“Pining for sea-folk,” my gangly new apprentice said — loudly, to no one in particular — as I left the sawmill, bento box in hand. He was one of the mayor’s clan, a cousin twice removed or some such, which he frequently found call to mention. I ignored the jibe, however accurate, just as I overlooked all the other whispered workplace tales of my romantic escapades. Stacked against the host of troubles a shipwright faces these days — rotting lumber, scarce tar, machinery so old it has parts stamped “Made in USA” rusting inside it — the nattering of a silver-buttoned teenager with an oily mustache matters less than chicken feed.

The breeze coaxed me onward with scents recalling my distant youth. I skirted the remains of Old Mobile, not even glancing at the crumbling factories and the skeletal apartments. (As Lem once pointed out, back when he still liked to tease me, locals learn not to see the ravaged glories of the past.) About halfway between the mill and the shipyard a narrow footpath leaves the boardwalk and meanders down to an inlet scarcely bigger than a pond which nonetheless provides a panoramic view of the bay. Those who know the spot have dubbed it Rabi’s Cove; in deference, they allow me my privacy there at sun’s-height during workdays. I suppose they can do without my scowling for an hour, during which I can escape the clamor of saws and the pestering of novices.

The bay’s annual transformation still surprised me, even after forty-five springtimes. Fresh gulf air brushed crisply across my face. The seaside stretched in front of me, full of life: bullfrogs lurked in the cordgrass that lined the shore; newborn redfish snapped at midges on the placid waters; a lonely gator drifted by. Far in the distance bright red buoys danced over onetime islands, now sunken hazards in the risen gulf. Despite my disappointment in the momentary absence of sirenae, I couldn’t withhold a smile.

Settling in amid this cacophony, I sat and munched on a slaw made with wilted collard greens and spongy radishes. Lem’s mother must have packed my lunch; I always got the worst bits when the widow did kitchen duty. Usually Mondays were Lem’s turn, but he’d been up all night tending to the twins’ fever. I spit out a stem, and grimaced. Lem used to joke that she’d poison me one day and I’d never notice it. He used to joke a lot until last year, when little Siu drowned and the widow grew ten times colder.

But a flood of tears won’t wash away calamity, so I pushed those thoughts aside and, sipping from a canteen of weak sweet tea, looked out at the bay. For a stretch of heartbeats I forgot as well about the Texas Conflict that had us working overtime under orders from Colonel Jin. This quiet thought-free moment stretched on and on until, with a sudden flutter, a motley heron swooped into the cove. Cupping its wings at the last moment, it landed elegantly in the shallows but then let out a comic squawk. Their honk always put me in mind of a circus clown, that and its feathers — a riot of scarlet and indigo, lemon and lime. A far too showy relic of the Geneshift Days, the poor birds have nearly gone extinct just two hundred years later. To most folk around here, spotting one means good fortune: Ma had seen one the summer she met Pa, en paz descansen. To me, that day, it only kindled memories of one I’d seen a quarter century earlier.

Back then, I’d left the journeyers’ party just before midnight, when the revelry was beginning in earnest. A full dozen of us had been raised up from our apprenticeships, so the taverns were full of sweaty young laborers already drunk on cheap beer and cheaper moonshine. I’d gotten politely tipsy on toasts in our honor, smiled through long reminiscences by various greying adepts, nibbled on the cornbread and the sweet potato pie. Eventually a few of us stepped outside to share a spliff and speculate about the next seven years of service. Such a stretch seemed mighty long back then, and my thoughts turned to the futures I’d just lost, having signed on under that snarling one-armed tyrant, Yoshikawa-sencho. My mood turned sour, and when the rest of the crew returned inside, I simply wandered off homeward, back toward the apprentices’ dorms which, for a few hours, I would have all to myself.

The ballad of the Alabama night accompanied me as I meandered up the boardwalk — barking treefrogs and lowing bullfrogs, the whippoorwill mourning, the katydids bleating. That muffled the partiers’ chatter, gracias a Dios. But as the wild choir ran through its repertoire, a motley heron swept past not a meter in front of me, landing to snap up a mouse hiding in the brush. While the bird gobbled down its prey it eyed me placidly, and then with a bob of its head and a flutter of its wings strode off toward the shore.

Like a fool in a folktale I followed it. Not for three wishes, not for a path to paradise, not even for the prestige that nabbing one of its feathers would bring, though I suppose each of these crossed my mind, particularly the last. But mostly I stumbled after this omen that had plopped down in my path on graduation night because the splendid bird had flown across entire nations, while I’d never left this simple harbor. Envy, besides curiosity, drew me onward.

When I caught up to it it was floating idly in the shallows of this same cove, occasionally swallowing up small fish that ventured incautiously near. Maybe I could pluck one feather for luck and remembrance? It paid me no mind as I stripped off my blue and white journeyer’s gown and slipped into the muck and the warm ripples of the bay. I waded slowly through submerged weeds that tangled my ankles and scratched at my legs, and though the heron haughtily pretended to ignore me, as I approached, it somehow receded. Soon the water was at my chest and doubts had begun to filter into my fuzzled brain, and at that moment I felt a gentle tug at my arm.

I pulled away with a shout. In the moonlight a cadaverous figure rose from the bay. Long black hair clung to a pale body about as old as my own, skin pocked with myriad tiny scars and adorned with luminous tattoos. Gill-like folds draped around an eellike neck, and after a moment’s shock I recognized it as a sireno, one of the sea-folk genetically altered  by the ancients to dwell in cities swallowed by the rising oceans. It smiled — he smiled — mouth full of sharp teeth, and in a croaking voice said, “Come.”

Some coast folk call the sirenae monstrous: misshapen caricatures of humanity that infest our waterways, raiding our aquafarms and scuppering our ships. We apprentices took more notice of a different sort of accusation, swapping jokes and lurid yarns about the sea-folks’ sexual depravities (which perhaps included a fair amount of invention on our part). Finally face-to-face, skin-to-skin with a sireno, I understood the allure of the grotesque. No man I’d ever touched had seemed so raw and otherworldly. My fingers tingled with an urge to stroke his earless skull and caress his mottled chest.

I knew the other stories, too: tales of children snatched from the shores, of bathers lured to the deep and ravaged, of sailors dragged overboard and drowned and eaten. Stories to frighten youngsters, yes, but I was not then old enough to entirely disbelieve them. I backed away but he followed, legs ungainly in the shallows, webbed hands extended. The stories say as well that the sea-folk exude a drug to pacify their prey, and perhaps that’s not balderdash, for as he neared me my fears dissolved, and I found myself entranced by his sparkling eyes, his muscular arms, his brawny, husky thighs. Whether behexed by his chemicals or by my own inebriated lust, I hesitated, my heart pounding, and then I took his hand.

As he led me out into the bay, I heard behind me the boom of fireworks and the cheering of partiers. Ships huddled against creaking docks, and among them a few startled curlews whistled their complaints about the nearby pandemonium. But the shore soon grew distant, and ahead past the mouth of the bay lay the vastness of the Gulf, and above it the deep star-dotted inky sky. The ships I helped build sailed in the one, and our ancestors (so the chronicles say) traveled in the other, while for me each breaststroke brought me the farthest I’d ever ventured from home. I followed dreamlike onward, feeling neither fear nor triumph.

The sireno swam easily into the deep, and when I struggled to keep pace, he had me cling to his back and carried us both out, out beyond sight of land, beyond even the lighthouse’s blinking. I clutched him tightly, felt his taut muscles pulling us through the mild surf and the salt spray. My last doubts vanished with the shoreline as we sped toward the horizon. We plowed on, on through the gentle waves, until after ten minutes or then again an hour I found we had stopped, and he was turning to face me as we treaded water.

His prickly hand swept across my cheek and neck. I grasped his scar-speckled shoulder, and we kissed. I tasted the ocean on his lips, felt the sea in his embrace. Buoyed by the water, my legs moved up against his chest, and slowly, gently, he entered me. I winced once yet never wavered from looking into his violet-flecked eyes. As we rocked together in the soft night tides, he suddenly took my forefinger and bit it, hard enough to draw a few drops of blood that trickled down his throat. I swore, but he had quickened his pace, and soon we were rushing together toward satisfaction. As he came he released my finger and howled gutturally at the sky.

An hour or a few minutes passed, and I was floating on my back — the cradling bay beneath me, the Triangle sparkling above — reaching out for the sireno, when he said, “Wait,” and vanished under the surface, down to the depths, the drowned past, as obscure to me as any distant shore, as far from my reach as Arcturus or Spica. I hung alone in the universe, neither down nor up nor far nor home. For a brief moment I attained what Lem tells me is sati: I and the breeze and the waves were one; I drifted unattached from my past, unlinked to my future; every ripple was the sea’s breath, every twinkling star was the night sky winking. I observed the feeling, and it slipped from my grasp.

How long since the sireno left? I shooed away that qualm and lolled in the water, hoping to regain transcendence. Out of habit I searched for the Little Bear, for Polaris low to the horizon. Every child who plays in the gulf learns to follow it home, that if you just head north you’ll reach the coast. But the coast is long, and I’d be alone, naked, unarmed, lost in the wilderness. Without much realizing it I moved to treading water, as if waving my arms could swat away my worries. My finger still bled, and I wondered what its taste might draw. A swarm of suspicions seized me, of plots by the sea-folk, lures and traps and dreadful appetites, vengeance against the unshifted who still could walk the land. My breath grew ragged and my swimming choppy.

A rogue wave splashed my face. I spluttered, coughing up the ounce of water I’d almost swallowed. I had begun to panic, and with the mouthful of brine I was five again, my father at my side, teaching me to swim the year before he went off to die in the last war with Texas. I’d been terrified then, but he’d put his hand on my back, and I heard his baritone voice chanting the old rhyme:

Arms down, won’t drown.

Breathe slow, fears go.

over and over till I floated safely in the shallows and he grinned with pride.

I clutched at that memory, one of the few clear recollections I have of him. I seized it  and lay still in the sea, occasionally raising my head to breathe, imagining my father beside me, letting the fear dissolve.

After a few minutes I regained my composure and sought out the North Star again. Easy enough, but now beneath it I saw the fin of a sharpnose circling me at a distance. Small and not particularly hostile, it didn’t pose much of a threat, except that it might draw the attention of larger sharks — bulls or tigers — which would be troublesome. Apprehension and exhaustion made my decision simple, spurring me toward the coast.

I’d only swum a few meters when I felt the pull on my ankle, not teeth, but a hand. I turned to the sireno full of anger and relief, both of which he seemed oblivious to. I wanted to shout at him, but could summon neither the energy nor the right words. Ignoring my distress, he took my hand and placed on one of my fingers a ring, a glistening gold band that he must have fetched from some trove he’d hidden in the deep. Words fell even further away from me, but he had one: “Wait,” he said again.

He seemed to expect a response, so I nodded as if I’d understood his meaning. At that he grinned, baring his long sharp teeth, and turned so that I could climb onto his back. Exhausted, confused, I lay atop him and let him swim us back to shore, returning to the cove in which we’d met. He dropped me there in the shallows, kissed me once, long and thirstily, and then was gone, vanishing into the dark waters of the bay. I stared out after him wondering what, exactly, had just transpired.

“Wait,” he’d said, and so I had. Days, weeks, a quarter century had passed, twenty-five years of absence in which my life had gone on. I’d worked my way up from journeyer to maestro, and then two years ago, after Yoshikawa-sencho retired, had become head shipwright of the bay. Ma had long since succumbed to the fever, and I’d met Lem when drought forced his own family in from the farmlands. We’d gotten bonded (despite his mother’s pride) and taken in young ones to raise. And then, in a moment of inattention at the riverbank, Siu was gone.

Now I finished my tea as I watched the heron hunt in the shallows. How often had I sat in this cove and gazed at birds who traveled farther in a single day than I’d voyaged my entire life? “For a Mobile man,” Lem once said, “you’re awfully stationary,” and I’d smiled to hide how deeply the old joke stung. Every time one of my boats left the harbor I’d imagine myself aboard it, face to the fore, but every night I’d end up back in the house I was born in. I spat out a stray tea leaf, and the heron cocked its head at me, then snatched up a tiny fish and waded on.

I suppose I could have stalked it for its feathers, as I had on that earlier night, but such pastimes are for kids who still believe the promises of fairy tales. Instead I wadded up the last of my stale vegetables and hocked the ball at the gene-shifted bird. It ignored the splash. I sighed and started repacking my bento box, rehearsing my schedule for the afternoon.

The first figure surfaced with nary a ripple. I’d sighted sea-folk in the cove before, more often in the harbor proper, but rarely so shore-close in full daylight. Not wanting to startle the visitor, I froze; but it stood, brushed back its long, dripping locks, and stared directly at me. The face was weathered and bearded, the chest and arms covered in a multitude of scars, the whole scarcely recognizable until, catching my gaze, he smiled.

“You’re here,” he called, much more eloquent now, but his voice still just as gravelly. He waded toward me through the cordgrass, wet skin sparkling in the midday sun. I stood but neither approached him nor stepped away, opened my mouth but found no words came out. At this he laughed a seal’s bark, harsh and happy.

A year before, the Kukulkan limped back into harbor, sails tattered and masts splintered, a decade after we’d all presumed it sunk. My emotions now mirrored those I saw in the crowd that day: not just the sulky teen who greeted her resurrected mother with unrestrained cries of joy, but also the sudden un-widow who stood in mute anguish beside her second husband, their babe bawling at her breast. Half a lifetime of idle daydreams hadn’t, in the end, prepared me for this at all.

Pure foolishness, pining for sea-folk, so all the folktales say; but those who write the stories are those who stayed behind. What do they know of dwelling among the restless tides, or penetrating the lightless deep? And besides, fond as I am of the nomads, truly I yearned for only this one, the apparition I met long ago. Now here he stood, beaming as I trembled.

I tugged at my beard. Lunchtime was over. Back in town my timber supplier awaited my return, no doubt bearing more bad news about the pine borer infestation; and Colonel Jin would probably storm in again today to demand another warship we hadn’t the material for. The Texans threatened new blockades and the summer forecast promised drought. And I’d told Lem I’d stop in at the florist to order lilies to lay on Siu’s grave next week. My schedule didn’t allow for mid-day dalliances.

Yet I discovered I was undressing. Discarding my checked shirt and overalls in the brush, I schlurped through the muck into the chilly bay. The weeds fondled my thighs and the skitterbugs darted in my wake. The clanging alarm of a distant fire-wagon echoed through the woods — the brigade wasn’t headed toward the mill, surely? I briefly turned back toward the city, but then the sireno took my hand in his and tugged me close. He kissed me, and the commotion faded away.

When I drew apart a minute later, I saw that company had joined us in the bay: behind him emerged a stout, jewel-braided sirena with skin even darker than mine; a beardless, swaggering adolescent who clutched a mid-size fishing spear by its freshly-hewn shaft; and an older, one-armed sireno riding herd over two shy toddlers who poked their heads above the surface, eyes goggling at my appearance. “My kin,” he said, his arm wrapped around me. “A few of them. Come, mix your blood with ours.” And he escorted me out to meet them.

The teen took two fierce steps through the water toward me, but the sirena caught the child by the shoulder and gave a shake of her head and a half-smile. Cross, the teen relented. The sirena untangled the youngster’s hair for a moment until the child remembered its petulance and swam apart. At my approach the two little ones dove behind their guardian, reminding me so much of how our twins greeted strangers that I halted abruptly, slipping a bit in the breast-deep water.

The twins! I was supposed to pick up some calamine lotion, now they’d made it through the worst of the fever and just had the rashes. A few nights last week had been particularly worrisome. Siu’s death had struck us hard, but to have lost all three children would have broken Lem for certain. Yet here I was, on the verge of abandoning them all. I yanked myself from the sireno’s grasp. He looked at me, perplexed and hurt.

The bay was quiet then. I heard no gulls call nor a single sandpiper wheet, just the tide lightly lapping. The speck of a freighter bound for Yucatán disappeared south across the horizon, and I recalled being told that sea-folk spend their winters there, carousing in the bahías turquesas and lolling on the white sand beaches. Back at the mill the afternoon whistle blew, shrill but distant, no louder than a piping plover. Still, it roused the heron, who took to the air with a raucous squawk.

The sireno echoed it with his laugh. “Garza knows to flee the song of dirt-folk,” he said as the gaudy bird circled us twice and headed out to sea. “That melody holds you fast and grinds you to dust.” The sireno held out his hand again, smiling that toothy grin, beckoning. The rest of his pack had closed rank behind him, the little ones bobbing and darting between the others. “I scouted your shores while I gathered my tribe. I saw how your cities drain your people of joy. I even spotted you, now and then, sitting seaside, dreaming of escape. Break free of your net, mud-strider, and come with us.”

The sirena, hands full with one of the little ones, exchanged whispers with the graybeard as they sized me up and smiled at some private joke. Then, graciously, she nodded. Meanwhile the teen peered over my shoulder at the woods and the land beyond, eyes blazing with the pull of adventure thoroughly mixed with doubt and fear. Despite our differences, I felt the comfort of this pack and reached out for the sireno’s hand.

His toxins had sedated me. His familia had charmed me. But I found there was a vast gulf between the midnight passions of a young man and the daytime responsibilities of a middle-aged shipwright. Squeezing the sireno’s hand once, I pressed the gold ring into it, then turned my back and waded resolutely back toward shore. I heard a brief burst of furious, incomprehensible chatter behind me, but I refused to turn around. My eyes were wet, though not with mist.

