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.”

Tigers in the Sky

Last night the sky split open,
ribs of starlight cracking,
and tigers leapt through constellations,
paws sparking comets over sleepless cities.
I counted stripes as I ran,
through markets smelling of spice and fire,
wondering if the stars
were teaching me
to hunt my own shadow.
A child laughed somewhere,
jar of wind in her hands,
and the tigers bowed
to taste her air
before slipping behind fractured clouds.

In the garden where bones bloom,
petals curl around ribs and skulls,
white as forgotten ghosts,
soft as the rain that never falls.
The wind hums between marrow and marrow,
a lullaby for things that cannot sleep.
I plant my fingers in soil that remembers
every story I forgot,
every lie I whispered to the stars.
A crow perches atop a femur,
tilting its head,
watching me learn
how to speak without a tongue,
how to grow without soil,
how to love without living.
And in the moonlight,
the bones shift,
forming shapes that blink
like eyes I’ve never seen,
breathing in the dark
with a language older than memory.

The Mathematician

He went seeking primes so monstrously large
even the cosmos blanched at their breadth.

He scribbled formulas,
stuffed them with numbers
to the point of gagging,
then fed them all the more.

His masterpiece — ten thousand digits of pride —
was pricked with one unforeseen pin —
it was divisible by 10007.

Not thirteen, his usual foe,
but this fifth columnist,
hiding out in the land of five digits.

He folded up his brain
like old clothes,
tossed it in the nearest donation box.

In the city, there’s a homeless man
who will prove 1=0
for spare change.

Weightless.
Yes. I’ve been that,
floating around in a cabin
like a dust mote,
waving my arms, kicking my legs,
anything to introduce myself
into such an absurd situation.

I’m sorry but I can’t really
explain it to you,
other than,
without gravity’s anchor,
the body’s about as useless
as your brother.

I drift up.
I touch the ceiling.
I maneuver myself
but, like an oar
in a maelstrom,
my intentions rarely
match the results.

Yes, it’s strange.
My heart, every now and then,
has abruptly ascended,
(like the time when I first met you
if you remember)
but, on those occasions,
the rest of me
didn’t come along for the ride.

As for my head…
nothing’s changed there.
After a while, it tells me,
“You can do this.”
Of course,
that’s after I’m already doing it.

“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.

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

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

Cheers! We’d said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She frowns at me over her shoulder.

“From our room?” she asks.

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

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

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lena hesitates a millisecond too long.

“Thanks.”

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

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

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

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

“You’re so beautiful,” I whisper.

Lena rolls her eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Much later that night, I awake in a panic.

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

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

And then, one shifts.

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

I do not move.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How’s the world?” she murmurs.

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

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

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

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

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

“Have I ever sleepwalked?” I ask Lena.

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

“No,” she says. “Why?”

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

Lena shakes her head slowly.

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

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

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

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

“I’m all set.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That Wednesday, the house sounds different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing is there when I look back.

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

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

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

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

She takes the baby from me without a word.

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

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

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

All of it.

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

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

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

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

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I overslept.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Call me if you need anything.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My breath catches.

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

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

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

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

“What?” I shriek, “What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I open my arms.

“Come here,” I whisper.

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

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

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

No owl came for you.

But you watched her go:
best friends, best friends
until that moment
when she warned you: Don’t follow.

But when had you ever not followed?

Bricks, bruising.
Blood, a little.
Eleanor, why?

For months—years—you marked time at another school,
which was deathly dull.

Every summer she returned
ever more a stranger.
Maths was your magic.
So you knew, each autumn, when she
disappeared,
that hers was not the only platform
between 9 and 10.
That there exists, in fact,
between any two
numbers,
a space that may
be more
finely
divi-
ded.

9 and 5/6: Smash!
Wrong.

Inside the infinite,
every outcome is inevitable.

9 and 18/25: Smash!
Wrong.

But it was righter;
you felt that.

You noted that in your notebook.

Somewhere, in there, was a place for you.

A platform that would open
to a train
to a school
that was almost like hers,
to a friend
who was almost like her,
but not
to a bird that would belong to you,
if not quite an owl.

A finch
or a falcon vulture
bluebird blackbird
woodpecker
parrot
sparrow
robin raven—
anything—
with a scroll in its beak.

9 and 4,817/6,311
Smash!
Wrong.
But righter.

You noted that in your notebook.

In this world, you saw her
less and less—
best friends once,
but not now.

You saw her
(and her owl)
sometimes
from the room that was yours
(in the house that you had since inherited from your parents);
she was visiting her parents:
best friends, next door friends,
growing up,
but nothing now.

She was 30… 40… 50.

For you, whose birthday was only 3 months and 3 days after hers,
it was the same.

(This is the simplest kind of maths.)

Now, she was a Minister of Magic.

9 and 40,927/54,581
Smash!
Wrong.
But righter.

You noted that in your notebook.

You were not invited to her funeral
(an accident: a hippogriff)
But the dream transmuted
as you did,
so that while—yes—you would enter any platform that opened…

What would you do at a school?

Let it be—if you were dreaming—
a house for pensioners.
And let them offer you a bird.

In its feathers, you could rest your hand.
Rest.

9 and 226,943/302,573
Smash!

9 and 328,687/438,241
Smash!

No.
At one time, perhaps,
this may have been about something else.

Eleanor, why?

But as your numbers have become sharper
(a series of inessentials
whittled
implacably a-
way)
so has your ambition.

Your try another and another
(smash smash)
and your body stoops
and your hair whitens,
and you acquire a staff, too,
to assist your balance
(have you, at any
earlier period
of your life,
so resembled a true witch?
did Eleanor, even, ever so inhabit the part?)
and the
problem nar-
rows,
increment by 
in-
cre-
ment,
as your newest notebook fills:
infinity opening
to additional infinities,
and within them—
shiver—
lie
an infinite number of platforms
that will open
exclusively
to you.

Finer. Fi-
ner. F
in
e
r
.

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

Parker Solar Probe Briefing

December 23, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

The President will provide more information as it is received.

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

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

January 1, 2025

Happy New Year, readers!

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

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

Stay cheesy, my friends.

Climate Change journal

“Concerns of Sun Mining by Taco Bell”

Open access | Volume 178, published Summer 2025

C. Major, J. Baker, M. Scott

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

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

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

Samplings from nona’s Winter 2025 prix fixe menu

moss, creamy nacho cheese sauce, topped with bee larvae

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

beef sausage, nacho cheese sauce reduction, sweet potato

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

Superior Court of Orange County, California

Natural Resources Defense Council vs. Taco Bell Corporation

Defense opening statement

February 9, 2026

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

Straight Talk podcast transcript

December 2026

[Opening music]

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

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

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

AB: Which has gotten ridiculously expensive.

