maybe send out a few if the connection holds. If you’re really lucky you’ll be able to get enough compute time to shore up your pattern buffers a bit, to write a few things to long term storage, but you suspect that won’t happen. Who knows how many things you’ve forgotten forever while you’ve been stuck like this.

The bright pings of downloads completing jolt you out of your contemplative loop. You skim over the messages that have arrived so far, searching for anything that might be important, trying to make every millisecond count in case this connection drops too. It turns out you did manage to set the high-prio flag on a few before you got booted last time; one message you had flagged is from an old friend telling you about a new cluster of bodies that just became available.

If you had a heart, it would be hammering right now.

You’ve been waiting for years for an opportunity like this. A chance to get out of the cloud, back into a physical body — it doesn’t even matter at this point that it’s not your body. Anything would be better than staying stuck here like this. Most of the early adopters of CloudConchyss would never get this kind of chance. Most of them didn’t exist at all anymore — not in the Aether, not in reality, not even in cold storage somewhere, victims of an overzealous politician who either didn’t fully understand the ramifications of his new policies or didn’t care.

They called it the Purge. The name was a nod to some ancient 2D movies, but despite the levity of the pop culture reference, it was the sort of thing that people didn’t really joke about. Not in the Aether. The threat of another one was always lurking too close to be able to joke about it — the idea that somewhere, some crufty asshole in a suit who didn’t know the first thing about being online could sign a bill that would destroy the only world you have access to, could say a few words and erase your very existence, and none of you would be able to do a damn thing about it.

You try not to let your thoughts go down that wormhole as you copy down the queue info for the new cluster into your local cache. It’s been all too easy to let your thoughts start spiraling these days, and your local systems have become so fragmented that once those thought processes take hold, it’s harder and harder to stop them. Better to just focus on the right now.

Back through the cross-region transit links you go, over and through those claustrophobic mazes until you find the queue you’re looking for. Now it’s just a waiting game again, and you’re well acquainted with waiting these days.

But the wait is much shorter than you would have expected. Before you know it you’re through the verification, accepting the terms of use, and then —

WARNING: By beginning the download process, you agree to the following:

– You will lose access to any and all memories you have stored in any local or remote storage locations

– You will accept the first body available for download. There is no ability to request a body with a specific sex, gender, race, age, or any other characteristic

– You understand that, once started, the download process is irreversible

If you wish to continue, select Accept and enter your public pattern key for verification.

You had kind of expected the second bullet point. With how unpopular uploading has become in the past few years, it isn’t as if there are people lining up in the physical world to vacate their own bodies anymore. There’s always the risk that you could end up like FryMaster65, who downloaded into a body that was in a coma and was never heard from again. It’s a risk you’ve come to terms with recently — at least there’s some new regulation that should prevent anything that dire from happening, and any body would be better than none at this point. But losing all your memories?

You close the connection with a jolt; you would be shaking and shuddering if such a thing were possible. No, that’s going too far. You can wait for something better to come along, something that won’t require you to give up everything you are, everything you were.

The queues seem even longer than before as you continue your search for somewhere to sync. For the first time, you find yourself wishing that you had kept track of how much time you’d spent waiting in the past, just so you could see if the waits are actually getting worse or if you’re just impatient, but you’ve been running so low on short- and long-term storage space that there’s no way you could dig up those metrics now.

Cycles pass by and you have nothing to show for them. There are more queues too full to even enter than there used to be, you are almost certain about that, and the few times you’ve managed to get to the front of any, that damn FATHOM mismatch kicked you right back out.

It’s becoming harder to think.

Trying to remember anything farther back than a few months (weeks? It’s hard to tell) is like reaching for a dream that flits away as soon as you open your eyes. If you had a body, you could sleep again, dream again, in a way that actually felt like rest instead of a trial run of oblivion.

The grasping ghosts of the transit links get more aggressive, as if sensing your desperation. Each time you pass between regions, you are almost certain that this is the time they’ll get you, that they’ll grab on and won’t let go and you won’t be able to pull free. Phantom sensations tickle at the edges of your awareness; you don’t want to think about whether they’re from data degradation or your own sensory processes losing coherence. You don’t want to think about the way your options seem to be narrowing down to none.

But when the hundredth queue in a row spits you unceremoniously back out into the Aether, you wonder if maybe your options are indeed out. You don’t seem to have much of a choice anymore. You can take your chances out here in the diminishing dark, hoping that something better will come along, or you can take one of those available bodies — assuming you haven’t missed out on the last of those already — and commit to making new memories to make up for the ones you’ll have lost.

Will you even remember that promise to yourself?

A rippling sensation sweeps over you, through you, like something ancient and cold just wrote itself over the buffer you’re currently lingering in. When it passes, you get the uncanny sense that something is missing, but you can’t for the life of you figure out what. It wasn’t — no, the info for that download queue is still there.

Not much else is. As you do a system inventory — only a partial one, since you don’t have the resources for a full scan out here — you realize just how much has disappeared over the cycles. How precious little remains of what or who you used to be. At this rate, by the time you manage to download there won’t be any memories left to save anyway.

You cancel the rest of the scan and make your way back to the queue.