I felt a tug on my ankle, and I hesitated. What opportunities, what adventures lay just behind me, waiting only for my assent? But then I realized it was only weeds in the shallows that held me, and I clambered onto land, shaking the seawater from my brown arms and hairy chest.

There was a rustle of branches at the edge of the cove, enough noise to spook a dozen terns to flight, and the new apprentice broke through, muttering uninspired curses. “Rabi-sencho,” he called at last. “You’re late for the meeting.” He peered down his nose at me as I sloshed through the muck, then looked over my shoulder at the bay. “Enjoy your dip?”

I turned. Not only the terns had fled. The sireno and his kin had vanished, traceless in the sea. As the bullfrogs found their voices again and croaked farewells, I pulled on my clothes — judging by his grimaces, much too slowly for the mayor’s cousin’s taste. Once I had dressed, he all but dragged me to the boardwalk, imperious and impertinent as he marched me back into captivity.

That spring night, as I sat on the back porch watching the twins playing outside for the first time in a week, Lem took my hand in his and gently rubbed the emptiness that the sireno’s ring had left. The evening breeze slipped between us. He pecked me on the cheek as the children squealed and the fireflies glimmered, and in that moment the gulf felt very far away.

This one is no different. And it’s all true. And it’s not happy.

Not mostly, anyway.

It has its moments.

Early one morning, at my restaurant in Denver, a metal box arrived in a metal truck, escorted by guards. They carried assault rifles, like they thought they might have to defend themselves against the bell peppers we kept in the fridge. Or the turmeric.

They checked the kitchen out to make sure it was secure. They checked the empty dining room.

Someone gave a signal. Unarmed men in grey jumpsuits brought the box inside.

It was big. We gave them space. They had rigged the box with antigravity clamps, which they took with them when they left, which meant I had to hire someone else to lug it out of there later.

I signed my name on a tablet, and on their way out one of the guards, under her breath, called me a fairy.

I grinned at her and winked. Life is short.

And when they were gone it was me, the box, Antoine, and Zaid, my chef de cuisine in Denver. He didn’t know what was going on, because I hadn’t told him anything, except that he should close the joint for a day so we could have a meeting.

When the army departed, the three of us stood back and watched the box for a minute.

“Does anyone have a crowbar?” Antoine asked, sipping a glass of beer.

Zaid laughed. We couldn’t have opened that box with a crowbar. We couldn’t have sprung it with a Howitzer.

The box was advanced. State-of-the-art. It had traveled hundreds of light-years to get there, and they’d made the box so that none of the contents would get knocked around when the speed they were moving scrambled the atoms of everything onboard the spacecraft that carried it.

I don’t know what the box was made of—some kind of compound. Steel and titanium plus nine things I never heard of.

We didn’t know how to open it. They had left no instructions.

Antoine stood back and watched as Zaid and I pawed the thing over, looking for a way to get it open.

Zaid found a button and pressed it.

The box whirred. It whooshed. I felt air come out of a vent on one side. The top detached, and it took all three of us to lift it away.

Mist poured out. When it cleared enough so we could see, we found the box was lined with some kind of foam, containers pressed into it to keep them safe.

With a gloved hand Antoine reached in through the mist and pulled out a glass jar of what looked, from where I stood, like rocks.

“What is that?” asked Zaid. “It looks like gravel.”

“It’s not gravel,” Antoine said. “The label says it’s gnorsalt.”

He set the jar on a steel table.

“How much do you know about this stuff?” Zaid asked.

“Not much,” I said. “I’m not supposed to even have it.”

Antoine removed his glove and found the jar was okay to touch.

I said, “I only have this stuff because I know a guy.”

“What guy?”

“He’s a higher-up with the Expeditionary Corps. The Interstellar Expeditionary Corps.”

“I thought all they did was strip gold off asteroids.”

Antoine unscrewed the jar’s lid like it was a bomb that might go off.

“That is what they do,” I said. “But they reached the Sariel system last year. You heard about that, right?”

“No.”

“It was all over the news, Zaid.”

“I don’t watch the news. I work, I sleep, and I come back to work. I don’t have time for news.”

“You should start making time for it. The Corps found the stuff in this box on Sariel III. There are eighteen freighters full of it headed our way. They’re burning out their hyperdrives, to get here as fast as they can. And they’ll go back for more, and a lot of people are going to make a fortune off of it.”

“Off of gravel?”

“It’s not gravel, Zaid. It’s food.”

“It’s an ingredient,” said Antoine. “One that no one on Earth has had before. One that came from another planet, far away.”

I said, “The guy who got me this box says the stuff in it is going to change the way we eat. Totally and irreversibly. And I paid a lot of money so we could get this box early.”

“Before the freighters get here?”

“That’s right.”

“Why not wait for the freighters?”

“Because, my friend, if we get a little of it in advance, we can learn what it is. What it’s about. We can experiment.”

“And that means,” added Antoine, who reached into the jar with tongs, “we can learn to make a whole range of dishes out of what’s in this box before anyone else gets their hands on it.”

I said, “In three months, those freighters will reenter Earth’s orbit. And Hampton Sherlock, and Sally Conroy, and Dallas fucking Everhart will be in their billion-dollar test kitchens, scrambling to fuse whatever’s on the freighters with the food we’ve always had on Earth.

“They’ll do exactly what we’re doing right now. But it will be too late.

“They won’t know it, but by the time they’ve figured out what the rocks in that jar can do, we’ll be rolling out a line of prepared meals and exclusive dishes at my restaurants.

“And when we start making money off of that, I’ll open more restaurants. It’ll be beautiful. We’ll be rich.”

Zaid looked stunned.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“ I thought you were going to fire me.”

“What?”

“When you told me to close the restaurant.”

“Oh.” I shook my head. “No, Zaid, this is not about you. Jesus, not everything is about you!”

“I didn’t say everything was about me. How often do we close for no reason? And you tell me to come in anyway? I was sure I was getting shitcanned. I spent last night updating my resume.”

“Zaid.” I rubbed my eyes. “Come on.”

“You guys,” said Antoine. “Look.”

We looked.

He held the gnorsalt up to the light. It was crystalline, like quartz. And when we looked closely, we could see colors swirling through it like oil on a puddle.

“What is that about?” asked Zaid.

“No idea,” said Antoine. “I wonder what it tastes like.”

He dropped the gnorsalt from the tongs into his hand.

He took the rock in his other hand, and licked his palm where the rock had been.

“It tastes like salt.”

I said, “Is that what it is? Big salt?”

Zaid said, “I can’t believe you tasted that. It’s from outer space.”

I went to the jar, pulled out a rock with my bare fingers, licked it.

“Fucking hell,” I said. “It is salt.”

“It isn’t salt,” said Antoine. “Salt doesn’t have this coloration.”

“It’s rainbow salt.”

Antoine lay the gnorsalt rock on a cutting board and banged it with a mallet. It broke.

Now we had a big piece of rainbow salt that was broken into smaller bits. Like regular salt, only colorful.

“So far,” Zaid said, “this is underwhelming.”

“Thank you, Zaid,” said Antoine. “Let us not draw conclusions yet.”

He got a pan from the rack above his head, put a burner under it, and swept that broken gnorsalt into the pan.

It melted as soon as it was warm. It turned to a viscous, cloudy liquid.

I said, “That was quick.”

It started to steam, and when it did it filled the room with a smell like nothing I’d smelled before.

Antoine tasted the liquid, now, and said, “It doesn’t taste like it did.”

I tried it myself. “It sure doesn’t.”

“What’s it taste like?” asked Zaid.

“I don’t know,” I said.

It was like the first time I had a glass of wine. I couldn’t have described it, not until I’d had more, and I had to have a lot more before I knew if I liked it or not.

I said, “I’m not sure I’ll be recouping my investment.”

Antoine was writing in one of the black notebooks he kept in his pocket at all times. “It’s too soon to say such things,” he said. “We have time to experiment.”

“What else is in the box?” asked Zaid.

“Freigenberries,” Antoine said, pulling out another jar.

“Do you think,” Zaid said, “they tested these things? Are they totally safe?”

I said, “My guy said they are.”

“You trust him?”

“As much as I trust anybody. Present company excluded.”

“Well,” Zaid said. “It’s the military, right? Who are handling this? They’re in charge of it?”

“Sure, it’s the military.” I took a bite of the plump freigenberry Antoine sliced open, so that its smell, like edible asphalt, filled the kitchen. “That’s a weird berry. But you know how it is. It’s not just the military, it’s the military in service of capital. Like it says in the New Constitution.”

“And what does it say there?”

“I don’t have a copy right here. This thing tastes nothing like it smells.”

“Good for salads,” said Antoine, munching his half of the berry. “Toss it with arugula?”

“Maybe. Not the most versatile thing.”

“You’re so negative.”

“I’m only saying,” Zaid said, “that even if you include capital among the forces that have brought these new things to us, they don’t exactly have a record of keeping the best interests of ordinary citizens in mind.”

“What do you think is going to happen?” I asked, holding up a freigenberry. “You think it’s going to bite you?”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I have a bad feeling about it.”

“How about you, Antoine?”

He didn’t answer. He was focused. He was looking in the box for the next new thing.

I could have fired a gun in the air, and I doubt he would have heard it.

He pulled a jar of black liquid from the space box. It was full of Zösch.

Everyone remembers the first time they saw Zösch. And we were some of the first human beings ever to see that black slime that ran like molasses and tasted nothing like molasses.

I was hoping it would taste good. Because so far none of the things in that box were worth the price I’d paid.

“You want to do the honors this time?” asked Antoine, tilting the jar so the Zösch sloughed to one side.

I took a long spoon, said, “What the hell, right?” dipped the spoon in the Zösch, and tried it for myself.

And I ran to the sink and spat it right back out.

I had not tasted anything so bitter in my life. And the consistency! It was thick, but it was grainy, and something about it made me think of butter.

Antoine tried it for himself.

He was utterly unfazed.

He said later my reaction made him think it would be worse than it was, so he was prepared—but really I think the guy was a mutant. I think nothing fazed him because it was like he wasn’t really living in his body. It was like he controlled it from someplace far away.

Zaid watched the Zösch jar like it might leap up and bite him, which we weren’t sure it wasn’t going to do.

“This is not good,” I said.

“It’s not bad,” said Antoine.

“The fuck it’s not. This is a disaster.”

He said, “Look.” And he got to work.

He tore another skillet off the rack above his head, laid it on the stove, poured avocado oil, diced a red onion in seconds flat, and tossed it in.

We had the best red onions in the world at that place. A guy was growing them upstate and they were unreal.

I was the one who discovered him. I don’t know where he is now. Counting his money full-time, I bet.

Into the pan went some minced garlic and roughly chopped chanterelles.

I watched Antoine with my arms folded. Zaid kept eyeing that jar of Zösch.

Half a minute ticked by. Antoine pulled a spoonful of Zösch from the jar and poured it over what was in the pan.

I’d never seen anything quite like what happened then: the Zösch melted into the mushrooms, like it was set to attack. Like its mission was to coat the mushrooms. A liquid mushroom blanket.

“What did that stuff just do?” asked Zaid.

“I don’t know,” laughed Antoine.

He could laugh. It wasn’t his money that had been thrown after this disaster.

Antoine plated on three plates whatever it was he’d made.

All at once, the three of us took a bite.

And there are things I have no words for, things that language can’t describe, at least not when I’m the one wielding it. Like the first time I ever had a kalamata olive. And the last time I ate pork loin, at a time when such a thing was scarce, when pigs were on the edge of being extinct. I paid $10,000 for that pork loin.

Zösch on its own was an abomination. But if you put it with something else, or a couple of other things, they combined to make something altogether new, unlike anything we’d had before. It would taste something like what you mixed it with, but there was a new element, too, that you couldn’t taste in Zösch on its own. It seemed to come from nowhere.

After a few more experiments, we learned you couldn’t predict what anything with Zösch in it would taste like.

It was fascinating. Unprecedented. Otherworldly—literally. And while I was hung up on how much money I’d spent acquiring the stuff, Antoine was fully absorbed. He took many pages of notes in his black notebook.

We tried cooking Zösch with potatoes, with seitan, with tofu, with rice. We baked Zösch cornbread, and drizzled Zösch over broccoli.

What we made tasted like those things, but it tasted like nothing else, too.

Now on his fourth glass of wine, Zaid said, “This isn’t right.”

I said, “What’s not right?”

“It’s too good. Nothing should taste this good.”

I laughed. Antoine laughed.

But Zaid was serious. He said again, “It isn’t right.”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s right,” I said. “This is it, there’s no going back. And I think maybe we’re going to be rich.”

Antoine suggested we mix Zösch with some bourbon.

I never would have thought bourbon could get better than it was already. I mean, who the hell wants to try and fix bourbon?

Zösch does. That’s who.

And within a half-second of coming into contact with bourbon, Zösch did it. It fixed it. And it was never even broken in the first place.

We spent the next month perfecting the dishes that used the new foods.

We were in no hurry. We weren’t yet allowed to serve the Sariel-infused dishes to anyone.

We would be, soon. Maybe if the new foods had arrived in, I don’t know, 2071, when bureaucrats ruled the land, it would have taken longer to cut through the red tape. They’d have run endless tests and made sure only the biggest players in the game had access to the new ingredients. No advance shipments for the enterprising, well-connected few; no box of Zösch and a dozen other things.

We spent that month in the kitchen in Denver, after hours. Antoine and I stayed in our Denver loft, blasting the AC. It was the middle of spring, and it was hot.

But that kitchen was the perfect place to fool around with the Sariel foods. And when we were done, we had created a new cuisine: interplanetary fusion.

We were ambitious. A little corny, too.

We represented every Earth cuisine we could do justice to with what we had. We made black bean and yakkon tacos, and the world’s first slipwort gnocchi. We invented ragapepper hummus, gnaxxji salads, and cocktails garnished with porp zest.

But the finest dishes we created were those that used Zösch. Stuffed peppers with Zösch. Scrambled tofu with Zösch. Zösch crepes, Chile Con Zösch, Petit Pois with Zösch.

Zösch, we found, adapted to what it was served with. It was the first edible thing we’d encountered that could change what it tasted like, altering its own flavor somehow. Pour it on a sundae and it was better than chocolate syrup. Dump it onto mashed potatoes and it was better than gravy, in ways it would take you a year to put into words.

It’s true. Food critics lost their minds when we rolled these things out.

We stayed up all night, some nights, getting things right. By the time we could legally serve all the young foods, a time when every restaurant but ours was getting their first taste of them, we had it figured out. We had engineered a new way of preparing and serving meals.

We were the only ones who had this head start. We couldn’t fail. We couldn’t lose.

And of course I know now that I should have listened, the night Antoine came in with his notebook open and said he had something to show me.

“I’ve been experimenting with Zösch,” he said.

“Experimenting? What kind of experimenting?”

“Nothing dramatic. I’m not Victor Frankenstein.”

“It must be pretty serious, if you’re coming to me with that look on your face.”

He sat beside me on the couch, where I was drinking a scotch and Zösch on the rocks and watching the news. He held out his notebook for me to see.

“Antoine,” I said. “I can’t read your handwriting. Just tell me what’s up.”

“Okay.” He leafed through his notes.

I rolled my eyes. I took a drink.

“You were with me,” he said, “when we learned that Zösch replicates itself.”

“I was. I remember.”

“When you leave it in the dark, it increases in quantity without outside influence.”

“Yes,” I said into my glass. “I did not forget.”

“I may have been wrong, when I determined why it was doing that. And I think the scientists who’ve studied Zösch are wrong about what it is.”

“You think you know better? How can that many people be wrong?”

“The same reason they could be wrong about all of the things they were wrong about for so long. The same reason it took so many centuries to develop the theory of evolution. Based on the evidence I have gathered the last few days, I have reason to believe Zösch is alive.”

“Have you lost your mind? I’ve looked at that shit under a microscope. It’s not alive.”

“It doesn’t look like it’s alive, because it doesn’t look like any living thing we’ve seen before.”

“It’s crystals. That’s all it is. How could it be alive?”

I think it’s a form of life that’s new to us. Of another nature. It doesn’t breathe, it doesn’t eat, it doesn’t meet our preconceptions of what life must be. All it has in common with us is that it reproduces. And we didn’t recognize it as reproduction because it doesn’t look like reproduction. Not as we have known it.”

“Antoine, don’t you think someone else would have noticed this aside from you? I mean, a lot of people have studied this already. They’re really smart.”

“I doubt I’m the only one to make this discovery. Others must have learned of it as well.”

“What, then? They’re keeping quiet about it?”

He shrugged. He nodded.

“Bullshit.”

“Think about it. No one wants to eat complex organisms anymore. Since all the livestock died off, and we have no meat we can eat, people have no appetite for creatures that can feel pain. They’ve lost the stomach for it.”

“And you think Zösch is alive and that it can feel?”

“I can walk you through my findings.”

“Please don’t call them that.”

“We have to pause production on everything that has Zösch in it until we learn more.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“I’m telling you.” He put his hand on my arm. “This is serious.”

“You know what? Maybe it is. Maybe it’s the most serious thing in the history of serious things. But maybe I’m not a serious enough guy to halt production of all the prepared foods that are about to hit the market, and to not serve the stuff at my restaurants, which I’ve been planning for months. Maybe I’m not serious enough to lose millions of dollars.”

Antoine looked at me with sad eyes.

I hated his sad eyes.

“It’s too late for this,” I said. “You should have come to me sooner.”

“I tried to come to you with this. Three times.”

“You didn’t try hard enough. And if Zösch is alive, and can think and feel—which I assure you is not the case—then why don’t you work on a way I can talk to it? Because I want to thank it for being so goddamn delicious.”