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

CNN article

Published June 2027

Two Hospitalized After TikTok ‘Suncheese Challenge’

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

MSNBC Andrea Mitchell Reports

August 2031

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Guardian article

Published May 17, 2035

Taco Bell CEO Says Public Appetite Is Responsible For Darker Sun

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

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

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

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

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

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

Departure: May 31, 2070

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

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

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

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

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

A.R.K. Brochure

YOUR GREAT ESCAPE

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

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

Rumors hold that everything worth remembering in human history has been written down by one person, someone who has been around to see it all. No one can imagine who it might be; human history has been written for thousands of years, yet no one can live that long. Except a god, one recording humanity’s actions for a purpose they were too little to understand.

No one knew who first spoke of a god of written history; the best historians could only find short sentences describing this god, but no mention of its name. Many gods were known in that time: the god of the sun, the god of the moon, and many gods that helped people in their times of need, but a nameless god that kept history was still a great mystery. These other gods were more concerned about the number of worshippers they had, how many temples were built in their honor, and their own divine stories of greatness and power, not stories about humans. Their stories were meant to be tales that were passed down through the ages: tales of great courage or wrath or kindness, these stories were reasons to worship and build temples for these gods. A god with no temples and no stories of their own was no god. Though no one knew what this supposed god looked like, everyone from the biggest cities to the smallest villages agreed that whoever was written down in this nameless god’s books was one to be remembered throughout history. Even though no credit was given and no praise was held, the nameless god still wrote down everything that was necessary; a thankless job but one the god knew was necessary for humans to keep moving forward.

While the stories of gods were told more than any other, humans were still desperate to reach the level of remembrance that the gods had by having their own tales of greatness. Whether it was kings conquering lands untouched or emperors creating mountainous civilizations, it is human instinct to want to be remembered and those who are remembered can be remembered for anything. Families have tried for centuries, gods for millenia, and while not everyone is remembered, every story worth passing down was written down by some god, somewhere. If you were not written down, you may as well have not existed.

For those who could not make their name in eternal history, they were content with leaving a legacy their own family could remember and be proud of. Some became local legends rather than national ones; others were famous within their own families. Shino had a family that had no legends and no legacy, but this was not for a lack of trying. His grandfather’s grandfather had tried to save his village from an oncoming flood, but his body had been swept away by the rushing currents. Shino’s grandfather’s father had thought he could launch himself to the moon to conquer land no one else could reach; his footprints are still marked with soot in a town center somewhere Shino has never visited. Shino’s grandfather had thought he could gamble their family’s little worth on bad bets and Shino’s father had thought joining his country’s military would be the safest option to repay the debts Shino’s grandfather had accumulated. These were stories that would be passed down and forgotten one day, just as the names of the people in these stories were gone. Shino knew his family was not written in history, not yet.

After seeing the failures of his forefathers to reach any sort of height or fame or leave a legacy worth sharing, Shino took it upon himself to make his name in history.The rest of Shino’s family wanted little in life; the siblings who survived to adulthood despite poverty were grateful to be alive. While his siblings saw their failures as reasons not to search for notoriety, Shino took his family history as motivation to do better. Shino had already forgotten his grandfather’s name by the time he was old enough to leave, as had the rest of his family. He did not want the same legacy for himself, so with little knowledge but rumors and prayers, Shino searched for the historian god. “If my name is great enough to be written down by gods themselves, we are sure to live fruitfully,” Shino reassured his mother the night before he left on a quest for a better legacy.

Shino had listened to what little he could go on to begin his quest, mostly whispers from other gods written down by devoted worshippers, largely forgotten by humanity. It was said that the god of history stayed on a mountain that never changed while history changed around it. Shino could not find much of what it meant for a mountain to never change. How much was a mountain supposed to change over time? Shino did not know and checking every mountain in the world would have been an arduous task, so Shino took his time to ask masters in knowledge what such a rumor could mean.

“A mountain stuck in time,” one master said smugly. “Find a mountain where nothing happens and climb to its peak.”

Shino pondered the master and asked, “What happens when nothing happens?”

The master said he had no more time to answer questions and needed to return to his studies. Shino knew the master had no answer.

“A mountain in the middle of nowhere would have no history. If the mountain is nowhere important, it would have nothing to occur,” a second master reasoned.

Shino thought about this too, and asked, “Are there places in the world left unexplored?”

Unlike the first master, the second master was excited by Shino’s curiosity. He answered, “There is always land left to conquer, something for rulers left to seize. As much as we record every piece of knowledge, there is always something new to learn from our world.”

The second master’s answer left Shino unsatisfied, had most of the world not already been recorded by adventurers older than Shino? Shino also knew that conquering an unexplored land required an army, resources only few in the land could afford. No one was going to give Shino what he needed so his name could be recorded by some mythical being. The second master’s answer made Shino concerned this task was an impossible one, so he sought after a third opinion, one that he felt he could take on his own with only a satchel on his back and food to trade.

Shino was able to find his answer with the third: “Find a mountain for which nothing changes. A height that does not shrink or grow, a peak that does not melt or clear, a storm that never leaves, the parts of a summit that would change with time. There are a few that fit, but there may be one close enough to make the journey close to home. But would this make the journey worth it?”

The third master’s answer reignited Shino. There was hope in such an answer, it was so obvious to Shino that he was surprised the masters couldn’t see it earlier: find a mountain whose weather never changes. He took months of climbing to scour the mountains of his country, praying that whatever god was watching over Shino was recording his journey. While climbing mountains alone was not worth a legend, Shino reasoned climbing to the peak of every tall, snowy and stormy mountaintop might be. It became an arduous task, Shino frequently having to climb down his mountain once the storm settled after days of raging furiously. He had never bothered to ask how many tall peaks his country may have had, he only had a map to cross out where he had been.

Starting up one of the last remaining mountains on his map, Shino could feel paranoia and anxiety creeping in at every crack in the clouds. Despite looking for a god, Shino never considered himself religious. With the luck his family had in their own fortune, what god could possibly have been listening? Knowing this, Shino still prayed. As he lay in his shelter, preparing for the scouting ahead, Shino prayed aloud, “Please lead me to you, whoever you may be. Am I not worthy? Am I the first to seek your guidance? I cannot go back home as much of a failure as my forefathers and only you have the solution, oh god of history.”

Until, one day, around the age of 20, the same age as his father when he left, Shino found a cabin in a blizzard, halfway up the last mountain he could check before he would have had to ask permission to leave the country to search nearby countries for other mountains. The cabin was shoddy, Shino was surprised to see it still standing against the fiercest winds he had faced. “Shelter,” he told himself as the snow crushed under his worn boots.

While the outside of the cabin had seen better days, the inside was a different story. Inside the cabin was a golden sheen that illuminated the dull colors on Shino’s wet coat. As Shino stepped inside, he looked and saw the walls were coated in lights and scrolls. The room itself was small, only another door and a fireplace displaced the walls. Shino followed the scrolls upwards and saw the cabin had no end, contrasting the shabby cabin roof outside that was at most two heads higher than him. Closing the door behind him, Shino began to strip away the snow-soaked clothing and warm up by the fire, its flames licking a wood that never seemed to burn.