I downed the rest of my scotch and Zösch.

Business boomed. I opened more restaurants. I sold frozen dinners at supermarkets with the Sariel ingredients inside.

A lot of people hesitated, at first, when it came to trying the new foods. But when they heard how good they were they got over it. We spent a fortune on advertising, to make sure everyone heard about it.

We sold literal tons of Zösch syrup. I don’t know how many tons. It was our bestselling product: Zösch, vinegar, salt, aminos, and I won’t say what else we put in it. Trade secret.

I was busier than ever, traveling to one city then another, opening a new restaurant, meeting with a food distributor, getting Zösch syrup served in the schools alongside ketchup and mustard, proving to the right people it had all the nutrition you could ask for.

At my restaurant in Washington, DC, we served the king of Saudi Arabia himself. When he had his first taste of bread dipped in olive oil, with pepper, gnorsalt, and a dash of Zösch, he said he’d never had anything like it before in his life.

I stood before him in my spotless, white apron, and fought back tears.

The next time Antoine called, his voice didn’t sound right.

I hadn’t heard from him in weeks, hadn’t seen him in months.

He said, “You need to come home.”

“Why?” I said. “I’m busy.”

“I’ve been busy, too.”

“Doing what?”

“Come home and see.”

“Antoine.”

“Now. You need to come home right now.”

He hung up.

Sure I’d go home. But I wasn’t in a hurry to get there. I had another day of helping to set things up at our new place in St. Louis. Someone else could have handled it, sure, but if my name’s about to be put on something I want to make sure it’s right. It’s called quality control.

When I went back to the hotel that night, I undressed and lit a joint, and Zaid called. He said there was a problem in Denver.

“What kind of problem? Why aren’t you handling it?”

“It’s a customer.”

He switched on the hologram and appeared in my bedroom. I’d forgotten to set it to Do Not Disturb. I was sitting up in bed, smoking, naked.

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry, boss.”

I didn’t cover myself.

“What’s going on?”

“Somebody came in a little while ago. Some lady? She said her husband’s in the ICU. He can’t move. His eyes are open, but he won’t talk or anything. She said the doctors said it’s not a stroke. She said they don’t know what it is. She said there must be something in the food he ate. The alien food. He left here, I don’t know, three hours ago?”

“All right. How serious is this?”

“Pretty serious. She was freaked out.”

“I’m not asking how serious she was. I’m asking if she had a lawyer with her.”

“I don’t think she had time to hire a lawyer.”

“All right, then. If she comes back with one, you know who to call.”

I hung up. I called the head of my legal team, made sure our people were briefed and ready. If that woman came back, with or without counsel, I’d have half a dozen of my guys there as holograms, to send her reeling back to her idiot husband.

How was I supposed to know she wasn’t blaming us for his stroke because she wanted money? I thought she was making it up. I thought she might not even have a husband.

Antoine blinked into the room. Another hologram.

“Holy shit,” I said, taking a drag, “it’s a convention in here.”

“Why aren’t you home?” he said. “You said you were coming back.”

He looked tired. And since I’d gone away, he’d been growing his beard, skipping haircuts, and otherwise losing his grip on his appearance. He looked like he’d been on a frontier, somewhere.

I thought for a second. “That’s right,” I said. “I did say I was coming back.”

“Summon a chopper. Get out here.”

“I can’t. Something’s up in Denver. Zaid just called.”

“Did someone who ate Zösch get paralyzed? Like they had a stroke?”

“How do you know about that?”

“Don’t go to Zaid. You need to get here now. I’ll tell you everything.”

He hung up on me again.

Hours later, stoned and airsick from a rough chopper ride, I found Antoine in our kitchen, though it was hard to find him in our kitchen.

I wasn’t sure it even was a kitchen anymore.

He had transformed it. He had filled it with beakers and vials, burners and pipettes. Metal rods attached to wires stuck out of jars of Zösch. The wires ran to machines, and other wires fed from the machines into what once was a soundboard, but which Antoine had converted to something I could never have made sense of on my own.

“Antoine,” I said, “what’s going on here?”

He stood. He’d been crouched behind one of the machines.

I didn’t know what the machine was—some kind of computer from long ago, when computers were big enough to crouch behind. I don’t know why he needed that.

His beard looked worse in person than it had as a hologram. He had a look in his eyes I didn’t like.

“You took your time getting here,” he said.

“I was busy.”

He scoffed.

“You know who pays for this house, don’t you?”

“Come look at this.”

“I pay for this house. Come look at what?”

“Put your hand here.” He pointed to a metal cylinder he’d mounted vertically so that it rose out of what had once been my stove. I followed the wires sticking from it with my eyes and saw that they ran from machine to machine to a jar of Zösch.

“Why should I put my hand there?”

He took me by the arm and put my hand on it himself.

I felt an electric shock. Or something like an electric shock.

It didn’t hurt. It was gentle. The shock ran in waves through my hand, up my arm.

I knew at once why Antoine had that look in his eyes. He’d been spending all his time lately with this electric current running through him.

How did I know that?

I took my hand off the cylinder.

“What did they say?”

“What did who say?”

“Zösch. They spoke to you.”

“Have you lost your mind? No one said anything. Your machine shocked the shit out of me.”

He grabbed my arm again and put my hand back on the cylinder.

He was quick. I didn’t think to pull away.

And I knew as soon as I felt that shock again that Antoine was right.

They were telling me he was right.

I let go again.

“We are in trouble, aren’t we?”

“Yes. We are.”

How was I supposed to know that what looked like space gravy—and was handed over to us by the authorities to serve at restaurants—was a vast assemblage of cells that worked together to solve problems and make decisions? That even when those cells spread across the surface of the Earth, they could think like we can, only better? That the reason complex intelligent life never evolved on Sariel III was that the planet was covered already with simple intelligent life—life that was so smart it could prevent anything that could threaten it from ever evolving there?

I know all of this because I’d placed my hand on that machine. I touched it for two seconds, and I learned all of that.

Yes. I know. Antoine alerted me to the likelihood that the Zösch were alive before that point. I could have listened to him then.

But he never said anything about them being smart. He never said they might be choosing to adapt their taste to how other foods tasted, rearranging their molecular structure so more of us would want to eat them.

And why were they doing that?

I asked Antoine that question, after I was done throwing up in the sink, which was a reaction to what I’d learned from my first couple of shocks.

He said, “You want to know why they do what they do. Don’t you want to know how I learned to talk to it?”

“Later,” I said. “Just tell me what they want.”

“They don’t want anything. They don’t know what it means to want.”

“Dear God!”

“They’re beautiful creatures.”

I clutched the metal cylinder again.

No words passed between me and Zösch. They didn’t use words. But I knew as I spoke to Zösch that I was talking with all of Zösch. The metal handle was wired to one jar, but through it I could reach the whole, vast being.

They said, without having to say it, that they were everywhere, now—not only in the foods we’d put it in, and not only in the bodies of the people who’d eaten that food.

They had passed through human bodies and spread from sewers to waterways. They had reached into the trenches that run across the floors of our oceans, where humans can’t go. Zösch had embedded itself in the world, like microplastics before them. They had done it fast, and we couldn’t breed new bacteria to eat it, like we did with microplastics. Zösch were too smart for that.

They had done the same thing on Sariel III. Their home planet. Now here they were.

When the Corps discovered Zösch, they thought they were nothing more than another inert substance, confined to the pools of black slime they found them in. But there was nothing inert about it, and bits of Zösch were everywhere you couldn’t see them, not just in those pools. They were in the water, in the air, in other plants, and in the clouds. They saw, felt, tasted everything. They were in control. They didn’t show up in the Corps’ analyses of water and soil because they knew how to outsmart their instruments, how to hide from us.

While Zösch explored the Earth, they reproduced constantly. In the dark places—in pipes and water treatment plants, rivers, lakes, and oceans—they thrived and spread farther than anything.

When they described to me how they were growing, I could feel the whole of Zösch growing. They conveyed the information to me in the form of sheer sensations. I could feel all that they said, the knowledge running through me faster than words. My body felt like an instrument Zösch was learning how to play.

I let the metal handle go. I left the kitchen.

“Where are you going?” Antoine asked.

“I’m calling my lawyer.”

But I didn’t call him first. I called the CEO of my company.

She asked if there was a problem, and for a second it was hard to answer. I realized why Antoine had that look in his eyes, why something about him seemed off. Talking to Zösch, even for a moment, made it hard to form words.

“Shut everything down,” I said. “It’s all over.”

She asked me to explain.

I said, “Zösch are alive.”

After a pause, she said, “Could you slow down? Explain what’s going on?”

“No. Call the restaurant managers, call the distributors of our microwave dinners—”

“They’re not microwave dinners.”

“Whatever the fuck they are, don’t let one more of them get sold.”

“I can’t do that,” she sighed. “It’ll ruin us.”

“We’re already ruined. That’s the point.”

I hung up and called the lead lawyer. I briefed him on the situation. It was all hands on deck.

I went back into what used to be my kitchen. I pulled up a stool, and while Antoine asked what I was going to do, I put both my hands around the handle of the device, the direct line to Zösch.

I don’t know how I knew how to talk back to the Zösch, how I made meaning by pressing on a metal thing. Somehow, though, the thoughts in my head traveled down my arm and through my hand to meet them.

I told them I was sorry I had eaten so many of them.

They didn’t understand what I meant. They didn’t comprehend Sorry.

And they didn’t think they had been wronged. They thought they had consumed us, not the other way around.

I had an image in my head of eating a pumpkin and finding myself growing out of the inside wall of a vast pumpkin.

Electric thoughts ran down my arm and I knew what Antoine knew. That the husband of the woman in Denver was an experiment. Others had suffered the same fate since then, people we hadn’t yet heard about.

Zösch weren’t cruel. They were only running tests. They wanted to see how our bodies would respond to stimuli.

We were in their test kitchen, now—only Zösch didn’t want to eat us. They had no need for that. They didn’t eat.

I didn’t know why they did what they did. I asked them not to do it, but I don’t think they understood.

I spent a long time pleading with Zösch to spare us, to not give more people strokes. I tried to make them understand.

I had a hard time paying attention to what was going on in the room while I spoke to Zösch—it was like my mind was being split in two—but I knew my phone was blowing up. I knew what it was about. Zösch told me they were running more tests on people. The calls must have been about those who’d had strokes as a result.

I had to do something. Didn’t I?

I mean, I’d done some awful things in my life. I’d cheated on Antoine, cut corners with the health department, embezzled money—and one time, long ago, I broke a young man’s heart. I felt nothing when I did it, and wondered for the first time—not for the last time—if everyone else had something in them that was missing from me. Something that made them good.

But minds were blinking out, one by one, all over the world. Maybe I have no heart, but I had to do something about that.

I asked Zösch if they were in me. If they circulated in my system.

They didn’t understand the concept of Me.

I knew I had to make them understand it, if I was to get anywhere. Zösch had to realize that human beings weren’t one mass organism with a shared intelligence that could spread across the world and still think as one.

I knew from the way the electric shocks felt that Zösch had no sense of time like we had, that they had no sense of history. Their experience was unified. When all your constituent parts, all the little selves that make up your species, are bound together, then when one of those selves dies it’s like shedding skin cells. It’s nothing.

Zösch knew their history as a constant present. There was no past. Everything was now.

I thought the way to tell Zösch that one life was precious to us, that it meant something it didn’t mean to Zösch, would be to tell them a piece of our history. And so I told them about something Antoine and I had talked about, not long after we’d opened the box and seen Zösch for the first time.

We talked about how this wasn’t the first time something like it had happened before, how we were repeating a drama that had played out centuries before we were born.

Way back in the middle of our second millennium—I explained to Zösch without using words—if you lived in Africa or the Middle East, Europe or Asia, you had no clue what was growing on the other side of the world. You’d never seen a tomato. You hadn’t heard of corn. And when those things started showing up at harbors?

Imagine it.

Imagine what Italian food must have looked like before they had tomato sauce. They didn’t even have noodles for the longest time. Those came from China.

No spaghetti. No ziti. No lasagna as we know it.

Can you imagine going to an Italian restaurant that didn’t serve those things? What would you order?

Garlic bread. That’s it!

Now imagine you’re an Italian chef in 1492 AD. You’re at the top of your game, you know everything there is to know about feta and artichokes—I almost said zucchini, but those came from Central America. Potatoes were imported from Peru.

But you’re the best of the best, the master of carrots and chicken. And then out of nowhere this jackass comes back from his suicide trip across the Atlantic with a round, red thing that everyone thinks is a vegetable but is really a fruit.

You can slice it, crush it, chop it. It’s like nothing anyone’s eaten before. And everybody wants to put it in everything.

It’s the tomato.

Huzzah, shithead! If you don’t figure out what to do with it fast, you’ll be out of a fucking job.

You do the best you can. You get a handful of those little guys, you see what you can do.

And before long, you’ve got the world’s first pizza. And some beautiful maniac down the street makes a plate of spaghetti with meatballs.

And you change the course of history. You don’t conquer any nations. You’re not Julius Caesar. You haven’t discovered electricity.

You’ve done something bigger than that. You’ve changed what people put in their mouths. You’ve given them something new to crave, something to look forward to eating after a long day’s work, something that a year before then no one on your continent had ever even smelled.

You’ve changed how they sustain themselves, how they put nutrients into their bodies and one another’s bodies. You’ve introduced to the world a new way for people to show they love one another. You’ve expanded the vocabulary of human relationships.

That is what cooking is about. That is what I have devoted my life to.

I didn’t even realize that myself, until I told it to Zösch. I’d never had to formulate the thought before. But it was true.

And Zösch seemed to know it was true.

Something in what I told it made it understand what it was doing to us, that it was destroying the bodies, minds, and lives of individual people, and that those people and their lives were precious to us.

It worked. I felt, through that metal handle, that everything Zösch had been doing was paused.

I had to act fast.

Zösch said they couldn’t halt what they were doing forever. They said they had to carry on with their work.

I asked how many people they needed for their experiments.

They still hadn’t quite wrapped their collective so-called mind around the basis for that question. The sense we have of being individuals. Our identities, and the lives we lead apart from one another.

But after some time passed, I understood that Zösch had made quick progress on this. Their answer was that they didn’t need more than one person. One of us would suffice. Now that they realized we were all different people, or that we thought we were all different people, and not just a vast species, like themselves, they said they could work on just one living body, not thousands.

And so, after a split-second of hard thought, I did what anyone would do.

Or, not anyone.

Actually, a lot of people wouldn’t have done what I did then.

A lot of chefs wouldn’t have done it. They’re egomaniacs.

I may, in fact, have been the only chef of my standing who would act as I did in that moment.

I offered myself to Zösch. I asked if they would settle for experimenting only on me. They could take my mind away, and use it for what they needed, if it meant they could spare everyone else.

The answer came back in an instant.

Zösch agreed to my proposal. They said okay.

That was when my grip on the handle began to relax at last. I began to be aware again of what was happening in the room.

My hand was stiff. My arm, too.

Morning light shone through the kitchen window, which meant I’d been there at the stove for at least an hour. My phone was still buzzing on the counter. The first thing I wondered was how its battery hadn’t died. It was low when I got there.

Any second now, I would leave my body. Zösch would take over. I’d be there, but I would be gone.

I wondered what it would be like. To be alive but unable to move. To be locked in myself until I died.

I wondered what was taking Zösch so long.

That was when I saw Antoine lying on the floor. And I knew at once what had taken place.

I should have known what would happen. I wish I had known.

Zösch had not yet mastered the concept of individual human beings. They were still getting the hang of human experience.

When I offered myself to Zösch, and said they could take me as their living cadaver, their perpetual test subject, they still didn’t quite know the difference between me and Antoine. They couldn’t tell us apart, didn’t fully know what apart in this case even meant.

They had mistaken him for me. They had thought they were still talking to him.

He was gone before his body hit the floor.

Nothing that’s happened since then has mattered much to me. Not the bankruptcy, not the foreclosures, not the testimony I gave before Congress, where I was so drunk I could barely sit upright.

There may have been several of those. I don’t remember and I haven’t checked.

After I lost Antoine, I lived in a fog.

Things got a lot worse before they got good again. I lost everything before I got back some of it.

It took time for everyone to realize the wave of Zösch strokes had halted for good. All they knew was that a lot of people had eaten Sariel food and gotten sick, that more of them could start getting sick at any time, and that it was my fault.

Or, rather, they thought it was my fault, when really it was the fault of the Interstellar Expeditionary Corps. They were the ones who had brought Zösch to Earth, not me. I’ve never even been in space. I have no interest in going. I hear the food is awful.

But I can’t blame people for blaming me for how Zösch took their loved ones away. I did, after all, ensure that everyone in the world associated Zösch with me. I had hired a marketing team to make that happen.

I got hate mail, I got death threats. I went into hiding, and three times I tried to kill myself.

I was in a bad place. Zaid helped me out of it. Hooray for Zaid.

It worked out, in the end. A few months after Antoine’s mind went dark, and the light left his eyes, but he kept on breathing, Zösch decided it was in their best interests—and in ours—to keep the human race around. To help us, to make us better. Since they were living in all of our bodies, and in the trees, the grass, the air, and the soil, and since their intelligence is vaster than anything we can comprehend without their help, they were in a fine position to improve our lives, our species, our world.

Once they made up their minds, the change happened overnight.

People stopped getting sick, first off.

There’s no cancer anymore. There are no diseases. We don’t even catch colds, because the Zösch supplement our immune systems.

We all stopped getting hangovers. Zösch preserve us, now, from hangovers.