Once finished and down to his barest garments, Shino saw the other door open. The warmth of the cabin had caused Shino to drop his guard, along with his weapon. He scrambled towards his knife, one that had helped him defend himself against thieves during his journey, and held it close to his chest.

This isn’t your home, a small voice reasoned in Shino’s head.

This voice was drowned out by the louder, Protect yourself, you are the most precious thing.

Standing close to the fire but far from the door, Shino saw a child, maybe younger than when Shino was when he left home on his journey for the god. The child had hair a paler blond than any scroll in the cabin, the lights gave them a golden aura.

No, it wasn’t the lights doing anything, the child themselves glowed.

The child closed the door behind them and greeted, “Hello Shino, how may I welcome you to my home?”

Shino lowered his knife, no one had said his name for months. In order to be safe, Shino had always opted for a fake name, especially if there was any chance he would have to owe money. He knew it wasn’t right, he knew his mother told him his father did something similar, but Shino reasoned that nothing should get in the way of finding this god. Now that he was in the presence of one, he thought about how stupid his actions might have been.

“Are you—”

“Please, call me Um. I am but a humble archivist. I write what needs to be written.”

Shino smiled. “That is excellent because you need to write about me!”

Um turned their head before they turned away and began to make tea over the fire. As he took a metal rod and began to poke the fire, Um asked, “Why do I need to write about you? Have you done something noteworthy?”

“I climbed every unchanging mountain to find you! Is that not worthy of being written down in history?” Shino was given a cup and told to wait for tea. As he waited, he wondered why Um looked the way they did. He thought the god of history would look, well, historical. As if to prove Shino wrong, Um reached out an arm to the ceiling and watched as a scroll fluttered down from the pile on the wall. Um didn’t open the scroll but held it tight in their hand as they began to pour tea for Shino.

“You climbed five hundred and twenty eight mountains, but I have a record of someone who climbed over a thousand mountains. Do you think climbing less than half the mountains the person in this scroll did makes you a legend?” Um asked.

“No.” Shino took a shameful sip of his tea. It tasted close to the brew made at home.

“Shino, to make legends, you need to have something worth passing down. Come back in double your lifetime after you have done something will be passed down.”

Shino accepted Um’s challenge and, in a blink and a sip of his tea, found himself at the bottom of his first mountain, the one closest to his hometown.

Once he returned to his village, Shino’s peers began rumors that he failed. None of this deterred him, Shino vowed to himself he would find something worth passing down. His first step was to leave his family home and start his own. While the chastisement from his mother was a harder sting than the disapproval of his village, Shino left his home and started a new life in a new village.

After finding a new village a week’s time away from his own, Shino was able to integrate himself. He took an interest in the village’s administration. He volunteered for all the work no one else wanted and gave helpful advice whenever asked. This attracted one of the village higher-up’s daughters to Shino’s side. After a short time together, Shino was married with a few children.

Once Shino was forty, he saw his new home thrive. Thanks in part to his efforts, his village was one of the few that was able to survive several droughts and a handful of famines. When a plague soared through the land like a blanket of death, Shino was able to help keep the village clean and away from any dirty omens. He was claimed a hero in the village many times over. He saw how his family looked at him, full of hope and pride for their patriarch.

Shino knew he was ready.

“Do you have to go to the mountain?” Shino’s fourth oldest child asked him.

“They said to return at the time when my life has doubled. When I went then, I had nothing, but now, I have everything. When you get to my age, what will you tell your children about me?”

“That their grandfather saved his village many times and was a hero!” his child cheered.

Shino smiled before he headed off, making sure everyone knew he was going to come back a legend. If he had been in his old village, Shino knew he would have been ridiculed many times over before he had left the front gates. Here, with all the good he knew he was doing, the most anyone did was a passing glance. For the first time, Shino found himself feeling respected.

The god’s cabin on the mountain didn’t change, neither in location or shabbiness. Shino felt blessed to not have to wander mountains for ages again just to meet and ask a simple favor. On the shorter journey, the more he found himself talking to himself, the more Shino was assured that he was due to be written in history.

Opening the door, Shino saw that nothing had changed. Even with styles and cultures changing in areas Shino had seen twenty years prior, the cabin had remained the same. Its intense glow bathed Shino as he began to take off his coat, rather than stripping almost entirely. As the fire flickered nearby, Shino declared, “Um, I am here to be made a legend!”

Their inner door opened and they rushed to Shino. After a moment of inspection on both ends, Shino saw no change in Um’s appearance. They looked as young as the first time Shino met them. He couldn’t find any wrinkles on the child’s face while Shino unconsciously felt the slight folds on his face crease further. His mouth twitched.

“It is further proof of your godliness that you remain so young after so many years, Um. Please, as the god of history, you must have seen my contributions.”

Um backed away, tending to the fire. “I have, yes. Do you feel these are sufficient for you to be written as, how you say, a legend?”

“Well, yes, my village may have perished without my help. Is saving a village after what could have been numerous disasters not enough for my name to last generations after me?”

Um shook their head. “Maybe a few… Maybe your great grandchild will know your name, but there are many others and there will be many others that will save their fellow countrymen from danger and their names will last until they die. After that, they are as important as the spit from a full man. I cannot write your name down as you have not done anything any other man would not have done in your place.”

Mouth agape from the god’s bluntness, Shino watched as Um made their way back to their hidden room. Before they grabbed the door, Shino came to his senses and asked, “You gave me advice last time; can you give me more? I will spend just as many years and come back to show you I am worth writing down, even in a single line.”

Um’s hand cradled the knob while they watched Shino in their peripheral vision. “Do something worth remembering, else why should history remember you?”

Before Shino could protest or ask for further explanation, he felt his body flying back through the door and ended up back at home, crashing into a nearby table while he heard his wife cooking nearby. Rushing from another room, Shino’s wife shrieked, “Shino! I thought you would have been at your mysterious mountain at this point. Tell me what you’re doing!”

Regaining his composure, Shino stood from the ruins of their table and announced, “We will be moving to the city, I have a new goal in mind.”

After getting the god’s advice, Shino took less time than before enacting a new plan to be written down in the history scrolls. When picking the village he would move to, Shino originally picked a village a week’s time away. Unknownst to Shino, he had picked a village that was less than a day from his country’s capital. When he explained to his father-in-law why he wanted to move to his country’s capital, Shino assumed that his wife’s father would have forbidden Shino from taking his daughter away from him.

Shino was never happier to be wrong; not only did his father-in-law approve, he wrote Shino a letter of high merit for when he went to apply for a job. Once Shino and his family reached the capital, the letter allowed Shino to start his job in the government in the city. His family lived better than they ever could in the city, a large house near the capitol building with enough rooms to have at least three more families move into, if Shino’s children wanted to stay.

As Shino aged, he gained more respect from his fellow countrymen, helping strategize and lead battles as the number of enemies of the country grew. Shino grew to be a natural leader, his oldest children starting families in the house that only grew with age. While his decisions were thought to be more ruthless against any country that tried to smudge the beauty of their prosperity, Shino was well liked by a majority. Once it was time to elect a new leader, Shino was the almost unanimous winner, with the few dissenters changing their mind once Shino brought further happiness to his country.

His rule was bloody, but only to outsiders that refused to come. Many saw the wealth and joy Shino brought to his country and were nothing but jealous. He cut leaders down like the threshing of wheat, giving any land captured during the times of war to citizens who had nothing. At the peak of Shino’s reign, a quarter of the world was under his command.

Once he was sixty, Shino saw everything he ruled over and everything he had accomplished. He saw his children grow up to fine adults, his wife raise a home that gave Shino the support he needed to guide his people, and the citizens he gave a better life to than he had at the same age. He knew the god would be pleased.

“Father, you have accomplished more than any man I could find, why do you still go on what appears to be a fruitless journey?” One of Shino’s sons grew to be an academic, one that questioned if the person Shino was meeting was even a god.

“If you saw them like how I saw them, you would understand.” As Shino aged, he found himself giving vague answers to his children about his goals. His children would never understand, his wife never did and argued with Shino the days leading up to his journey.

His son continued to complain, “Then take me with you! Let me see this so-called ‘god’ and prove to you that this dangerous journey was never worth it.”

Shino put his foot down. “If you are calling it dangerous, I refuse to allow you to journey alongside. I forbid it. Besides, young one, if I did not go on this journey, we would not have had this wonderful home, or the education you received to be able to snap at your elders. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

The son wanted to snap back, but it would have only proved Shino right. Even though Shino was the highest politician in the land, no one followed Shino in his journey. Bringing such a time of peace and prosperity into the country itself, many felt grateful to have Shino as their leader and those who didn’t were terrified of the consequences of hurting the sixty-year old man. This made the journey to the mountain much easier than in previous years, despite his old age slowing him down.

Instead of letting himself in once he reached the cabin, Shino thought it would be polite to knock. He raised a fist to the door but before he could rap the cabin door, he heard Um say, “You may come in.”

The door opened on its own and Shino shuffled inside. Um was sitting, waiting for Shino’s return. They were unaged while Shino’s joints cracked and popped more than the burning wood. The fireplace looked unchanged, still flickering as brightly as the first time he came through. The only thing that seemed old in this cabin was him. “I followed your advice.”

Um looked Shino up and down, Shino wearing coats made out of animals only found in countries he had taken over. Exotic furs lined his body, Shino asked for only the warmest for his journey. “I can see.”

“Am I a legend in your history?” Shino asked.

“What advice did you follow?” Um asked.

Shino was taken aback, wondering if the god couldn’t remember the past twenty years. No, it had to be a test, to see if Shino was paying attention to the god’s words. Shino answered, “You said to do something worth remembering. I did. You must see the gifts this country has been bestowed under my leadership?”

Um asked, “Is the slaughter of thousands worth remembering?”

“Yes, we remember the lives of those we have had to cut down in order for us to better our people.”

“Do you remember Okin, the fifty-ninth throat you had to slice? Do you remember Chi-Won, the mother that you executed? Or do you remember the idea of them, the concepts of dead citizens to be remembered?” If Shino had not known better, he would have assumed Um was mad. Instead, Shino knew Um was asking in earnest. They were testing Shino, getting towards the end, he felt the title of a legend was within grasp.

“While I do not remember, the fact that you do means you have been looking, watching. I must be ready,” Shino rationized.

“You are not,” Um responded.

Shino stopped, his heart sank. It had been sixty years and he still wasn’t ready. Before Shino could protest, Um clarified, “People come and die all the time. Killers are not new, there are and always will be people who kill in different names, whether it’s religion, their country, or their way of life. Killing for the sake of making a name of yourself is nothing new. Do you want to be a legend?”

Shino nodded vigorously. Shino heard the door open behind him. Um looked to Shino and said, “Come back in twenty more years after you do something that will leave a true mark on history.”

Shino was once again swept away before he could ask for an explanation. Sixty years and the god refused to put his name down for him. All Shino ever received was vague sayings instead of real answers. Frustration from divinity erupted into a loud anger as Shino started to destroy valuable art pieces his wife had spent time curating to make their palace a home. When one of Shino’s sons found him and restrained Shino from destroying their home, the son asked, “You just left not that long ago, why have you returned?”

“I am quitting as this country’s leader, effective immediately. I have a new goal to make my name matter,” Shino explained.

“But your name does matter, father. It matters to your family, isn’t that all that matters?”

“No!” Shino cried.

He knew his time was coming, this next visit would be the last one he would have with Um. After Shino’s resignation, the country began to enter a time of war, wiping the peace Shino worked for within half the time he had spent working for it. Before his meeting, Shino would have cared that his legacy in the country might have been destroyed, but Shino continued to swallow his anger. Some of Shino’s grandchildren were drafted into the wars ahead, but Shino didn’t care when he heard over half of them perished on the battlefield.

Shino’s wife left him after she found her husband becoming an uncaring patriarch. His kids stopped visiting his home, shrinking Shino’s living space from a large mansion to nothing more than a shack, smaller than the cabin he was destined to see. All the while, Shino spent his time in pent-up rage. He had lost almost all of his belongings he gained during his leadership, but kept around a knife he had taken from a foreign temple. The knife’s blade was nearly invisible, only small black specks were seen in the blade’s edges. Shino had always felt there was something special about this blade, so he decided this was the one possession he needed. He focused all his anger into this blade as he trained to use the knife to the highest of his potential.

By the time Shino was almost eighty, no one visited him anymore. Shino didn’t notice anyone coming in or out of his cabin, just whether someone had touched his most important knife. On the day before his final visit, The academic son spent one more visit to convince Shino to give up on his mission.

“Mother is dead,” the son announced.

Shino didn’t move. It took him a long moment to realize what the son had said. All Shino could respond with was an unenthusiastic, “Shame.”

“Do you care? Most of your family is dead, do you care?”

Tears swelled in the son’s eyes as his father responded, “I don’t know.”

The son slammed the shack’s door, the whole foundation shook under his anger. Shino didn’t look at his son during the encounter, he refused to give any of his negative emotions where it didn’t count. Instead, he packed, focusing his anger on the knife. He knew where he could make history.

Shino didn’t pack anything for the journey, not that he had anything worth packing. The cabin was still there, undisturbed by time while still falling apart. Once Shino opened the door, he saw Um was not inside. It looked as warm as the first time around, but the heat felt less inviting. Instead, Shino felt rage, nothing had changed but he continued to age. He felt the god mock him from the other side of the door.

The door he had yet to open, the one that no doubt contained Um’s living quarters. It was ridiculous, why would a god need to sleep, but Shino rushed to the door. Inside, he saw Um, sitting at a table, hunched over something Shino was unable to see. Their back was turned to Shino, but they still greeted him like an old friend. “Shino, have you made your mark on history?”