No one goes hungry. When we don’t eat for a while, Zösch reproduce in our stomachs so we feed on them.

Zösch live in our brains. Mental illness is no more. No one gets dementia.

People make mistakes, and hearts get broken, but no one gets depressed for no reason.

Zösch cleaned Earth’s oceans in a year and restored balance to the natural world, which they say they will maintain in perpetuity. The forests are thriving and the ice caps are back.

Last week, it snowed in Maine, for the first time in fifty years.

We are all partially Zösch, now. Zösch are the human race’s better half, the piece we were missing that has made us whole.

We are each other’s perfect symbiotes. Intergalactic soulmates.

I don’t know for sure what they get out of the deal, except that we spread them to new planets, new species, new ecosystems.

That’s probably it, actually. We have spaceships, and they hitch rides with us on those.

The human race is expanding, while I stay here and attend to Antoine. I file his nails, cut his hair, bathe him, read to him. Every time a ship travels to a star we never thought we’d reach before Zösch showed us how to get there, I sit with him and a tall glass of whiskey, and I read him the news of things we never thought possible.

He takes his meals through a tube, but we eat together, still. I cook meals the way he laid them out in his black notebooks, the ones he wrote his ideas, thoughts, and recipes in, starting long before we met, when he was young and his whole life was ahead of him. There are hundreds of those notebooks, and in some of them he wrote about us.

Moments ago, Dayeema had let out a shriek which alerted us. She was crestfallen, having let the tail of the ugly black cloud slip from her fingers. The ugly black cloud that had abducted Dina had climbed in bursts of three—mimicking a child, somewhat imbalanced, hurriedly climbing upstairs while skipping one-legged, as though abundantly cheerful and equally naughty—she recounted. It had wiggled through the power cables high above, disengaged its body and escaped into higher atmospheric territory, then out of our vision.

Gathering around, we don’t speak. Dayeema doesn’t say anything more. Dina is gone forever.

Your sisters and you just wait for Dayeema’s orders. You’ll not let any more of your sisters be stolen like this.

Her nod could be the thunderbolt. You are shoving the photograph into everyone’s face, when the woman-with-the-thunderbolt-nod nods. In your culture, the nod has many variations, and equally, those many meanings. This head is tilted in alternating up and down arcs along the sagittal plane, like a child’s spinning top, whirring, deciding which way to fall.

The next one is not a tilt of head that signals irritation. Instead she measures you, feet to hair, and decides. What? That’s not clear, because the nod meant a no, she tells you, by way of explicit confirmation, when you look confused. She has never seen this girl of twelve in the photograph, now seventeen, in a parrot-printed summer frock, ears reddened from the piercing she’d just had, a mischievous smile because she’d been stealing mangoes from the neighbour’s orchard.

Every nod is an omen setting you deeper and deeper into domains of unknowing. The cloud clan is stronger than ever. Sisters of thunder-men are everywhere. They are the lightning-women; they can take forms that suit their fancy. They’re the shapes of rustic women, shapes of aromatic nameless wildflowers, and shapes of buoyant neem trees that nod to winds for eons. This thought makes you suspect these women who nod. Do they know something about Dina, and are yet, conniving?

‘Kyon?’ the milkmaid steps out of her home at your call, shoves you aside and tosses vegetable peels out on the street to make use of her time stepping out. As you balk, she queries again, ‘Why you ask?’

‘She’s a sister. Stolen by the thunder-men.’

‘Ah-ha!’ She laughs.

‘Then, why look for her on the ground, amidst our fields and homes? Ha?’

‘Thunder-men are crafty. I only explain because you act like you know nothing. Well, if you didn’t know yet, I suspect she’s been deposited with their many sisters, the lightning-women, for safe-keeping, until they have the podium ready, the horoscopes matched, and an auspicious night with storms and fireworks ready for the wedding.’

‘Is it?’ She laughs one more time. A strange laugh of disbelief, mocking the story of a child-woman like myself, perhaps too unhinged to be true in her estimate.

This is not a time to cry, not with face abegging, eyes to heavens. The cloud clan has forcibly married Dayeema’s daughters for centuries now. If you saw an interface, it might be one of Dayeema’s daughters peering from there, someone who could be your mother, except she was never released, and you—the baby of a cloud and a woman, liberated instead to grow into a woman who they might fancy when the time is ripe. They let you go. They let you fall miles to soil, ensconced in one of many raindrops that regularly descend on earth, to be reunited with Dayeema, and nurtured through adolescence.

You often hear the rumblings of your thunder father, imagine your mother crying when it rains, and bereft of love above and below, watch the shelves of cottony clouds play on a blue field when autumn arrives. You think of the place you were born in, in the upturned vessel of the sky.

Main hoon hi nahi is duniya ki: As a child you often roared emphatically, little knowing it was actually a curse.

You remember what mother told you once. Cotton flowers are trapped clouds. Only cotton farmers can expertly hook thunder-clouds, cleave them into tiny bits and stuff the pods in their fields with those bits. Packed like that for long periods, the thunder-men are drained of all their powers to regroup again. So cotton farmers are the only ones that can end the tyranny of the cloud clan.

You had listened in awe.

Today, you shout again:

Main hoon hi nahi is duniya ki.

Main hoon hi nahi is duniya ki.

Your cries float away to the distant hills and back.

You shy away when you spot gaping onlookers, peasants and labourers from the nearby fields, baffled at your dishevelled clothes but royal manner of speaking, as though someone possessed or of unsound mind. You run off to where your mother once hid to escape being taken away by the thunder-kingdoms Vikings. It’s a ruined mansion that was once struck and destroyed by lightning. Mother said she had spent days together, hidden there, among the braided mountain-ivy. The mansion smells of moss, the bricks showing up like a monster’s jutting teeth, the pillars like they’ll give away any minute, and rather be a concrete pile washed away by the rains. You walk through the undergrowth that has taken over the mansion to discover the twines around. They are handy to make a swing, tied to one of the hooks in the walls. You think it could be made into a rope ladder for you to meet your mother and older sisters held captive up there.

This is not your village, or you could have asked for help with the search. Only you and your sisters must do it alone, without aid.

Dina could be dead. As you roam around, the thought swirls more often, now that several hours have passed.

You think of Dina with increasing dread. She is your twin; she is more than a sister. She is the one you saw in bed next to you every morning as you woke up. The only time you didn’t see Dina, was when she’d escaped five months ago, revealing her plans to you beforehand. She said she was tired of the way Dayeema kept all the girls hidden—in mango boughs, sometimes in mud huts meant for the cattle, sometimes in a trunk meant to keep heirloom saris.

Dayeema warned you not to venture out, even for water, because she feared the thunder-men would spy on you. She believed you were safe from their hunting, safe from the abductions, if you stayed hidden.

You had feigned sleep that morning, until Dayeema noticed that Dina was missing. You wished that Dina escaped the curse that has haunted women of Dayeema’s clan for ages. For yourself, unlike Dina, you hoped you’d be taken away by a prince instead. That morning too, you and your sisters had embarked on a search like this one.

An unenthusiastic head bobble can be a polite way of declining something without saying no. But you noticed they were more like a pattern. It seemed the nods were a contorted way to mock your plight.

Following Dina’s disappearance five months ago, you had all gathered at Dayeema’s private chambers. There, while everyone was praying, the brass idol of Kumari Devi had briefly nodded in a direction that indicated where Dina might be. She was brought back because Dina couldn’t be allowed to do what normal girls her age normally do. Dina couldn’t be permitted to live like a commoner. She could not be allowed to elope and marry a simple, hardworking cotton farmer who lived with his parents in the far corner of the village.

That young man was no prince. Unlike you, Dina had never desired one. One morning almost a year ago, a boyish-faced man was on his way to the market, when he had discovered you sisters hiding among the haystacks where Dayeema had ordered you to be. He had openly been enamoured with Dina—and did not shy away from revealing his feelings. In turn, Dina was immediately brought to liveliness by that young man. After that chance encounter, Dina met him secretly, to which end she enlisted your help. Once they were together, even though you remained away to allow them private comfort, you could hear Dina giggle and laugh, as though she was her happiest self ever. How badly she wanted to escape her doomed future!

When you were alone, just the two of you, Dina told you she was waiting for the right time.

Waiting for far too long, Dina had decided to twist open the knob of her captivity that morning five months ago, and waking you up and telling you, she had the courage to escape out and be where her moods took her. Alas, by evening, owing to the intervention of the brass idol of Kumari Devi, it turned out to be a misstep, one that ended in futility.

The sun can be seen crawling to its perch. It must be nearly noon. This second time you’re searching for Dina, it is turning out to be much worse. Dina hasn’t shared her intentions with you. Besides, Dayeema vouches that she witnessed the abduction—of Dina being carried away by that ugly cloud. However much she tried, she lamented many times, she could only grab its tail, and had to let that slip through her fingers too, because clouds are unimaginably powerful.

Even though you feel, deep down, that Dayeema has erred, and that Dina is safe, you dare not mistrust the old, fragile woman who brought you up.

You wipe your tears as you walk the mud-lanes that crisscross the village, thought-dried and aimless. Your hope eroding fast.

You’re at the outer periphery of the village where the lane meets the concrete road. You watch a small caravan leave the village. The bullock-cart is laden with humongous bales of cotton. The young man who commands it wears a turban so huge it partially conceals his face. The family, that trails the bullock-cart on foot, carry possessions bundled under their arms or on their heads.

You wonder if you really saw the turbaned-man nod, or if it was something your mind conjured up.

At noon, you are on the fire dragon’s back, because it’ll give you a free ride. Besides, fire dragons and the branch-sons of cloud men, are arch-enemies. You know this fire-dragon has an eye on you. If you manage to escape the thunder-men, this fire dragon will surely take you away. You accepted its offer of help because now is not a time to think of personal dislikes.

Riding against the train tracks, you keep peeping into the shanties by the tracks to look for Dina. Perhaps the sisters of thunder-men are keeping Dina there, hiding her under the enormous tarpaulins.

But there is no success.

Tired and parched, you lick your own sweat streaming down your face.

By late afternoon, you reject the fire dragon’s plea to continue assisting. Your sisters and you now regroup and climb onto specks of dust to travel through the air on the shoulders of a tropical storm and go barge into the hotel that’s near the railway station.

You and your sisters sift through each room, there’s not a trace or hint of someone held wrongly.

The storm is still picking up speed when you cross the pavement, and run across to the railway station premises. Pilgrims to Kumbh, caught in the storm, and freshly invested in briny grains upon their skin, hurry for cover.

A woman with hip-length wavy hair, pushes a stack of cardboard boxes on a cart towards the stall by the roadside, causing a commotion.

‘Dina!’

Hearing you, one of your sisters runs and grabs a woman pilgrim by the arm. She turns to look, but it’s not Dina.

You look at the faces of the people standing around stunned by the suddenness. Most are pilgrims. They stop and empathise, gauging the immediacy of the situation of a near-relation gone missing. Some, overwhelmed with concern, offer to help, but you politely refuse.

Your sisters and you resume the search for Dina. Minutes tick away.

‘We lost her. The lightning-sisters may have boarded a train with Dina.’ The sister, with the long bony arms, says.

‘We can’t give up now!’ The chant from the rest is spontaneous.

Dusk, raw like wound, settles in where the storm has just passed through. You, daughters of Dayeema and daughters-of-daughters, similitude of drops, tokens of your thunder fathers, are still around, looking for Dina.

Everyone whom you ask, they only nod. And the ‘no’ sticks to you—the no-in-the-N-O-D sticks to you even more, the more unlikely you’ll ever find Dina.

You pause; something holds your attention. The bullock-cart you saw earlier, still laden with cotton bales, has been abandoned under the prayer flags hanging from a pole near the railway station. The bullocks are nowhere to be seen, nor the women, nor the young man in a turban. As you try to see more clearly in the descending semi-darkness, try to see deep inside, conflicting thoughts arise in your mind. Cotton? Farmer?

A couple walk by, very close to you. The man is oddly familiar but has his face painted with colours as is common for pilgrims, making him unrecognizable. The woman has a veil drawn over her face. She playfully brushes your shoulder. As you turn, surprised and mildly irritated, she lifts her veil ever so slightly, then nods very slowly as she crosses.

You don’t grab her for affirmation. You know dead-sure who this woman is, and what her nod means.

The couple are headed to catch the train leaving for Kumbh soon. You shield the sight of their passage onto the platform from your sisters, who are still swarming the steadily-thinning mass of pilgrims, checking every face.

Locking the truth of Dina’s daring escape deep in your heart, you discharge a long sigh of relief.

When you return to Dayeema and report an unsuccessful search, you must make sure to steal the brass idol in Dayeema’s chambers before it has occasion to sway its head one way or other to indicate Dina’s bearings. You must bury it deep in the backyard.

I go about my day—all twenty minutes of it—as I do other days. I contemplate the state of the world, mine in particular, smoke a couple, hit a couple and then end my day.

I begin the next day by closing my eyes in time to begin the next. And after that my day stretches to exactly twenty-two hours and nineteen minutes. There’s a lot to do; buy groceries, cook food, clean the space I call home, wash the dishes, water the plants, change the sheets, take a shower, wear clean clothes, stare out into the world with longing, read something (anything!), get milk, make tea, answer the neighbors’ numerous annoying questions, nap for just about forty-five minutes (in which the world awakes and brings you out of slumber), wake up all groggy and contemplate what to do next, cook more food, eat it, peek into the lives of those you may know or had known, wash the dishes in the sink, wash your face, wash your skin, wash your teeth, wash your veins, turn the lights off.

The day after lasts about a minute. The one after that about all of seventeen seconds. I wonder if you’ve caught on to the workings of my inner world. Whether it is so in reality or not does not bother me. It is certainly so in my reality. The only one that matters. So now that you know about this fun little fact, what do you think of me? Am I an object of fascination, a thing to be marveled at? Or do I confuse and irritate you? Do I remind you of the many insolents who defy the ‘normal’ working order of this world of ours? Doesn’t matter, judgment will be passed either way.

“How goes the lonely old sages that roam the coast,” I wonder, and I shout. Though none hear me. The wind has carried my voice, though I am pretty sure that instead of carrying it towards it has carried my voice away from the sages it was meant for. This is my favorite thing to do—sit next to the sea, observe and sometimes shout out sentences and questions. Today this is all I do.

I am not bound by the ordinary confines of time. I am not bound by ‘appropriate’ times to wake up, eat, sleep, drink, think, talk, repeat. I make my own rules, just as I have made my own time. I haven’t physically created it, no. But I have tweaked the rules around to suit me. All these regulations and rules about time, day, night, etc. were made up by someone. And if they can be made, they can certainly be unmade. I haven’t unmade it really, just rearranged it.

My time on this earth began the day I had my first thought. Before that all time ceased to exist. And I thought: “Could it be that I could make my own place in this world?” And then after I seemed to grow by many months before my next thought: “How much longer will this linger inside me?”

This thing, this entity that gripped me in its sharp, tight claws. This thing that is now a part of me, a moving, breathing, active thing. This thing I dare not name. This thing that I am as attached to as it is to me. If it stops lingering, I will end. There won’t be much else to hang on to. Can I take it out and place it somewhere? A prize trophy that I can just stare at, stroke at moments when it all gets too much, a solid reminder of it still being in my life. I fear if it slips away I will not realize it, I will live in hollow, barren ground without it.

The only reference point I live by is time. The minutes, seconds, hours that make up my day. Weeks, days and years are of no consequence to me. I am told we live in the year 2025. I am also told we live in the year 1447. I am sure many others have ways of measuring time. I simply do not care.

In the thirty-two hours that make up my day, I am driven from branch to branch of a dinosaur of a bank. Neither know what to do about my application or my papers. They both tell me to try the other. Each branch has its own quirks, and each branch has a minimum waiting time of three uncles there for an argument, not their money. I am spent to the edge of my sanity. I am overstimulated and alone and Oh God, It’s back again! And I keep a straight face as I head to the counter, explain myself the umpteenth time and am told once again to head to the branch I came from. I go home. I sit in silence.

The next day lasts about fifty-five minutes. It begins with a sip of tea; it ends with the cup shattering on my balcony.

The day after is four hours of contemplation. I can’t really say what I was thinking about; it’s all such a mishmash in my head. What happens in the brain should stay in the brain. At least that’s what I believe.

I hope you understand by now. I would caution you to not try to understand this peculiarity of mine with the constraints of your lives. I do not live by them, nor do I care for them. If you choose to do so, you will find yourself more perplexed than when you started. For your own good, it’s useless to even try. Differences are usually labelled. I am sure I will be too. Make your own theories about me, go on. Why else would I put myself out there?

One day—sixteen hours—the water ran out. A common problem. A fixable problem. But only if the stars align and the man with the tanker of water and a political song as his caller tune picks up. He does. He has none to offer today. I implore the neighbors, ask if I may borrow some water. They oblige. It is enough to wash my face and use sparsely in the toilet. The next day—ten hours—the man arrives. He fills my life with hope, just as he fills my tank with water. As he leaves I am renewed with a sense of purpose. I cook, I clean, I read, I watch, I scribble, I turn the house inside out. And then I sleep.

There are moments when this thing inside of me grips me like roots grip the ground. As though it uses me to grow into this massive, tentacle-like network. A tentacle gets activated each time I remember. And depending on the intensity of the thing I remember, the tentacle either beats to the intensity of the pain or it triggers the many many tentacles inside me, and they all beat as one. Sometimes a tentacle will lodge itself in my throat, sometimes in my eyes, sometimes in my stomach. At all times I am overcome by it. There is little for me to do than to feel it, fully, wholly, as intensely as I can. This tentacle will not stay inside me. I cannot make it. Sometimes I really wish I could, I wish I could control it. I wish there was a switch, a controller, anything. Instead I lay here, drowning into myself. Some nights I feel the tentacles wrapping and squeezing me from the inside out. Some nights I want them to wrap themselves around me. Call it a false sense of safety if you will. Some days I am left motionless. This thing that grows and keeps growing, this ball in the middle of my chest.