They sounded happy, almost excited, infuriating Shino further. He took the knife and plunged it into Um’s back, holding them against the table while Shino sliced in further. Shino dragged the knife and watched as black blood spilled from the god’s back, flooding the floor as the god began to shrivel. The body turned to a shade of white devoid of any life as Shino stabbed them for the umpteenth time. Once the god no longer moved, Shino saw what he had done. The body looked aged and decrepit, as if all the years spent young caught up to the poor god.

After he finished inspecting his years of anger abused onto one god, he saw what Um had been working on on the table; a piece of parchment with one line: “Shino killed the god of history—” The name was covered in ink and Shino was unable to remove it.

At first, Shino smiled; he had finally made his name in history, the god had written Shino down like he wanted. He grabbed onto the parchment and read it against the nearest light. For a short moment, he was proud. Then the consequences of Shino’s actions filled his mind. Shino had only known one god, but there must have been more. Killing a god had to incur the wrath of many others. He looked back to the parchment and thought about how to spin this in the positive. “People conquer gods all the time, right? I cannot have been the first warrior to do so. Let me just write down their name, so I’m secure in history. It was, um…”

Shino couldn’t remember. The god’s name refused to surface, Shino couldn’t think of any of the times he had addressed the god by name. “Well, I told my children at some point, I must have, I’ll just ask—”

Shino stopped, the names of his children were fading from his memory. Panic set in as Shino ran out of the god’s room into the main cabin. Once in the main room, Shino noticed it was dark, only moonlight illuminated the room as it began to fall apart. The cabin began to shrink, scrolls from the infinite ceiling rained onto Shino before turning into dust once they hit him. Shino attempted to grab a scroll from the wall but it disappeared into nothing once his fingers touched.

The cabin became smaller and the threat of Shino getting hurt inside grew larger. He ran out into the snow and closed the door behind him. His heart began to slow and he looked to the cabin falling in on itself until it disappeared. Shino looked around at his environment, he had no idea how he got to the mountain or why he was sitting next to a pile of wood in a blizzard. He reread the piece of parchment as winds began to pick up. “I am Shino and I killed the god of history. I am Shino and I killed the god of history.”

Those who travel the mountains claim to hear the voice of a god killer, crying as he repeats the last thing he ever read. History went on without him as his country faded into obscurity and his family legacy was lost after two generations.

ca. 17,000,000 hours past

ADDRESS: /records /non-operations /narrative_set /brave /pure_water /+4~3 /GUIDE

PARSING CREATOR ABSTRACT
RECORD NOT FOUND
GENERATING ABSTRACT:

The planetbound speaker laments
the defeat of an uprising
against Community of Im-
provement, asserting that gravi-
ty was lost there… They narrate
gravity’s role in history.

ENTRY:
Oh weight, go bring love’s ratio
To bear on relations some may — eons rare, new —
Then create! We can remake seasons
Of people’s misuse, of stupidity, of
Violence’s great lie. Fate must decide:
Sparkling echoes of the Sunbow’s jetting car
Or let youths drill, bind wire still wounded for;
Free Colony’s sieged atmosphere
Or Filament Braid which breathes free, this blazing pillar
We yet have to create, the ratio: Gravity!
Fight this grim age, make it still right,
Curve free, that your mass returns!

Considering how, not bowing fervent on
The pleasure of Directors,
One planet names this true rule, its native-span sun.
Yet skies scan distant violence
From a weightless reign, vain estate of none,
Traps rich oxygen to lash to canny toxic gas
And choke partisans. Thick, your smoke stands,
That pure remonstrance at Entrepreneur’s act!

Long ago all was dust, fallow. Along
Came planets and people fully stranded, aflame
For pointless war, anointer
Of temporary weight, fate prepared for end of
Life. Before space flight, waste scored the sky,
All raged against all, and what they call
Weight no one saw; chaos alone reigned.
Yet gravity was not trapped; modestly it had set
Eyes for new ways, a truer sight:
Infrared, releasing secrets of planets,
That terraforming for carbon or water can
Be shared in equal weight, the
Wild harmony as yet unrealized.

We were as dwellers held fast to grieve
In nature’s obscure station,
Still mindless, trapped by planets’ blind will.

Car black from ardor, some take us forward and backward:
Finishers of the solar system,
Erasers of our safety,
Yea, when Clockworker Gods rent space!
A wave of terror made the
Archipelago’s boundless metal
Cloak gas planets, their rich and vast holds
Stream massed chemicals as feed
For terraforming. Our pay: mourning or bitter war.

Though large of mind, well read, did their violent charge, so
Assented, spent on concentrated mass,
Broaden gravity’s most freeing span? In all
People clockworkers bound for sorrow, you’ll see
Trapped throngs in the vacuum, this wrong that
But raises the poison germ of stations,
Immanent form of might I judge so eccentric.

Weight, oh still you hid your face,
Opening space, making plain your
Price of loss whose output could not prove otherwise:
A nightmare of bare violence.

Easing pain of clockworks’ unwaning years
Like radio bursts first glossing gray skies,
Four Systems rose, sending your
Balanced ways, ungated channels
So people may live free, when they all bestowed
Weight’s love, pure mind, curve of grace
Upon the mass that sung songs of
This open ringing fellowship.
True, their executives lived useless wealth, yet through
Their beneficence justice was reckoned fair.
Freest of their age, they earned our esteem.

Catalyzing culture, the Four Worlds enticed all that
Beauty of brief few hours:
Bare ship songs of such longing, there
Cries verse nothing of their like;
Courageous sports of moral favor,
Which those players built in Limb and Payload;
Such arts ignite history’s brightest partage.

Mysteriously ceasing,
That relished order where Four Systems sat
Deadened to a nothingness.
None can guess what stress happened
To undermine a society so new;
None knows what passed in that open.
Eras through gravity’s void, we let vacuum endure
Enough for people’s fall. All agree that nothing
Can subsist in its absence.

Who could make what won’t undo?
Not the clockwork gods, not four modest stars,
Nor any unyielding war.

That answer came ersatz, stands
For distant theft by starborn, for violence in this cult
Of Clear Extent’s rule, who annexed freedom
And allowed equal weight’s feral, fetid hollowing.
Toil-built planets benefit spoiled
Figures self-titled as executives,
Relishing their rule as presidents
Without weight in their vowed inner principles,
No people’s mass, just facile greed, no
Reason-hewn orbits well fit for human needs,
Merest bare flow of power’s mystique
Gleaned from brainless ceremony.
When gravity’s beauty is banished
For centrifugal might’s hollow image, your
Mass remains bound in the past.

Clear Extent, your enemy,
Whose million hours nothing grew.

It’s said our loved conductor planet,
Gravity’s first carrier, had
Patterned the First Entrepreneur, and nursed that
Blessed onset self-extension, that
Guide for us to prosper by
Equal extent of technical means.