A day—five minutes—that feels like eternity stretching out onto the horizon. Horizons have always been fascinating to me. Where the earth and the sky meet, where the world was once thought to end. But that ending stretches, elongates, endures beyond our imagination. To reach that end, that line, and see what lies smack in the middle of it, we’d have to invent something. An invention to cover up another invention. That day I invented a way to cover up my days.

The thing—the creature, the tentacle, the monster, the butterfly, my solemn companion. I try to forget, to not remember and bring more aches. I try to do it all and yet the thing has its own way of making its presence known. Very subtle on its quiet days, right beneath the beat of my own heart, a throbbing so slight not even my body can feel it. A throb that has existed since the first day I remember.

Ten hours of swiping, scrolling, watching, ducking buses, rickshaws and bikes. Ten hours of being very aware of the fragility of our lives. Ten hours of looking at a dead body, at a decomposing face. I wasn’t standing next to a dead body for ten hours, no. But a glance at it was enough. The rest of my day was spent wondering at a life lost, a life that was possibly as ordinary as one could have. That face roamed in my mind, round and round and round, always coming back to it. Straying far from the face was never an option. It existed in tandem with the thing, the throb. That day was particularly challenging; the thing would tingle each time the face would take a front seat in my brain. A tingle that activated all the various tentacles lodged throughout my body, one singular tingle that made my muscles, veins and skin ache and itch. I went through the motions of being an ordinary being when out in public. At home I dropped down and tried to fix whatever was happening inside with the coolness of the stone floor. I rolled and wriggled and slid like a snake. I rubbed my body against the floor, laying myself as flat as I could. I took a cold shower, I turned on the air conditioning and I tried to stick my entire body inside the refrigerator. It was only when I was exhausted, panting, pleading, skin red, blue and raw, covered in dust and lint, that I passed out.

Some days I wonder about the thing I am not supposed to think about. The thing, that is. The thing is that the thing itself isn’t the problem. The thing is a thing is a thing, it has no name, no identity, no importance save for whatever I choose to give it. The thing is just that, a thing. I wonder if I just stopped referring to it, if I just refused to acknowledge its presence if it would somehow just fade away. The thing that was born with me, in me, the thing that I dare not name, the thing that at times feels like a friend, an enemy, a companion, a soulmate. The thing is of course its own thing, it is not mine. It is not mine, it is not mine, it is not mine.

It is mine. It always has been, it always will be.

Most days pass by in a blur. I don’t remember much, nothing exciting happens. What good is remembering, then? But I must remember, I must. I can’t remember why I need to do so, but I must. Once I spent the entire day making lists of things I saw, people I spoke with, to-do lists, this list, that list. That day was also incredibly long, forty hours and thirteen minutes long. A lot happened then. A lot happened that I have documented although I cannot make sense of it somehow. Those lists were unintelligible, scribbles on pieces of scrap. I must remember to remember by not making lists. I must remember to remember by devising another way. I must remember to devise this way.

On a cool winter’s morning, a day when the world was asleep and I was awake, I could feel for the first time in a long time a sense of calm. I was never a calm person, I was very quick to jump to conclusions, shortheaded, quick to joy, quick to grief. I was only calm in retrospect. It felt like a new beginning. The thing hadn’t vanished but it had stayed in the back, deep, deep in my subconscious. I felt as though I had more energy, a life renewed. I had interests, hobbies, work, people to meet and things to see. And while I was doing it all, I had the peculiar sense that for the first time in a long while I could trace back to a moment hours ago in the day and recall it with great clarity. For most of my life such moments have been fuzzy, outlined like the halo around light. When the day had ended, fifteen hours and three minutes later, I did not feel overstimulated or anxious. I was simply tired. The simple tired that signals the fact that the body is ready to take a break, nothing more. This break that made me forget about the thing was also quite peaceful. My mind was a vacuum, a plain (a plane) canvas, a flatland that stretched beyond recognition.

That didn’t last long. A few days went by, of varying lengths, where I felt as though I was walking on a cloud, that there was nothing more to life than its mundanity. And those days ended and my world became the same again. For a while it oscillated that way, between mundanity and total anxiety. And then it became a mishmash of the two. Such that I never knew where I would end up at the beginning of a day. The thing was moving along with it, I believe it also didn’t know how to behave. We were each finding out as we went along, as each day brought out new feelings and reactions. The thing wasn’t an all-consuming force by this point, it was there in the back, making itself known at times and obscure at others. We spent a total of one thousand four hundred and eighty-nine hours in this in-between.

At the one thousand four hundred and ninetieth mark, I accepted. I accepted the varying nature of my disposition. I accepted that my world view could change after having lived all my life in it. And it was as if I was birthed anew. The thing was a part of me, I was a part of it. We relied on each other, dependent like breath is to air.

There was a time when I lived. I lived like each day was my last, I made memories, made food, made friends, made a carpet once, made a shelf, made sweets, made napkins, made a fortune. I can’t remember if that was all in the same life or if I’m thinking of other lives. At some point I did all of the above. At some point I stopped doing all of the above. At this point I am a shell of my former self, but I am not unhappy. I’ve heard that often: people being referred to as shells which equals unhappiness. I am a shell because I have left my former self behind, I am a shell because I chose to be one. My happiness is not relevant here.

The thing seems closer to my happiness than all my past lives. The thing claws on to the thing that makes the thing throb. Once it lets go the thing gets space to breathe and the thing is once more dormant. This is an emotion one should feel. This is an emotion one should feel in abundance. I have lived so long with the thing attached to the thing that to not feel an emotion others expect of me is ordinary. I am apathetic towards everything my body is unable to do because I simply do not feel the need to care.

A day, a second day, a third, a fourth. A week, a month, a year. Time goes by in numbers, sure, measurable, exact, constant. Exactly what I hate. In a year’s time—my version of three hundred and sixty-five days—I have come to think of the thing as an extension of my left lung. It stays right there, not moving around much like it used to. And each time it needs to make its presence known the thing constricts, writhes, slides around. I never have to look farther than my own beating heart.

I am in my own little alcove, one of my choosing. I have created the circumstances necessary for myself to remain permanently enclosed in this vast grey space. The thing stays with me, of course it must. It had created this alcove, a space where only we exist. Sometimes I wonder if the thing is well and truly obsessed with me. Am I obsessed with it? Why do I keep it around? I have tried to expel it from my being, tried to shoo it away. Either it doesn’t listen, or I need to do more than just talk to it. I do that too, sometimes on the shorter days I will speak to the thing as a friend. I seldom get an answer but that doesn’t deter me. The thing is my companion and I am its. This alcove, though quite big, is perfect for the both of us.

On a day that was particularly gloomy and dark—unlike the usual—everyone decided to stay in. I know this because I saw more cars parked downstairs, more people flitting about the grounds and stairs, more noises from outside. They tell me it’s unsafe to go out when the weather turns stormy, a drop of rain would upend the city. I can agree with that, but I have never had cause to step out much and so I cannot understand why. And then the rains started; children screamed in joy, the backup generator turned on, a pipe burst open, a car broke down and afar I could see the beginnings of a traffic jam. That day was exactly three hours and forty-five minutes long. I spent it watching the world disintegrate.

Even if I don’t remember, the thing does. I think. It remembers why it is a part of me, I do not. All our lives are spent remembering, tapping into memories, keeping the past alive. All of life is an act of remembrance, of holding on to memories, silences, faces, feelings. All of life is holding the wound of time with grace, mourning it, nurturing it, remembering, trying to not let it fade from memory or body. I may have let it fade from memory but with the thing present, it will not fade from my body.

At the last hour of my day—the fourth—I decide to extract the thing. I don’t have a plan as such, just a will, a need. I take both hands to my chest, try to hold onto anything (my kameez) and pull it from my body. All that does is stretch the cloth out. I put more force into it, pull harder. The fabric rips. I place my hands on skin, where the fabric has left a hole, and pull. I pull until there is blood dripping from my chest, skin scratched and maimed. I stop when I get tired. I vow to try again, and again.

And each time I do I am left with nothing but scars, gashes, bruises. A searing pain has made its way on me since that first day. It stays, like film on still water, until I stop. The coolness of the morning after I stop trying to extract my lungs feels like I have woken up after a long, dreamless sleep. Could I try from the back? But I would require assistance for that. No one I knew would be willing to be a part of this experiment. I could just let the thing be, as I have for so long. But the need to remove it from my being is so strong I have to try. So, I rip my clothes from the back as well but can’t get a hold of my skin or get a good enough angle to even make a dent. Beyond careless scratches I don’t get much farther. I fall into a heap of my selves, too exhausted to pick up the pieces.

There isn’t much time left. I may have lived for as long as I did but I can live no longer. Soon a self of me will not exist. A version that existed before I wrote this sentence. After I write the next it will vaporize.

The thing is, I don’t mind the thing being around so long as it can behave itself. It tends not to. When my day began three minutes ago, I noticed marks on my chest and back. I’m not sure where they could have come from, but I suspect the thing may have something to do with it. I’ll have to make a trip to the pharmacy, there’s quite a lot of bandaging up that needs to be done.

We now live as one. The thing and my selves. In me there are multitudes. Outside of me there is only one certainty.

In tales still told at firesides, he is El Antílope. Others name him the Flying One. Whichever tale or title, El Antílope is fleeter afoot than any mounted outlaw. In years past, many bandits and evil men learned this truth the hard way. El Antílope ran them down and sealed their doom. He is still out there somewhere, or so they say.

Old men say that even now, El Antílope will appear from nowhere, swift and silent, dealing out justice in this harsh land. He is bound to the code, as are the villains. Good and evil, both beholden to the rules, white and black pieces facing each other across the checkered board. This is as it must be, although the old ones cannot say why.

The passing years are not kind to storytellers, and less so to heroes. The tick-tock of time spares no one. There comes a day when the old must give way to those who are younger and stronger.

El Antílope finds no respite in the villages. The villagers are grateful, yes, but only until the bandits are defeated or the monster killed. When the deed is done, the villagers do not need a hero. They cork the mescal, hide their women, and pray that the hero will leave them in peace. The hero must vanish into the sunset. The rules of the tale remain unbreakable.

This will be his last journey. El Antílope does not know the place he searches for. He follows hints and whispers carried on the arid wind, the voices of those who have gone before him, searching for a place where fast or slow does not matter.

The soles of his moccasins leave only the faintest trace of his passage. As he nears a rock outcropping, he senses a faint presence, no more than the shadow of a ghost. His eyes read the ground. Yes, there, the husks of sunflower seeds scattered amongst the sand and rocks. Someone paused in the shade of this rock. Hungry, they cracked sunflower seeds between their teeth, savored the salty kernel, then spit out the husks.

El Antílope closes his eyes, feels the searing heat, listens to the wind. Once, a long time ago maybe, there were voices here. Only a trace remains; a hiss, a whisper brushing sun-bleached parchment. He wills his mind to hear the words.

I am telling you, Paco, the hills ahead don’t get any closer, and the mountains behind us don’t get any further away. This goddamn desert goes on forever.

He opens his eyes. Looking behind, he sees the rough scarp of mountains. Far ahead, a faint outline of dusky green hills dances in the heat. This place feels familiar yet unreal, like something glimpsed in a dream and then forgotten. He will follow the ghost voices. Perhaps this is the correct path. Where it leads is a mystery. The only certainty is that he must walk on.

El Antílope lifts his straw hat, wipes a stained sleeve across his forehead, then pulls the hat low over his eyes. His hands are brown and weathered. A coiled leather whip crosses his chest like a bandolier. The stock of a repeating rifle protrudes from a scabbard he wears across his back. A wiry man built for tireless speed, he is a hero by profession rather than stature. Unmarked graves hold many larger men who misjudged the difference.

Heroes do not spring fully formed from their mother’s womb. Some are chosen and others cursed. In the forgotten ages long ago, El Antílope may have been Juan Carlos, a common name for a barefoot boy in a dusty village. He cannot remember the name but knows there was once a child who could disappear in the blink of an eye. A fleet-footed village boy, always first in any game of running or chasing.

The old men watch as the children whirl past.

There, you see? That chico runs like the devil. I swear to you, the boy has wings. He flies while other niños only run. Nothing can catch him.

Time passes, and the quick boy grows into a swift young man. Then comes a day that changes everything. The early dawn stillness is broken by the wails of a frantic mother discovering an empty bed. Someone or something has stolen a young girl, spiriting the poor thing into the night.

The distraught mother’s panic kindles the flames of fear. The villagers run about like chickens. Someone screams the name El Coco, and others take up the cry. Yes, it must be El Coco, the monster who kidnaps children and devours them. Poor girl, it is too late. The older women encircle the grieving young mother, a protective ring of black dresses.

The swift young man does not believe in El Coco. While the villagers run in circles, he slips away into the gray dawn. At the edge of the village, he finds fresh tracks.

One man wearing moccasins, the footprints heading south on the main path. The young man sprints down the pathway. Not far from the village, the footprints disappear, replaced by the hoof prints of two horses. This was not the work of El Coco, but evil men, child stealers who will sell the girl to slavers. He runs after the horses, faster than he has ever run before.

He finds the kidnappers in the mountains south of the village. They have camped not far off the path, not even bothering to hide. The barefoot young man circles through the brush surrounding the camp, silent as smoke.

Two dirty men sit beside the smoldering fire, arguing over a jug of mescal. Two lean horses are hobbled nearby. Just past the horses, he sees the girl. She lies beneath a gnarled pine tree, her hands and feet tied with cords. He hears her whimpers through the knotted cloth bound tightly over her mouth.

He slips behind the tree, leans from the shadows, whispers to the girl. She cranes her head, eyes filled with terror. He holds a finger to his lips and waits. She nods, then casts a fearful look toward the dirty men. He pulls a knife from his belt and creeps forward. The sharp blade slices the cords. He lifts the trembling girl and carries her into the shadows. He whispers into her ear, then slips back to the camp.

The kidnappers are still busy with their jug. The young man cups his hands to his mouth.

Shoot them, Pedro, shoot! What are you waiting for?

The bandits lurch to their feet, spilling the mescal. They claw for their pistols while the young man sprints away behind the horses. He shouts again, feigning a different voice.

Juan, get their horses! Pedro, kill these hombres!

Pistol shots erupt as the bandits blast away at everything and nothing. While they shoot at ghosts, the swift young man dashes to the other side of the camp.

Now you die, you bastardos!

Hammers click on empty chambers. Drunk on panic and mescal, the bandits stagger to their horses. They claw at the hobbles, frightening the horses. Finally, the two heave themselves into the saddles and spur their rawboned mounts into a ragged gallop.

From his hiding place, the young man listens to the fading hoofbeats. He stands and walks across the empty camp. A coiled leather whip lies in the dust beside the forgotten jug. He picks up the whip and drapes it across his chest. Then he leads the weeping girl back to the village and delivers her to her family.

The memories swirl and fade. El Antílope touches the plaited whip where it rubs against his sweating chest. His eyes search the desert horizon to the line of hills far ahead.

Yes, hombre, and what was your reward for rescuing the girl? You left that little village behind, forgot your name, and became ‘El Antílope’. A hero’s life, full of bandits and monsters and trouble, an endless string of trouble. No, not a string, a chain. Each heroic deed forged a new link that bound you to the next task. But no more, do you hear? You are no longer bound. ¡Vamos!

He is on his feet and moving. The dragging weight of the past seems to grow lighter. Some of his former quickness returns. Now, he strides across the desert. The green hills appear to draw near.

The desert comes to an end, as all things must, but many travelers meet their mortal end before they reach the edge of the wasteland. Those that survive find a narrow band of scrubland. Passing through stunted acacia and mesquite trees, the way begins to climb.

The first slopes are covered with rough grass. A faint path appears, dips out of sight, then reappears on the next hill. Piñon pines rise in an abrupt edge across the bald hilltop, like the shaved tonsure of a fat friar. On the far side of the hill, a small lake nestles beneath the pines. Nearby sits a snug log cabin.

Smoke rises from a campfire. A rotund man leans into the woodsmoke, poking at a cast-iron skillet. He fans away smoke with a battered black hat and reaches for the skillet. With a fat man’s agility, he spins away from the stinging smoke. Rough laughter spills from his black beard.

“Lunch is ready, jefe. Lovely fried trout for El Sombrero and his faithful companion El Burro.”

The bearded man flourishes the skillet. A second man sits near the fire. He is as lean as his companion is fat.

True to his former nom de guerre, El Sombrero Blanco wears a huge white hat. The sombrero shades a hawkish face, an aquiline nose, and drooping black mustaches.

He shakes a warning finger at the fat man.

“Enough of that crap. We agreed, remember? I’m Raul, and you’re Paco. No more stupid titles.”

Still chuckling, Paco, once known as El Burro, sits beside his lifelong friend. He slides one fried fish onto a tin plate and hands it to Raul Garcia, then serves himself. Raul bends over his plate. Paco chews a mouthful while gazing out over the desert. He shields his eyes and stares into the glare. Paco lowers his eyes to the food. In a brief pause between forkfuls, he questions his old compadre.

“Hey, jefe, I’m trying to count in my head, but I’m not smart like you. How long we been retired?”