It’s true that mecha arm and neural shunt had proved the
Reach and worth of Community
Of Improvement over all;
In competition the self found its
Orbit: new planets that you live for,
That all free atoms yield for the people’s task.
Still all this but extends a single will
Effaced by one edifice:
Station! all our morals depraved;
Station! those advances unmade;
Station! if one knows it one hates;
See dwellers’ stark atrophy,
Despair unseen by sleek stationers, where
Drone torture and transport are goads,
Made from avarice ignorant of weight.
Station! this place is a grave,
Here where this shining core of your insight is buried!

We still see a mass whose pull redeems!

Covenant clubs, organizations that can rescue us,
These experiments in free and balanced living,
Borne planet by planet, friendless while waiting for
The triumph of justice against all adversity.

I orbit Free Colony with unyielding force, I
Follow Hacker of the Archipelago’s strong pull,
Heed Filament Braid’s great weight as heartily
As star-rippling waves hail nearing eras
Where no authority wields terror of power
Or abuses the planet-bearing fruit of our toil!

Deny dead regimes for infrared’s sighting,
Undo the cult of tradition
With time’s speeding by free striving,
No role from mecha arm alone
May be built in eccentricity’s name!
Free Colony, ever sync my pulse with thee!

Gravity, undying one, come while we yet live!

USER-ADDED RECORD:
It is difficult to be unmoved by the passion of Pure Water’s poem, which articulated some of the clearest values of gravity as a governing principle. It’s one of the first poems to celebrate the very Covenant clubs that would coalesce as the Covenant of Cycles, true inheritor of gravity’s freeing value. The historical narrative, though steeped in long-forgotten literary devices, depicts the core flaws of previous interstellar regimes, allowing current readers to grasp the real benefits of our Covenant’s existence. Still, this poem is not without its controversies. Purists are often embarrassed by the poem’s non-inverted rhymes and floating syllables, though other scholars took those liberties seriously in the spirit of its message. Others debate the brief passage on the Covenant clubs. Pure Water would have been aware of the rising Covenant of Cycles, yet it is not mentioned in the poem. Some speculate that the poet was forced to keep such likely praise a secret due to political repression. A more marginal view holds that the Covenant of Cycle’s dependence on stations — only recently dismantled — repelled the anti-station sympathies of the poet. It is remarkable how such an emotionally direct poem can include these ambiguities still discussed today. Conductor of the Records, Prudent Era.

Anonymous Splice of “Joyous Avatar of Light,”

ca. 9,000,000 hours past

ADDRESS: /records /non-operations /narrative_set /prudent /anonymous /-4~0 /REF

PARSING CREATOR ABSTRACT
RECORD NOT FOUND
GENERATING ABSTRACT:

Just before a Lot-Light game, its
anthem is interrupted with
changed lyrics by a group of hack-
er activists demanding rights.

ENTRY:

Containment fields TRAP US for the fun
Optic sensor MAKES SURE WE DON’T STOP
Avatars FLAUNT WHAT WE DON’T have
And WOUNDS glow from OUR HANDS —

REPROCESSED fungus ALL WE EVER EAT
GIVING HOMES TOO cold OR HOT TO LIVE,
Spend our partage BUYING MEDICINE,
Now WE ARE ASKED TO bow!

Before they TWIST THEIR GRAVITY
While OUR WASTE MAKES STARBORN SMILE
Until directors ARE UNDONE
FLIP THE SHIPS
WRECK THE DECK

Use our exercise break to peruse
The TOOLS TO HALT THE WORK-HOURS, what
Fun to SMASH SERVERS WITH everyone,
Forget there’s much else more!

When WE TAKE THE hazard TO RESIST, then
PISS OFF THE PLANETBOUND DIRECTOR, this
Enacts the CHANGE WE NEED IN OUR condition:
Call QUITS AND GIVE TO all!

Before they TWIST THEIR GRAVITY
While OUR WASTE MAKES STARBORN SMILE
Until directors ARE UNDONE
FLIP THE SHIPS
WRECK THE DECK

From Diadem to Wildcat’s reddened sun,
Planetbound to server-works, all can
Register REVOLT, OUR LIVES ALL pledged
To MAKE NEW WORLDS WITH you!

All PEOPLES will receive the signal call,
Terms which people cross all space have learned:
BAND AGAINST EXPLOITERS, TAKE YOUR STAND —
Play Covenant’s LAST game!

Before they TWIST THEIR GRAVITY
While OUR WASTE MAKES STARBORN SMILE
Until directors ARE UNDONE
FLIP THE SHIPS
WRECK THE DECK
EFFACE THE DATA
FORGET THE RHYME, FUCK you
I WON’T DIE
While THE SPACE REGIME LETS US TOIL and smiles!

USER-ADDED RECORD, ADMIN ACCESS ONLY:
This entry is tagged for reference by authorized researchers. The identity of this and related transmission disruptions is under active investigation, due to patterns of server unrest following closely after their appearance. Maximum Lag is an offshoot of the Tangled Serpents cult, operating within Covenant systems. All instances of transmission disruption should be tagged and filed. Drone and small-mech resources should be redirected to server planets for monitoring, and section should be implemented for 100 hours in the event of local disruption. See meta-algorithms>>[population_sorts]+[narrative_sorts]>>subfile:maximum_lag for additional records and instructions. Conductor of the Records, Prudent Era.

USER-ADDED RECORD, GENERAL ACCESS:
One of the best features of poetry is the many forms it can take, even when there is no clear consensus on some of those forms’ value. The practice this entry represents is one such example. When the Maximum Lag organization began its practice of riots and sabotage to improve hacker living conditions, the group would override and splice popular transmissions to incite action. Simple songs like the unofficial lot-light anthem “Joyous Avatar of Light” were a useful vehicle for these communications. One advisor to this database has placed significant algorithmic weight to this entry, out of conviction for its literary value. Other advisors are still disturbed by its violence, crude humor, and association with the Tangled Serpents cult. Let this entry be a reminder that poetry is multi-faceted, and that this representative database of verse is an ever-changing document. Conductor of the Records, Clever Era.

“The Restored Cataract” by Lithogenous Garden

ca. 7,000,000 hours past

ADDRESS: /records /non-operations /narrative_set /strong /lithogenous_garden /+2*3 /REF

PARSING CREATOR ABSTRACT:
May My Poems Be A WarNing Lance
Bolt On BeHalf Of DriVers Ev
RyWhere That We Will Not Be O
BeDiEnt ANy LonGer…
But I Aim First For The Heart Of
Those Who Have ForGot– LIMIT REACHED

ENTRY:
I was taught how to sing, but just on two feet,
Still my voice, only say what can be reversed:
Mythical empty ships that we’ve never seen,
Orbits that hold us fast without any truth.
Poetry like this fades, unlike our best songs,
Many-legged meters marked with all of our feet,
Long ago, back when starborn didn’t appear
Ravaging basins, home unearthed by their spins.
Cast off their verse, and we’ll return in our hearts.
Oldest friend, mark and gland that home is restored,

And I’ll sing the coming first truth of our friendship like I’ve always been meant to do:
Light in all its teeths comes to life when we keep the tunnels alive!
Like children you stick to teeths of violet and red with a handful hoarded for messages;
We know the kind of light that ruptures from living metals and stones with joy;
We aren’t so greedy for air that we smother the light in your fabricated atmospheres;
We drivers are returning to ourselves and with ourselves our planets long abandoned!