El Sombrero Blanco looks up into the noon sky. He turns to Paco and shrugs.

“Time seems strange here. Every day is the same. We hunt, we fish. The sun goes down, and we watch the stars. I’m not complaining, mind you. It’s peaceful. No one bothers us, nobody needs rescuing. But how long? I think six months, maybe more.”

For a time, the two men eat in silence.

Paco slips his empty plate to the ground and reaches inside his dusty black jacket. He pulls out a muslin bag, opens it, and pours roasted seeds onto his palm. Then he offers the bag to Raul.

“Sunflower seeds, jefe?”

“No, thank you, Paco. The trout was enough, perfect as always.”

Paco smiles, lifts a seed to his teeth, cracks it, and spits the hull into the fire. He gazes out to where the heat shimmers off the distant desert, smiles to himself, and cracks another seed.

“Tell me the truth, Raul. Do you miss the life?”

Raul snorts and shakes his head.

“You mean never having a home of our own? Sleeping on the hard ground almost every night of our lives? Riding back and forth across that goddamn desert chasing bandits or monsters? No, Paco, I don’t miss any of that.”

Paco grins huge and spits another hull. He throws his arms wide and bellows like a bull.

“Look, on the horizon! It’s the White Hat. The pistolero of the people. And his faithful companion rides with him. Viva El Burro! Viva El Sombrero Blanco!”

Dropping his arms to his side, he grins at his old companion-in-arms. Raul chuckles at the performance but waves it away.

“No, I don’t miss that either. The villagers stopped cheering the minute we chased off the bad guys. They were afraid of us, afraid we might steal their women or drink all the mescal. In their eyes, we were only one notch above the bandits. Bah!”

In the silence that follows, Raul watches Paco eat his sunflower seeds. A look of puzzlement crosses his lean face.

“Paco, why do you never run out of seeds?”

Paco dangles the bag by its drawstring. The sack bulges like a chipmunk’s cheeks.

“All these years together, jefe, and you just now notice?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You see any sunflowers around here, boss? Look all you want. Not a one, right?”

Paco slips the bag into his jacket and spits another hull.

“It’s not just the seeds either. All those years sleeping on the ground, you and me living off what we carried in our saddlebags. But every morning we had coffee. Every night there was a bottle of mescal.”

Raul looks dumbfounded. He scratches his chin, then waves a finger in the air.

“Yes, but the villagers gave us food, if only to get rid of us.”

“Sure they did. They loaded us up with bad bacon and old beans. But if you think about it, you’ll remember that we were forever running out of food. And yet we always had coffee, mescal, seeds, and just enough ammunition to finish the job.”

Raul props his chin in his hand. He stares into the fire. Paco spits sunflower hulls and glances again at the edge of the desert. The silence is broken when Raul slaps his thigh.

“The three bullets. Dios mío, I remember now. It happened every time we got pinned down by scruffy bandits. Everyone shooting at each other, gunsmoke in our eyes, and then you ask, ‘How many bullets you got left, jefe?’ I’d crack open my trusty revolver to check. ‘Only three shots left, Paco.’ And somehow, those three bullets were always enough to finish off the bad guys. How is that possible?”

Paco shrugs and grins.

“It’s not possible, but that’s what happened. Maybe it’s a benefit of the profession, you know? The heroes gotta have coffee, they gotta have three bullets at the end. So, the bullets and the coffee just appear, you know?”

“What, you mean like magic?”

“Don’t know, jefe. We ain’t heroes no more, so I don’t care. I tell you, I’ve been thinking on this. I need a new profession. I decided I’m going to take up prophecy.”

 Raul laughs long and hard.

“At least you’ve got the beard for it, my old friend.”

“Laugh all you want, but here’s my first prediction. We’re going to have a visitor real soon.”

Raul does not laugh. Before a heartbeat passes, a huge revolver appears in his hand. He flips the cylinder, checks the loads, then snaps it closed. The pistol disappears back into its holster.

“Where?”

Paco grunts and points a fat finger. Raul squints at the rough hills and the scrubland below. He curses under his breath. Paco always had sharper eyes, and the passing years have not helped.

“My old eyes aren’t as good as yours, Paco. How many riders?”

“You don’t see them because there ain’t no riders, just one walker, and he’s on the small side.”

Raul stares where Paco points. If he holds his eyes just right, he sees a small blob bobbing through the scrub.

“That makes no sense. No one can cross that desert on foot. It would be suicide.”

“Si, I thought the same. But then I remembered some old stories about an hombre they called the Flying One. That ring any bells?”

Raul sinks into the stream of memory. El Sombrero, El Burro, so many years, names, and faces. Too many unmarked graves. Then a thought clicks like a firing pin against an empty casing.

“¡Claro está! You mean El Antílope, supposed to be faster on foot than an outlaw on horseback. But it can’t be him. El Antílope worked the northwest mountains. What would he be doing down here?”

“I got no idea, boss, but in less than an hour, you can ask him yourself.”

El Antílope follows a faint trail through the scrubland, happy to have the desert at his back. Prairie chickens scuttle through the dry grass. He crouches for a handful of round stones. By the time he reaches the hilltop, three fat birds dangle from his belt. Fresh meat will improve his welcome if any welcome is offered.

Cresting the hill, El Antílope spots the camp as he crests the hill. Two men on a log beside a fire and a rough cabin on the far side of an earthen clearing. He stomps to make his presence obvious. Never surprise a man in his camp, although they surely spotted him leaving the desert.

He stops just outside pistol range and raises a hand in greeting. Then he holds up the prairie hens. One of the men, the lean one with the white sombrero, waves him in. El Antílope closes the distance at a steady pace, no sudden movements, hands in plain sight. He stops at the edge of the earthen clearing.

“Buenas tardes, señores.”

The white sombrero answers. The dark-bearded one is smiling.

“Buenas tardes, señor. You have walked a long way.”

“Si, very long.”

“Come and sit. We have water. You are welcome here.”

El Antílope smiles and nods. They have made it past the formalities without gunplay. The hard part is already over. He steps into the clearing and walks to the two men, halting his footsteps at a respectful distance.

“They call me El Antílope.”

The two are standing now.

“Welcome to our camp, El Antílope. I am Raul Garcia, and this is my compadre Paco Valdez.”

“Am I right to assume that you are also El Sombrero Blanco and El Burro?”

“Yes, that was true once, but no longer. Here we use our old names.”

“Then I apologize for my nom de guerre, but I do not remember my birth name.”

“No need for apologies, my friend. Perhaps you will remember given time. We carried those silly names just as we were saddled with the hero nonsense. And why? Because peons with no cojones needed some sort of symbol. Aieee! But where are my manners? Come, sit down. You are tired from your long walk. Paco, some water for our guest.”

By the time the sun sinks to the western rim of the desert, the three men are talking and laughing like old friends. The spit-roasted prairie hens sizzle over the rekindled cookfire. Paco turns the spits while reeling out another tale from the old days.

“I’m telling you that feathered serpent was a real monster, and one tough bastard. The village headman told us this serpent captured virgins and ate them. Waste of a good virgin, if you ask me.”

Raul laughs and waves his hands.

“How could it be a waste? That old man lied through his teeth. There were no virgins to begin with.”

Then El Antílope chimes in.

 “Lack of virgins was a widespread problem.”

The three laugh long and hard. As the laughter fades, El Antílope is the first to speak.

“Ah, it is good to laugh. You know, one of those feather snakes almost got me as well. The sneaky bastard caught me having a piss. I waited all day outside its cave. Finally, I couldn’t hold it no more. I’m in the middle of a glorious piss when the serpent pops out from behind a rock. Like an idiot, I didn’t have my rifle. So, I drop my pito and unwind my whip. Meanwhile, I’m pissing on my boots. Maybe the sight of my little wet pito confused the feather snake. Anyway, the monster hesitated, and I cracked my whip right in its eye.”

“¡No me digas! Then what happened, hombre?”

“That snake screamed like an eagle and ran for the hills. I buttoned up, dragged the alleged virgin from the cave, and ran like hell. Pure luck, muchachos, nothing more.”

Raul passes the bottomless mescal bottle and slaps El Antílope on the shoulder.

“If not for luck, we’d have been vulture shit long ago, right Paco?”

“Si, jefe, luck saved us many times.”

The three men swap tales as the fire burns low and the stars shine overhead. They talk of embarrassing mistakes and lucky escapes. The mescal bottle passes from hand to hand.

El Antílope rolls a cigarette, lights it with an ember from the fire, and blows a cloud of smoke at the stars. Then he begins to speak in almost a whisper.

“Let me tell you about the worst and best thing I ever did. I have never spoken of this to anyone.”

Raul and Paco lean in to hear his words.

“Years ago, I met La Llorona.”

“Dios mío, you met The Weeping Woman?”

“The very same, Raul. It came about because of a missing child, a little boy. You know the story of La Llorona. In life, she was a poor woman named Maria. Her husband ran off with a whore. In a fit of rage, she drowned her two children in the river. She regained her senses, but it was too late. Her children were dead. She was damned forever. Maria drowned herself and became a ghost haunting the riverbanks, searching for her dead children.”

Paco waves the bottle in the dark.

“Si, I remember La Llorona, the river ghost. She never found her dead kids, so she snatched living children from the riverbank. A sad story.”

“But not just a story, my friend. The villagers sent for me, like always. I tracked the missing boy to where his footprints disappeared beside the river. You would think the boy had drowned, of course. But there was another trail, faint and strange, like cloth dragged across the ground. This trail led to a cave. Always a damn cave. And there I found the boy and La Llorona.”

“Did you fight her?”

“No, my friends, and this is my best and the worst deed. She was very beautiful, dressed in a tattered gown. The child lay at her feet, whimpering in fear, but I was not afraid. I sat beside her. The night grew old as she told me her tale. Never in my life have I felt such grief. At dawn, she allowed me to take the boy, and in turn, I left her alone. I am sure she took other children later, but I could not bear to harm her.”

Paco passes him the bottle and sighs.

“Do not regret mercy, my friend. Is that not right, Raul?”

“Paco speaks the truth. All our lives we have chased evil up and down the mountains, across that damned desert, and back again. But no matter how many evil things we defeated, the world did not change. Now we find ourselves here, three old men around a dying fire. I suppose this is the retirement ranch for old heroes.”

Paco laughs aloud.

“What’s so funny, Paco?”

“You’re right, jefe, but we need a better name. Meanwhile, you two heroes gotta promise you won’t start bragging about who was the best and the fastest. You’ll end up shooting each other, and then I’d be a sidekick with no boss.”

El Antílope raises his hand in a solemn oath.

“I swear it will be so. You have welcomed me, and for that I am grateful.”

“Si, and I, Raul Garcia, swear the same.”

“Well done, my friends. Now, here under the shining stars, I name this place the Camp of Old Heroes.”

He waves the bottle at the night sky.

“Look how the stars shine. We are nothing to them. Maybe we will see a shooting star and it will bring us luck.”

As if his words bear prophecy, a fiery trail shoots across the heavens. El Antílope gasps. The others turn to him, see his starlit face staring open-mouthed at the firmament.

“What is it, hombre? You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”

El Antílope shakes his head, still staring at the stars.

“I remember! Dios mio, I remember!”

“What do you remember?”

“My name, the name I was born with. My mother called me Miguel. Yes, that’s my name, Miguel.”

Miguel drops his eyes from the stars. He wipes tears from his cheeks and smiles at his new compadres. Paco passes him the bottle.

“Welcome back, Miguel.”

Raul reaches out to squeeze his shoulder.“Si, amigo, welcome home.”

The chill breeze that skips off the waves to power her flight tells she is somewhere north (the Bering sea, maybe?). Her shoulder muscles, the ones that power her flapping, ache. There is not so much as a piece of driftwood. There is only the vast, unbroken sea.

Calypso flies for days.

She expects hunger to gnaw at her stomach but she only feels emptiness. It’s like meditation, just like emptying my mind, but I’m terrible at that, aren’t I. Her muscles suffer but do not fail. She yearns for sleep. Calypso soars onwards.

Days become weeks become months. She waits for the moment when her body can no longer sustain her, but it never comes.

What torments her more than the starvation, the sleeplessness and the physical fatigue, is the boredom. The ubiquity of her numb flight never changes. One day she looks around and wonders if she has moved at all. The slapping of the waves is the same as it has always been. Calypso has adjusted to the sensation of air under her feathers so much that she is unsure whether she is moving or floating in one place. Maybe this is meditation, maybe I finally figured it out.

Calypso angles her beak downward and closes her wings into her body. She plummets towards the waves. The arctic air is freezing but the water will be colder. Bald eagles cannot swim. Even this sensation (faster, faster) of dive bombing does not shock, exhilarate, or scare her.

The moment Calypso the eagle’s beak pierces the surface is the moment Calypso the woman wakes. Under the outline of her body, the mattress is damp with sweat that has cooled. On the bedside table is the empty potion bottle, which is really no different than a mason jar, but Calypso can’t help but think of it as a potion bottle. A dried film of the purple liquid paints the floor of the bottle and traces a riverbed up one side towards the mouth to record the path the draught flowed on its way to her lips.

The enormously fat man, built like a blob of melted wax, shuffles over to her bed.

“Just coming up on fifteen hours. Not so bad.”

Calypso wonders hazily what his name was. Pemba. That’s right. Her bed is the third in a row of identical cots. Every other one is unoccupied. Calypso tries to sit up but Pemba forces her down with meaty hands.

“Don’t stand. You’re awake but that doesn’t mean that all of the chemical has left you. Stay and rest.”

Pemba presses something with his foot, and with a metallic vrrr, Calypso is sitting up. The sheets shift slightly and Calypso recalls she is naked.

“How did you get your hands on a dozen hospital beds?” Calypso’s voice is dull and feels like it is coming from somewhere far away, certainly not her mouth.

“You were out for fifteen hours. Pretty good for a first potion.”

Calypso shakes her head, trying to rid herself of the fatigue like a cloud of black flies. She feels the pounding of a bell knocker between her ears. Her head droops the way your eyelids do after many hours of sleeplessness, but she cannot shut her brain as she has just woken up from fifteen hours of unconsciousness. In the back of her throat is acid.

She looks at Pemba and says, as clearly as she can, “Where was the fucking sage?”

“That potion does not induce a sage. You know this.”

“I was an eagle. A stupid bald eagle! And I didn’t see shit. So what’s the point?”

“Your mind needs time to adjust. Otherwise it will be unable to handle the stronger drugs. This first potion went well.”

“I paid for a sage. Give me the fucking sage.” Calypso glares at Pemba. She may not have the physical strength to overpower the man, but she knows what she looks like. She knows the half-moons beneath her eyes and the menacing darkness behind them. Calypso has seen the effect she has on passersby when she pierces them with her gaze; she’s seen how they shrink on the sidewalk, how they are caught between pretending she does not exist and keeping an eye on her.

Pemba does not flinch. Pemba sees people as desperate as her every day.

“You will not see a sage today. It would kill you. I have told you this.”

“Give me the sage or you can kiss goodbye to any more cash you think you’re getting out of me. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you’re not exactly overflowing with customers.”

“If you die, I will receive no more payments.”

The cloud in Calypso’s head is dispersing, leaving a biting vacuum. She lurches forward, and, lightning quick, Pemba pushes her back down. Now Pemba is the one scowling, and Calypso, despite herself, is shocked at how the round, even countenance can flip to hostility.

“I need you to behave if we are going to have any relationship. I cannot bring the sages to those who don’t behave. It is dangerous, and I don’t do well with danger.”

“Fuck.”

“I do well with trust.”

“I’ve gotta get out of here. I’ve gotta get home. I need to sleep.”

“Can I trust you, Calypso?” Pemba’s hand is on Calypso’s collarbone.

“Goddamn it. You can trust me.”

“Stay here to rest for one hour. Then you may leave. I will see you in a week. You will bring me the rest of the payment then. If you try to see a sage today, you will die. And then neither of us will get what we want.”

Calypso remains silent and refuses to meet the man’s gaze. Pemba appears unbothered.

“Do your best to relax. Clear your mind. You have been meditating?”

“What the fuck do you think?”

He is nonplussed. “Have you been meditating?”

“Of course! That’s the one thing you told me to do, isn’t it?”

“Keep meditating. I’ll see you in a week.”

Pemba ambles away from the bed, easy as can be. His bulk vanishes into the darkness.

As soon as the fat man is out of sight, Calypso grabs the handrail and pulls herself up from the bed. “Probably stole ’em from a fucking hospital,” she mutters. When she gets to her feet she sways and her vision shrinks to a tunnel through which the only thing that can be seen is a colorless plastic package of syringes. As her sight returns, she throws on her clothes and flees the basement as quickly as her feet will take her. Calypso bangs her head on a hanging pipe and bruises her knees falling on the stairs and yells out a cuss each time, but Pemba does not reappear.

A week later, Calypso is supine on the hospital bed and Pemba is holding a vial to the light. The circles under her eyes are no smaller.

“I told you to rest.”

Calypso doesn’t know if she can feel the dried sweat from her last visit still on the mattress or if she’s imagining it. There are no windows in Pemba’s lair.

“I’ve been sleeping like a baby.”

“If you lie to me, it does not matter. If you lie to yourself, you may die. You know this is true.”

“I’ve been fucking sleeping. Shut up and give me the potion already. I don’t pay you to talk.”

“You don’t pay me at all.”

“I’ve paid you some.”

“You don’t pay me what you owe me.”

“How many fucking times do I have to tell you? The money’s on the way. It’s tied up with the lawyers.”

“Calypso, you must rest. Rest clears your mind. And meditate. This is the only way the sages will consent to meet with you.”