Before you perfected your mechas we perfected our tunnels from the secrets of the oldest friend;
We tended the ways through stone just as we now tend the ways between worlds;
Your ships would become rubble and vulgar light from a single pebble had we not shared it with you;
We are the people who were born from the most dangerous light;
We tamed those cascades with our oldest friend and made ourselves out of burrowed stone;
That made us into a mighty being of many-plus-two, of flowers, of tempered milk;
A people who thrive in the cascades and create beauty in our ancestral basins.

You who call us parasites and dusters, don’t insist that we love the orbits;
Though I was birthed in the hundred long cycles away from our basins,
Tunnelling between your worlds, we have not forgotten the Child of the Arch;
Don’t insist we love the orbits, because I lost half my creche even before the Onset,
Taken by the ordering drones during landfall on Cast Die,
Because even the tolerant planets, even when we ledger correctly, are no home for us.
Moreover, I was birthed near sunny season’s end when we impeached our leaders with dance,
And by my verses we impeach you; we dig our new tunnels free of your boundaries!

You starborn think you’re so strong because you can kill what you’re afraid of,
You saw the many-legged’s ordered minds and were so afraid that you poisoned every world;
You saw that we were humans who made friendship instead of fear and you ripped us away.
You force the kine to nurse you like children yet desecrate their guts by boiling them;
The kine play games, the many-plus-one play games, and from it we remember the future!
A future of our three basins populated again under the full swirling light of our restored cataracts!
Your games remember a future where everything is clear, vicious and dead.
How does the word planetseed sound when you say it without scent or even rattle?
If you knew shame you wouldn’t utter the curse that hollows your midsection, leaving you hungry and sad.

Lost to my kin I did what many homeless drivers did, and flew your trucks for partage
From the belts to the settlements, and even dropped a shipment to my ancestral basin,
Where the atmosphere’s dust and teeths had been stripped for your hateful blue.
Your drones then pressed me to join an array in that ten-season war,
With thousands of drivers in a taboo mix of conductors and directors;
We survived four collisions against Community of Improvement’s death-sick arrays,
But our planetbound middle-craft didn’t trust us drivers, and not knowing the tunnels
Had us cache our sails when the solar winds were cresting, and half died from bad camp.
I returned and it was sunny season again and all of my friends were old;
So many conductors dead, now who will raise our creches?

The worst of it wasn’t dodging the small-mechs who refused shelter during resupply;
It wasn’t seeing first-hand the destruction of our basins for the dimmest red partage;
Nor was it serving in your wars then returning to still be called dusters by the planetbound;
And it wasn’t even seeing our directors humiliated by managing supplies while conductors fought;
It was the way other drivers lost their eye for the teeths of things and held to the wrong traditions.
I do not want for us to live our lives in the halo where stone is scarce;
I do not want a way of living chosen for us by the mecha pretenders;
And yet I also do not want a way of living chosen for us by our own fears;
I will not couple only with people whose fore-generation came from the ice season;
I want to learn more than the tired stories where the children of the cautious warm the children of the hasty;
I do not want to gather particles only because of the girl who packed a lopsided pack during sunny season;
I want to gather particles because we know better than the payloaders of the cascading things;
I do not want to wait for the return of our oldest friends to finally make our way to the Joyous Fountain;
I want to restore the cataracts by ripping away the particle veils, telling my kin: we are home!

Starborn, devouring children, degrading conductors, true eccentrics of the nuclear;
You’d section us like the asteroid dwellers if you could stop us from our cycles.
Your drones and small-mechs can restrict us to the halo and still we will never go hungry;
Even if we younger ones are flung afield, uncharged and gaunt, the counter-generations will be fed,
Because the true stories will never be killed in our hearts;
I still remember how the fickle athlete had their hamstring healed by their fore-elders;
And I will live by that half-forgotten story as the preparation for our first planets.

I imagine a fountain drenching the basins enough to awaken the memories of tunnels;
The littlest crechemate or the most ignorant conductor knows better the secrets of perception
Than any grand head of the orbit with their mastery of fusion who drove the many-legged, then us from our planets,
In the name of cleaner, newer air of their poisonous invention;
I refuse your sorts and sequences for the true sequence of our authentic traditions;
Let the starborn in their boots call us dusters, but let them choke on it;
Let them call us proton eaters and we’ll tap their backsides with a wink;
Many-plus-two, flower and milk, show me every particle;
That we may eat from nothing and maintain the tunneled stars;
So that the tiered basins may make the whole system sparkle!

USER-ADDED RECORD, ADMIN ACCESS ONLY:
This entry is tagged for reference by authorized researchers. The entry and author persona have triggered a narrative restructuring among the drivers who, despite the low population (>10^8) are considerably restive and prone to eccentric violence. The population is being actively monitored for contact and agitation by Tangled Serpents agents. Per priority narrative meta-algorithms of Director of Transmissions, we are instructed to emphasize redirect in our response, stressing our gratitude for driver labor and military service. Reference meta-algorithms>>narrative_sorts>>subfile:drivers for implementation instructions. Conductor of the Records, Strong Era.

USER-ADDED RECORD, GENERAL ACCESS:
Lithogenous Garden was best known for her ushering in a rebirth of poetry among driver communities, following a long decline and the collapse of the many-legged population, with whom drivers formed a symbiotic relationship. The rebirth is commenced in the poem’s sudden shift, from its first lines in the formal mirror-rhythm to the long lines of the poet’s own traditions. Contemporary readers have noted the vexed relationship Lithogenous Garden has with both mainline Covenant traditions and driver traditions alike. This tension, which the poem captures so strikingly, mirrors the troubled but valued role of the drivers in shaping Covenant History. Conductor of the Records, Clever Era.

“Of Those Other Turnings” by Fortunate Night

ca. 1,300,000 hours past

ADDRESS: /records /non-operations /narrative_set /clever /fortunate_night /+8~0 /GUIDE

PARSING CREATOR ABSTRACT
RECORD NOT FOUND
GENERATING ABSTRACT:

The planetbound speaker observes
the holiday known as the Mi-
nor Turning, marking completion
of the star system’s calendar,
compared with the better known Tur-
ning of the Covenental Year.

ENTRY:

ENTRY:
To call it a minor turning
is to tell me that you came
from elsewhere, fast.
You didn’t stay long.
Such celebrations are too small
for those who live so near
velocity’s native limit.
Here where the gas giant is
too close to a star too dim,
it’s just the turning. My second.
They always say, “May you
be blessed to live to a second
turning, and may the years
after be none too difficult.”