Calypso does not so much as twitch a muscle. The only sound that can be heard is the drip of some unseen liquid.

Pemba sighs and walks away. “Sleep for a week and come back with money.”

“Hey!” Pemba wheels at Calypso’s shout and raises his eyebrows. “I can’t fucking sleep, don’t you know that? Why the hell else would I be in this hellhole spending my last dime shooting up all this shit with some fucking crackpot?”

Pemba returns to the bed and stands statuesque for a moment. Then he hands her the vial. “Be careful,” he says. “You are in a tough spot, and the sages may help. But they can only reveal what is already inside of you. There is no help from outside that can fix what is inside. You must do that.”

By the time Pemba has finished talking, Calypso is adjusting to her form as a silkworm. Crawling with six legs comes instinctively to her and requires no more conscious thought than walking on two legs does. Her body trundles across the web of silk like a sleeve of coagulated milk.

“Look up,” says the silkworm (is she the sage?) next to her. Her tone is serene and Calypso feels that if the silkworm had been a human, she would be smiling. The two silkworms are alone on a cluster of mulberry leaves pockmarked with holes where they have grazed. The stem of the mulberry bush curves downward into a white abyss, giving Calypso the sense that they are above the sky. As Calypso moves, the plant jiggles, but she feels certain she will not fall.

“You must be the sage,” she says to the other silkworm (fucking finally, a sage!). The sage does not respond. Her back is arched in an upward-dog yoga pose.

Calypso follows suit. Two inches above them, a tapestry of silk extends infinitely. It is dense enough to block the view of anything behind it. Calypso looks from filament to filament, entranced by its luster. The weave contains no discernible pattern but instead a random assortment of dizzying colors. These colors are so vibrant they give the impression that they’re not dyed silk. The silk really is that color, right down to its core.

“What is this?” Calypso asks.

“You should have listened to Pemba’s briefing,” says the sage (damn it, she’s right, isn’t she?), and lets out a slow, echoing laugh.

Some threads, Calypso notices, are the same color as others — the exact same color. The most common color is somewhere between yellow and pink, like the blush she’d blend onto her cheeks (don’t think of that) or the rosé that she and Britt would drink on the rooftop of the Classics department (don’t think of that, for god’s sake). She hones in on one thread of this color. As she stares, its end disconnects from the web, leaving a pinpoint of white light, and bends towards her. Calypso the silkworm stares at it in recognition. I know exactly what color that yellow-pink is.

The other silkworm swivels towards her. “Don’t touch that,” she screams. It is too late. Calypso’s silkworm nose nudges the tip of the strand to find that it is the soft of pure silk, not the poke of plastic twine.

The yellow-pink strand doubles, then doubles, then doubles again. It grows to a sheet of threads, slapping and rubbing its ends against Calypso’s face all the while. They tickle her and she feels as if she is going to sneeze so she pushes forward, hard but controlled, an equal effort between her two arms (I have arms again?) like pushing a swing. The fluttering of the silken head of hair flies in the breeze (no) but it’s a few feet ahead of her and below it, she can see the furious pedaling of sneakers that she found at Goodwill not two weeks ago (No) and the girl is biking, she’s biking all by herself and something like pride is (no no no no NO) swelling within Calypso’s chest and she’s laughing (oh god!) and her legs burn with the running she’s not so young any more is she but she doesn’t mind she sprints trying to catch up and the worry and the fiero are equally balanced in her and the girl is squealing in delight (please no no no no) and Calypso’s stride is opening up maybe she’s not so old after all eh but the girl is pedaling faster and faster around the little asphalt loop in the pocket park she’ll never catch her now and

The other silkworm is pressing her body against Calypso’s. Silkworms are not warm-blooded, but Calypso can feel the little warmth where their exoskeletons touch.

“How was that?” the sage asks.

“Get the fuck off me,” says Calypso.

“I should have warned you. The webs can bring back ghosts.”

“Let’s get this over with,” says Calypso. “What the hell is all this,” she attempts to gesticulate upwards but can’t (goddamn it! I’ve lost my arms again), “shit?”

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Let me guess, those are all my memories?”

“Not quite. They’re figments of your character. This is your life’s tapestry.”

“Like bits of my brain?”

“Sort of. But your character is about who you are. It’s not about your cognitive processes.”

“So explain to me, then, what the hell all these things are.”

“I’d be happy to.” The sage turns to face Calypso, who upward-dogs to look at the tapestry.

“Every strand is a piece of who you are. Not your ability, not your history, but something that makes up you in the present day. These pieces comprise exclusively of what you have learned from other people. I don’t mean learning like you learn in school; I mean learning like you absorb in your everyday life. Everyone knows that you grow alike those who you spend your time with, but most don’t realize how fine-grained this is: every interaction you ever have contributes to your person in a big or small way. The colors, of course, correspond to the individuals who changed you. The light-ish blue ones — you see those scattered about — those are from your mom. I’m sure you’ve noticed that they’re the color of her eyes. If there are twelve strands, your mother’s blue is one of them. That’s how responsible she is for who you are. One in twelve. You might not think that’s a lot for the person who raised you, but really it is, when you start to consider everyone who has affected you. She’s left a strong mark on you. That murky black one, that’s from you dad. If there are one-hundred-and-ninety fibers, he makes up seven of them.”

“Nope. I never knew my dad.”

“And yet he left a mark on you all the same. We learn nearly as much from someone’s absence as we do from their presence. Like it or not, what he taught you is seven in one-hundred-and-ninety of your being.”

“Yeah, well, three percent’s not so fucking great for a parent. Look at my mom, she’s got ten percent. That’s what a parent should be.”

The sage acts as if she can’t hear Calypso. “And these sort of light-pink ones, the ones that are all over…”

“Doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out.” There are so many.

“Well, I suppose you don’t need any help there. You just saw that memory, after all. What I find really interesting is that so many of these fibers are not repeated many times across the tapestry. A lot of them are even one-offs. And that’s across this whole tapestry, which is miles wide. A less diverse tapestry is the sign of a narrow, closed mind. You’ve got a beautifully multi-colored web, Calypso. You’ve taken influence from thousands and thousands of people in your life. That’s good. You’ve learned from every friend you’ve ever had. People you’ve worked with or bumped into on the street or served you coffee. It’s all here. It’s all a part of you. It all makes up who you are today.”

“If you say so.”

“Take this thread.” The sage nods towards a royal purple thread, handling it with practiced mind-control, and it bends towards them. The silk loop falls between the noses of the two worms, so close that an exhale from either would push it into the other’s face (be careful, don’t touch it like you touched the other one). It is tiny and diaphanous like a spider’s rappel and Calypso instinctively recoils, worried that it will break.

Calypso feels the memory incompletely, the way you hallucinate when you’re drifting into a nap.

She sprints up the steps of the library, each footfall crunching a cluster of brown rock-salt beneath her boots. At the top another student — a sophomore, by the looks of it — pulls the key from the door and adjusts a checkered scarf wrapped around his neck. Between breaths that make puffy clouds, Calypso pleads with him to re-open the library, just for a minute. She needs a book, she says. She has a test in the morning. The boy looks out with eyes that tell the story of another tired college student more than ready to hit the hay and says no. The library is closed, Calypso should have come earlier, what kept her so late anyways. But the boy doesn’t walk away just yet. Calypso hangs her head. She meant to come earlier but had to run to the drugstore. Her baby is sick and so, of course, she can feel it coming on too. She needs this class to pass, and she needs to pass to graduate, and she sure as hell needs the degree to get a job. The boy shakes his head and the key clicks as it fits in the lock. Five minutes, he says, drawing a cigarette from his jacket pocket and looking blankly into the night.

“That act of kindness,” says the sage, the thread retreating from the pair of silkworms to return to its place in the weave, “changed your character, just a tiny bit, even though you forgot all about him the next week. You never spoke to that man again — you never even got his name, and he doesn’t remember you either — but he’s a part of you. He’s just one strand, but he made you kinder.”

“And now I’m a regular old mother Teresa.”

“It might be imperceptible, but it’s there. The threads just go on and on and on, and there are new ones all the time. No one’s tapestry is ever finished.”

“How nice!” says Calypso (really, thanks a lot, off my rocker in a basement off Spring street for an art lesson). “That’s really something special. Now how does that help me?”

“Help you?” The sage nibbles the leaf they stand on. “I’m a silkworm. I’m just explaining the silk.”

Calypso (fuck this!) trundles towards a patch that is entirely made up of the yellow-pink threads. She focuses on them and they bend as if an invisible finger is curling through them.

“Calypso, what are you doing?” Calypso ignores the sage. She backs up as she pulls, concentrating with all her might. As the threads stretch taut she feels resistance build up like a headache and she grits her silkworm teeth (pull, damn you). They’re at their maximal stretch. One snaps. Oh God!.

Calypso shrieks. Her chest seizes (I’m on Fire oh dear God). The other silk strands rubber band back to their original spot in the tapestry. Her silkworm body curls into a fetal circle. She rolls and rolls and falls from one leaf to the next (on Fire Fire Fire). The sage hustles towards her, hopping from leaf to leaf, but can’t catch up. Calypso cannot grasp at her chest because she is a silkworm (I’m Trapped) so she rolls and rolls and rolls and falls.

When Calypso wakes, her eyes are stained with tears.

Pemba is standing over her. He’s smiling. “You have been meditating.”

Calypso wipes her eyes on the sheet and sits up. “Didn’t I fucking tell you that?”

“Very good, Calypso. Was your mind clear enough for a sage to come?”

“I’ve been meditating every day this week. Like I told you.”

“Very good, very good.” Pemba’s face grows rounder still as he beams at Calypso. “Which sage did you see?”

Calypso stumbles to her feet, again feeling the darkness creep in from the edges of her vision, and Pemba does not stop her. “How soon can I see the next sage?”

Pemba stands in the direction of the exit. He is still smiling but his eyes are sad as he watches Calypso dress. “None of the sages can bring her back, Calypso. I have told you this. You know this.”

“Get out of the way. I’ve gotta get home. When can I come back?”

“You have the payment?”

“I’ll get the fucking money.” Calypso picks up her belt, drops it, picks it up again.

“How?”

“How do you get these hospital beds and besides that the fucking potions? Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies. What that means is, none of your goddamn business.”

“Come back in a week. Don’t forget to meditate.” Calypso is dressed but Pemba remains in the corridor, blocking it with his bulk.

“Move it.”

“The potions can’t bring your daughter back, Calypso. You know this.”

Pemba swirls a potion the color of sewage. When he shakes the vial, dark clouds rise from the bottom like muck in shallow water.

“Shake it again before you shoot it. And make sure you get all the dregs down.”

Calypso extends her hand but Pemba does not proffer the potion. “Which sage is next?”

Pemba shakes his head, and Calypso imagines this motion stirring his thoughts from rest like the potion. “I have told you this. The sages only bring out what is already inside of you. I can’t predict the next sage any more than I can predict what you’ll eat for breakfast tomorrow. You know this.”

Calypso makes a swipe for the potion and misses.

“Trust,” says Pemba. “I need to trust you.”

“Fuck. I’m sorry.”

“How can I be sure you’ll pay what you have promised if you are the sort of person who grabs the vial out of my hands?”

“I told you, you’ll get the money. Tuesday by the latest. If you can’t keep this business on its feet for another six days, that’s on you.”

“It’s a lot of money, Calypso.”

“Fuck.”

“I’d like the money now.”

“I told you. The life insurance payment comes on Tuesday. Then we’ll be square.”

“You have promised me the life insurance payment before, Calypso.”

“They delayed it. You know how lawyers are. Always want to cross more T’s and dot more I’s. I crawl up his ass whenever I have the chance. This hurts me too, you know. I want the money just as bad as you do. He promised me. Tuesday.”

“Do you trust his promises?”

“I’ll get it to you. Don’t worry about it. Don’t go fucking soft on me, Pemba.”

“Can I trust your promises?”

“The life insurance payment gets delivered Tuesday. Maybe the bank will take a day, so Wednesday I’ll get the cash and bring it in. First thing in the morning. I’ll wake up early to bring it in. I’ll bring you a bagel too. Lox and cream cheese and scallions on an everything bagel. How’s that?”

“My patience is wearing thin.”

“You can trust me.”

“Tell me something to build my trust.”

“The money’s on its way.”

“How did your daughter die?”

“Fuck you.”

“Let’s trust each other.”

“I’ll bring coffee with the bagel.”

“Calypso.”

“Cancer. Leukemia.”

“Did she suffer?”

“Fuck off. That’s enough of this bullshit. Give me the potion. Give it.”

“Being honest with me may help you be honest with yourself.”

“Go to hell.”

“If you’re seeing my sages, I should know what you’re asking them. ”

Calypso seethed. “She didn’t suffer much. They do a good job in the hospital. They keep the kids happy, as best they can, you know, given the circumstances.”

“Did your daughter have to go through chemotherapy?”

“Fuck.”

“Calypso.”

“Yes. A bit. That part was tough. But we made it through. As a family, you know.”

“But your husband left?”

“Boyfriend, not husband. And that wasn’t until after. He couldn’t take it.”

“Thank you for sharing, Calypso.”

“You’re sick in the head.”

“I feel certain I can trust you.”

“You’re sick where it counts. Something’s fucking wrong up there.”

Without warning, Pemba jerks forward and wraps his fingers around Calypso’s throat. When Calypso’s mouth gasps for air, Pemba upends the potion into it. Calypso is under before she can make a move.

Calypso the cicada nymph is underground. She senses it is dark, though she does not have eyes, and she can also perceive other elements of her surroundings: the soil on her back and under her spindly legs. Goddamn it, he put me under without my consent, I’ll see how he likes a lawsuit (well, I can’t exactly call the cops, can I?). Beside her is another cicada, though Calypso does not comprehend how she knows this.

Calypso and the sage set into chewing what is at their mouths: wet, chalky, like tree bark. It’s not tree bark, she realizes; it’s tree roots. Calypso isn’t exactly hungry, but is driven by a deeper atavistic instinct that overrides hunger as it overrides all of the brain’s desires. Chewing is a default instinct for cicada nymphs, so eating involves relaxation more than conscious effort. It is reassuring to Calypso to have her brain’s noise drowned by one aim.

“Okay, give it to me straight, sage. Just tell me your speech or whatever and get it over with. I’ve been jerked around enough today.”

“We’re chewing to get to the sap. We’ll get there soon.”

Calypso nibbles and nibbles only to reach more root. Past the outer layer of bark, like substance she finds healthy, wet wood like cords of muscle. This is almost tasty.

“And the amount of sap we find represents how much piss is in my body, or something?”

The sage laughs, a full-throated genuine laugh that surprises Calypso. Am I funny? I’m not funny.

“Not quite. It represents how much you have lived.”

“So twenty-eight years. Ding-ding. Mystery solved.”

“Not how long you’ve lived, but how much. Most twenty-somethings have a few ounces of sap collected in their roots. A few have more. Some have none at all. Sap accrues the same way memory does: each experience nurtures the tree as does sunlight or rain or fertilizer, which crystalizes in one drop, or a few drops of sap in the roots. Diverse and novel experiences add up. Days that are boring and uninteresting and redundant, your tree won’t grow at all. But the times where you produce something or open your eyes in wonder or spin the silk of those you care about, those times sap flows in abundance. Those are the times, rich and varied, that lead to gallons of sap. Those are the times that matter.”

“So it’s just a measure of how many different types of food I’ve ever had. Great.”

“Variations in food and travel, yes, those things can comprise much sap for folks your age. But more of it is due to interpersonal experiences with those who matter to you.”

Calypso does not stop nibbling. The faster I get through to this sap the faster I can get the fuck out of here to a sage that will actually fix me. She and the sage work in silence for some time.

Finally, Calypso’s chewing produces a noise reminiscent of Pemba popping the cap off a tube and the two cicada nymphs retreat a step. A dribble of sap leaks from the spot Calypso has been chewing.

“So there it is. That’s all.” But that’s not all. As the sap covers their tarsi, the opening widens and sap flows thicker, faster. Oh shit!

The sage chuckles. “Very good, Calypso.” The sap fills their cavern, its tide reaching their bellies, and still the hole from which it emanates grows and soon their claws are no longer embedded in the hard subterranean soil (woah!) and they’re flowing away downstream (holy shit!) in the torrent of sap, its thickness buoying them pleasantly like a lazy river. The sage is laughing, and, despite herself, Calypso is laughing too.

“That’s a lot of sap!”

“Damn straight, a lot of fucking sap!”

“A windfall.”

The two cicada nymphs float lazily, side by side. Thank god we’re done with that chewing. “How much is that? It’s gotta be more than an ounce, right?”

The sage looks at Calypso with wonder in her eyes. “You have lived much, my friend. You have lived more than anyone I’ve ever seen. You are fulfilled.”

“No, no, no. Fuck that.” Calypso shifts, trying to turn away from the sage, but in the flow of sap, it’s impossible to maneuver. “I haven’t done shit. I lived in New York my whole life. I never left. I never had the money to go gallivanting around. I work at a gas station, for Christ’s sake. So I couldn’t tell you where this sap comes from.”

“Let’s find out.” Without so much as a gesture, Calypso knows what the sage is asking of her. She brings her mouth to the liquid and tastes the sugar of the drink almost sooner than she feels the crystalline texture.

Calypso is on her roof dangling her feet off the side. Isn’t it funny how the wind is stronger on my legs than on my arms? There must be some sort of wind tunnel effect. Below her, trash bags line the street like ugly black shrubs. Someone (is the white line on the road painted crooked, or is the whiskey getting to me?) calls up at her, asks her if she is okay (ignore it). For a moment, Calypso sees a yellow-pink head of hair belonging to an eight-year-old girl on the streetcorner and her hands stiffen beneath her, as if she’s ready to leap from the sixth-story roof and chase after her, but in the next (shit) moment, she realizes it’s only the shine of the streetlamp on the naked head of a firehydrant. I’m really losing it now. The man on the street is standing between two plywood sheds (from up top you can really see how shitty they are. I mean, make a restaurant or don’t, but don’t half-ass one in the middle of the street) from which waiters shuttle food and cocktails from the Bistro directly beneath Calypso. I can almost see the roof of my old apartment from up here; it’s only a few blocks east. The man looks up (what are those white lines called, anyway?) at Calypso on the roof, then to his right and to his left (he’s wondering if anyone else sees what he sees), and then takes five steps down the street, checks his watch (he’s got somewhere to be), then looks up again (he really does have a good heart, doesn’t he?). The voice below implores her not to jump, but she wasn’t going to jump anyway. It’s late, the man says (well, my apartment was too lonely to sleep so I came up here). He’s dialing someone (goddamn it, it better not be the cops) and saying something else to her (I can’t deal with fucking cops tonight) and she rolls backwards onto the roof, out of his sightline onto her back and stares up at the sky. I wish I was out of the city and could see a star, just one.

And then once again, she is a cicada nymph in a river of sap.

“That sounds like a rough night,” says the sage. “And yet it added meaning to your life.”

“That was last night.”

“You had a hard time sleeping?”

“I’ve got fucking problems sleeping, who doesn’t?”

“Sleeping can be hard,” says the sage, “but so can being awake.” For a moment, the two cicada nymphs float in silence before she continues. “I should have noticed it earlier. Sometimes you can tell these sorts of things from the quality of the sap. A bit sweet, a bit watery. Calypso, an overwhelming majority of your sap derives from suffering.”

“Oh great! So I’ve had a shitty life. Like I didn’t know. Wonderful.”

“Surely you had already realized that. But, you see, suffering has as much meaning as joy.”

“That can’t be it. My life has no meaning. Not anymore, that’s for sure.”

“Your life is as rich and complex as anyone’s. The amount you’ve lived is more than nearly anyone in the world.”

“I hate my life. I might as well be dead.”

“Right and wrong. You’re not happy but you’re alive, and that’s what living is, joy and pain, and sometimes one is disproportionately larger than the other. That is all part of living. As long as you can feel, you are alive, even if only what you feel is suffering.”

When Calypso wakes, she is babbling. She is talking even before Pemba comes into her frame of vision. Her pupils are dilated enough to swallow her irises. She makes no acknowledgement of Pemba when he places a glass of water on the bedside table.

“I keep moving west. Every time my lease is up, I move west. In each new apartment, after I get adjusted, I have my new go-to spots: my grocery, my liquor store, my whatever. Then, every day, I start to notice which way I head when I leave my house. I can’t help but keep track of it, it’s just some shit my brain does. And you always go one way or the other, when you leave your building. You go right or you go left. And you’re always walking somewhere, in New York. So the way I go most often — right or left — that’s the direction I move when the lease is up. It makes sense that way. And for years I’ve been moving west. Ever since she died, and Britt left, and I’ve been going from place to place, I’ve been moving west, a few blocks each time. It seems like each time, everything I end up doing is just a bit more west. But there’s one place I always go that’s east, no matter where my apartment is. In my new place, the door faces south, so that means when I exit I turn left. It’s the only time I leave and turn left. But when I do, I walk all the way to East River Park. After all the moving house I’ve done, it takes me about forty-five minutes of walking to get there. And when I get there I turn around and come back. I always think I’m ready to see the spot where she went under but I’ve never made it all the way back there. I walk all the way there, probably twice a week, and I’ve never made it to the little pier where East River Park pokes out into the river. My daughter didn’t die in the hospital, did you know that? We didn’t want her to. She was suffering too much. It was taking too long. She had no chance. I was lying to you before, when I said she didn’t suffer, but I’m sure you figured that out. She was in the hospital for two years. People always said she was strong. Fuck that. There was no hope by the end. It was her idea, going off into the river. When we set her in the water, off the end of the pier, she couldn’t swim. She couldn’t even flail. She was too weak. Couldn’t move her limbs. I was wearing my patagonia zipped all the way up and I had tucked my chin into it because of the cold. She went right under and barely any bubbles came up. No struggle. Britt tried to hold my hand but that felt wrong. And then we walked away and all I could think about was how loud our boots were on the wooden dock and that was the end. So, yeah, she suffered. She suffered like all hell. It killed me. It fucking killed me. I mean, that’s obvious. Why else would I be in this shithole? She suffered and suffered and suffered. I would have ended it sooner if I could go back and do it again. I held onto hope for too long. Or I would have held onto it longer. I don’t know. And there’s nothing I can do about it now. I just keep moving west.”

Pemba looks at her for a long while before the smile returns to his face.

“I trust you, Calypso. Bring me the money on Wednesday. And get me a bacon-egg-and-cheese on an everything bagel. I can’t eat fish.”

Calypso waits an hour before standing. As she puts on her clothes, she mutters, “at least I got all this fucking sap.”

As Pemba swallows the last bite of the bacon-egg-and-cheese, he looks off into the distance, as if what he sees is a mountaintop view rather than nailheads intermittently protruding from a brick wall. He finishes the bagel, wipes his hands on the napkin, and throws the paper bag of scraps into a corner before turning to Calypso and saying: “I take it you do not have the money.”

“The lawyer said he needs confirmation from the bank. He said it would take another few days. A week, tops.”

Pemba shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”

“I’ll get it. I promise. This bagel was an act of goodwill. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

“No. No, no no.”

“I fucking promise, okay? The goddamn lawyer is screwing me royally.”

“There is no lawyer. You did not have a life insurance policy on your eight-year-old daughter. You know this.”

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

“You have spent the trust you earned. You have used up your credit. Come back only with the money you owe me. Otherwise, you will never see the sages again.”

Calypso stands and the straightening of her knees kicks the plastic chair to the ground. By the time she is upright she has a gun in both hands. “Give me the fucking potion, Pemba.”

“A gun hidden in the waistband. How clever. Well done.”

“Give me the potion.”

Pemba is calm as he regards her. “A potion is not worth a bacon-egg-and-cheese bagel, Calypso. You know this.”

“I’m not asking. I’m ordering. I’ll fucking kill you.”

“You can be rather abrasive at times. Has anyone ever told you that before?”

“Don’t you know how fucked up my life is? I can’t sleep. I can’t think. I can’t look in a fucking mirror. I need this sage to fix me.”

“You still do not understand. Only you can fix yourself. Besides, you have not paid.”

“I paid for the first potion.”

“You paid for half of the first potion. I help you, and this is how you treat me? You disappoint me, Calypso.”

“You know, you’re not some fucking saint. You act all high and mighty and tell me you’re helping me, but all you give a shit about is money. I don’t know what, but I’m sure there’s a good fucking reason you’re not practicing medicine in a hospital any more. I looked you up and you did have a medical license at some point. So what the fuck happened? You’re down here with the rats. That’s what you are: the fattest fucking rat in the city.”

“You know, cussing does not give the appearance of strength. It also does not make you stronger.”

“I was right about you. You’re a fucked up guy. You’re sick in the head. And you’re not helping anyone.”

Pemba is smiling. “Then why do you keep coming back?”

“Because I’m an idiot, obviously. Now give me the potion.”

“You’ll need me for this last potion. It’s not like the other ones. You need a healer to administer it.”

“I’ll take that risk.”

“You can’t drink it. You inject it, slowly, over the course of six hours. Every hour I empty one-sixth of the syringe into your veins. Any less and you won’t see the sage. Any more and you’ll die.”

“So, fucking administer it.”

“And then what’s to stop me from killing you while you’re under?” Pemba licks his fingers, then wipes them on his pants. “That really was an excellent bacon-egg-and-cheese. There’s nothing like them.”

Calypso’s hands are trembling on the gun but she does not speak. Pemba rises and turns away to amble down the throat of the room. “Get me the money, Calypso. Then I will happily administer the last potion. I won’t ask you where it comes from. But bring it here, please. And in the meantime, don’t forget to keep meditating.”

When Calypso squeezes the trigger she is surprised at how easily it gives. There is no resistance. The gun does not care that she is ending a life. The recoil jerks her wrists upwards but the bullet flies true.

Pemba screams at the impact of the bullet but falls silent when his bulk hits the ground, as if the floor has knocked the sound right out of him. Calypso tries to flip the fat man onto his back, is unable, feels through the pockets of his lab coat with one hand, the other holding the trembling gun. His body is still. Surprising he isn’t too fucking fat to be pierced by a bullet. When she pulls the syringe and the vial from its hiding place, she sees his eyes and finds that they hold neither fear nor hate but pity. Oh god, what have I done?. They are already beginning to glaze over.

When Calypso springs from the basement door, the daylight hits her like a slap to the face. Shit, it’s still daytime, how did I forget?. She sprints down Spring street, rounds the corner, forces herself to slow to a brisk walk. The gun is still in her hand (shit!). She shoves it in her waistband and pulls her shirt over it. I’ve got blood on my jeans!.

In Washington Square Park, the density of the crowd allows her to be anonymous if not alone. She reaches a square of benches half-blocked by curtains of leaves and lies on her back (meditate, meditate, meditate, empty your mind, empty your mind). From the path, a boy stares at her, too young or too new to New York to have honed his disregard for tramps or his awareness that it is rude to gawk. He does not blink. She stares back, the two foreign creatures regarding each other with cool caution and curiosity as a giraffe and a wildebeest would.

Calypso gives up on emptying her mind and thrusts the syringe into her quad. She depresses the top until it is empty.

She is a frog (a frog?), feeling the texture of the lilypad beneath her with webbed feet in more detail than she had ever thought possible. It’s like I can feel every individual atom, or at least each little cell of the lilypad (all these tiny little bumps, they’ve gotta have a name). Beside her, the sage looks out over the water, her throat bulging and deflating in the rhythm of steady breath. Oh, god, I killed him. I killed Pemba.

They are together on a single lilypad (he’s dead, lying in his own fucking basement) in the middle of what appears to be (how long before he’s found?) endless still water. It is too small (weeks? days?) to turn around, but Calypso (does he have other patients? patients isn’t right, and it’s not druggies, either, it’s fuckups like me, people who have found some way to fuck their mind up without even any drugs) believes the lilypad is rotating, letting her see that the gentle curve of the horizon can be seen in all directions. Even if no one goes in there at first, the smell will go up to the apartments above.

“What’s the lilypad?” asks Calypso (there are tons of smells in New York, who’s got time to check them out), the exhaustion apparent in her voice. “What does it mean? Just give it to me straight.”

“I thought you’d never ask,” says the sage (maybe I am a druggie, I’m flat on my back in a park like the rest of them), letting out an easy, ribbity chuckle. “This is the sum total of your contributions to humanity, good and bad. The more sap” — (back to the fucking sap, good lord) — “you add to someone’s life, the more positive threads you weave, the more you contribute to their happiness, the more contributions you accrue. Most people can see the direct effects” — (maybe I’ll go to East River Park after this. Maybe this is finally the time, I’ll be so drained from the drugs I can wander over there and look at the spot where she went under; maybe I’ll jump in too… I’m not sure if I could drown, I mean I’m physically able to swim and my brain… stupid fucking brain that causes all my problems… might force me to be alive from some basic instinct I can’t override… did her brain have that instinct? Did she want to survive, when she was under?) — “of their actions, which are obvious — bullying is bad, helping an old woman cross the street is good — but the indirect results are much more wide reaching.” — (I killed her and I killed Pemba) — “Here are the downstream effects of your actions, all laid out for you.”

“And all I’ve given to the world is this lilypad.”

“No. What you have contributed is the water.” The water is light and clear, but Calypso is unable to see to the bottom.

“That’s the impact I’ve had on others?”

“Each positive contribution to someone else’s life, direct or indirect, adds a drop of water.” — (a drop, well what’s a drop, really, what does a frog think is a drop) — “A negative contribution results in water evaporating.”

“No, that’s wrong.” Calypso edges forward (there were hardly any bubbles when she went under. I should have counted them, it wouldn’t have been hard), shuffling towards the edge (let’s see the bottom). The motion of her frog-legs causes the lilypad to crease and a dribble of liquid breaks the meniscus. It slides down the green plant to touch her feet.

The memories (oh god oh fuck) come in flashes. Calypso knows that they are memories (they’re memories but they’re Real, they were real then and they’re real Now), but that does not soften their bite. Each scene hits her like a staggeringly bright slide of a ViewMaster (like I’m right up against the movie screen… I haven’t seen a movie in so, so long; I gave up when I couldn’t sit through one, when I couldn’t concentrate, I would walk out not even knowing the plot… everyone else around, chattering happily and I didn’t even have anyone to go with) from which she cannot look away: balancing the textbook on her knee as she rocks the baby back to sleep, bleary street light filtering in through the sheer curtains, tying shoes and teaching to tie shoes (she learned quick, didn’t she? That surprised me, I thought that would be more trouble, but no, she learned so quick), filling up the tiny backpack with donated school supplies before the first day of kindergarten (I had to beg for those like a beggar, but I did it, didn’t I, I filled that bag right up to the brim), glancing up above the storybook to see if she is asleep in the hospital bed, seeing the bald head (oh god) and the closed eyes and the emaciated body (no no no no) and trying to cry softly so as not to wake her (I cry loud now, as loud as I please, all alone).

When Calypso is a frog again, the sage rotates to face her. “Nearly everyone is surprised by how much water is in their ocean.” — (I killed him, Pemba’s lying dead in a pool of his own blood) — “Even those who we consider to be bad people usually have a net-positive effect on the world. There is no necessity for balance between good and evil. Humanity is overwhelmingly kind to each other. We naturally help each other and build each other up. That’s why our few negative actions bubble up in our memory. Our shame propels us to fixate on them because they are unusual.”

“No, no, no.” (wrong, all wrong; who does this frog think she is?) Calypso is shaking (no bubbles, almost no bubbles at all) her head. “You don’t understand. You don’t know what I’ve done.”

“I am a sage. I understand.”

“What I could tell you… I don’t ” — (she’s probably still underwater, under the East River… not the only one, I’m sure the mob has sent men to sleep with the fishes… what a fucking cesspool…, her rotting corpse… is there anything down there? fish? that eats human flesh? Or does it just degrade slowly?… Eventually she’ll be just bones… that’s better, that’s more comfortable, somehow…, child’s bones) — “deserve all this water.”

“It’s not what you deserve. It simply is. Calypso, anything you could tell me, I already know. I’m a part of you.”

“You’re a sage. You know wise things. You don’t know what’s in my head.”

“I’m a drug-induced fantasy, Calypso.” — (I should have jumped off my roof the other night, do what I did to my daughter, end all the suffering because what’s the point of only suffering?… somewhere in me, there’s still hope). I’m a product of your own imagination. I only know what’s in your head, and nothing else.”

“Then you know I killed my own daughter.”

“Yes.”

The two frogs face each other, neither speaking, each gullet pulsating in a tense rhythm. That’s it, it’s out, nothing else to say. (it feels like I’ve puked, something… revolting, acidic, secret… out of my system that needed to get out and now there’s an empty spot in its place… for once, nothing to say… we walked away and I wouldn’t take Britt’s hand and I felt so utterly numb as if I were the one under a thousand pounds of freezing East River water and I thought the guilt would lighten but it hasn’t, it’s only killed me since).

“The good outweighs the bad, Calypso.”

“No. This is all wrong.”

“You have a rich tapestry of silk” — (my dad, where did he go? he got three percent of me, and I never even knew him, he got three percent for free; what percent of my daughter’s tapestry did I have?) — “, a river of sap,” — (don’t think of those same memories… pushing the bike… tying the shoes… bedtime stories… they’ll never stop coming back)) — “and an ocean as far as the eye can see. You have learned from others; you have lived a meaningful life;” — (the day when she told me about the East River plan she was so sad, but a little happy too; she had found a way out and she had thought of something I hadn’t) — ” you have been good to the world.”

“I can’t, I just can’t. I still just…”

“You’re stuck. You can’t move forward.” She didn’t struggle when she went under; almost no bubbles came up; when I walked away I don’t know if I heard the clacking of my boots on the pier or the pounding of my blood in my head or nothing at all.

“Then let me say” — (Pemba’s dead, he’s bled out by now, he’s dead on the floor of his lair, dead like a dog) — “this. You need to hear it.” (you’re just a figment of my imagination).

“Say it!” Dear god, is it what I think it is?

“I forgive you.”

The words ring out like a clarion dinner-bell, reverberating as if they are in a cavern rather than at sea.

Over the sage’s shoulder, Calypso can see land on the horizon. She doesn’t feel anything but stillness from the lilypad, so it surprises her to learn that they have been moving. The land approaches at a rapid clip, and soon it clarifies into blocky shapes above a sliver of earth, disjoint but connected into one mass. The shapes grow. They are distant, then significant, then towering, then comforting as she recognizes the skyline of the southern tip of Manhattan. It takes her a moment longer to process the view since she’s approaching from the east, meaning the buildings stack in an unfamiliar order. Just to her right is the Williamsburg bridge, and far to her left is the Manhattan bridge. She knows that if she were able to turn around, behind her would be Brooklyn. There are no ships in the East River, and no waves. The lilypad has not wobbled once.

“It’s New York,” she mutters, without thinking. “I’m headed home.”

“And I’m almost there.”

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.