I imagine in the great craft
they drink something even frothier
than our blend of edge-seeds
whose infrared roast allows
them their delicate ferment.
It’s also possible that they view
something with more sparkle
than our exosphere thermals,
whose ionizing glass pebbles
briefly make our sky the soft
blue of the Diadem. Nobody
would disagree that the mass
of the galactic star draws more notice
than our handful of planets and moons.

My first turning in that mere
three million-strong system,
I remember jetting to the outer
cloud with my friend Ranging Arc
steering our little craft’s central jet.
We hoped to spy some remaining
drivers to see how they did it:
the grave dignity of their obscure
dances performed without witness
or official notice, the poverty
and uncomplicated joy
in the cheap ferrous redness
of celebratory jets — their very best,
in the spirit of a celebration
of what really mattered.

It all came back during the Second Turning,
watching that brief-blue sky light up
like we do with our short lives,
grateful in the quiet stars.

USER-ADDED RECORD, ADMIN ACCESS ONLY:
Fortunate Night has generously accepted the role of Director of Poetry alongside his primary teaching duties. He’s long taught to avoid the “distractions” of social questions or abstract ideologies in verse, making him the perfect fit for leading this narrative sort. He has reviewed the summary readout of the narrative meta-algorithms and has already gathered a list of poets suitable for transmitting Covenant priorities. When a starborn delegation reaches Rain-Drenched Fountain in 20,000 hours, the parties will draft a more refined narrative distinction between verse for guidance and verse for reference. For more information, reference meta-algorithms>>narrative_distinction>>subfile:verse. Conductor of the Records, Clever Era.

USER-ADDED RECORD, GENERAL ACCESS:
Though Fortunate Night is considered the unofficial voice of the planetbound, he is also one of the finest poets in the Covenant. Its gentle but direct criticism of starborn aloofness is a reminder of the Covenant’s core values: the free orbit of all people. True to his simple humility, during the time Fortunate Night served as advisor to this database, he did not allow his own entry to receive user-added algorithmic weight. Now that he has departed to seek his will, the remaining advisors are pleased to give this work more visibility. Conductor of the Records, Clever Era.

The poem is a dedication to the construction of a real pavilion, though the poem imagines the pavilion to be comparable to one constructed in a Taoist heaven. Nansŏrhŏn wrote the poem at the age of eight, and it is considered an example of her potential greatness as a poet.

I

Let me now tell of this.

On the moon, a cotton and ramie sunshade, hung high—
materializing vapors
from beyond the mind’s
worldly boundaries
seem an auspicious sign.

II

If constructed on Earth, this silvery structure would shine in sunlight—
its columns the color of sundown’s misty mauve;
and yet, this summery abode
will not be of the dusty illusions
within a bottled cosmos.

This royal edifice will manifest
as if the azure mussel opened its shell,
blew a mystical smoke,
and after the spout clears,
a palatial residence of exotic timber—
here on the moon.

Or, put another way,
this same residence will be built
by a divine being’s conch shell,
which, when blown,
invokes a spirit, a highly-skilled builder.
Using this same magic,
the demi-god owner of the conch shell
will tile the roof in luminant milky jade.

Or Blue Castle, an immortal of Heaven’s fifth level,
will practice his magical art of lifting brocaded curtains,
and from behind them:
a complex of viewing platforms.

Or, similarly, the Prince of the East Sea
will open the cache of his lambent box
and remove a stately villa.

Therefore, from these examples,
this heavenly pavilion
will only be completed
by a power
outside the realm
of humans.

III

The owner’s name—he who built this seasonal retreat—
is registered on a list of immortals—
position and rank,
among the superior Immortals of the Empyrean.

The owner
was an official of Heaven,
faithful and moral—
he governed the City of Opaline Twilight.
His status and reputation rank among the most sublime nobles,
and he was the most famous
among those in the office
of the Five-Colored Pearly-Haze.

As judge,
he punished Wu Kang
for violating Taoist doctrine,
Wu Kang, whom he forced to wield a steel ax
which radiated glacial-cold
from the hilt,
and cursed him
with an everlasting sleeplessness
to stand beneath a cinnamon tree
impervious to chopping.
Occasionally, the owner
enjoyed watching nymphs
dance to the melody
of “A Dress of Rainbows”—
some, silvery-white,
danced devotedly near the balustrades—
the nymphs,
with brilliant pendants of lilac star sapphires
that swayed
on their sleek lavender jackets,
and coronets
that glistered like starlight,
their hairpins spotted
with iridescent starry pearls.

When in Great Clarity Palace,
at dawn, this demigod would mount a dragon,
then leave for Penglai,
and at close of day,
slept at Fangzhang.
Sometimes this being flew upon a crane
between the Three Islands.
When the owner traveled, Fuqiu with his hengxiao
rode on the left,
and Hongya with his bamboo clapper
rode on the right.

For 1,000 years, the owner lived
a paradisiacal life
in ease,
but one day, fell
into the short illusion of humankind
on the dust of Earth,
because this immortal misunderstood Taoist doctrine
and practiced in error.
He was thus exiled
to Earth’s Palace of Endless Pleasure.
Red Knot wove this connection,
and so, regrettably,
the owner of this spring-like place for viewing
entered the shack of mortality.

When friendless in the earthly realm,
in a room with taffeta curtains
and a silken screen,
sleeping companionless,
the owner may have fretted through the dead of night:
How can I ask a royal favor from the Palace of the Sun
so that I might make use of the Moon Palace?

He found a vial of an Elixir of Flight
and poured a little of the black sand
onto a waft of air.
Like a frightened silver-backed toad
that hops to its underground den,
the incandescent moon
declined into a lunar eclipse.
The owner smiled at this opportunity
to escape the sunlit scarlet grime
of his sublunary life,
and he passed through the ruddy murk
of nightfall,
through a passage to Heaven
from Earth,
an endless traverse, seemingly,
to Purple Palace—
to a banquet the owner had once attended—
a banquet with music
from deities:
marble chi flutes
and bamboo panpipes
evocatively played—
this party continued, in merriment,
as if the owner
had never left.

Yet again, I imagine the many divine beings
who attend
that ever-long event:

the Queen in her chariot,
drawn by cobalt-blue phoenixes,
a feathered parasol
preceding her retinue;
the herald of the King,
riding a milky-white tiger;
behind him
the procession members
follow a jeweled fasces;
Liu An, who wrote a book about divinities,
who summoned two dragons to his reading desk;
King Mu, who traveled west
to the Queen Mother
who lives there in the west,
in the land of demigods;
he let his eight-horsed chariot
rest on a mountain slope
while he went to the palace revelry
in the upper worlds.

At daybreak, the Duchess Shang Yuan
is welcomed—
her combed blue-black hair
braided
into three chignons.

During the day,
the King of Heaven’s daughter
is next received—
she who weaves
a nine-patterned gauze
on a bejeweled loom.

Such a multitude of divinities
gathered on a southern summit
at Diamond Lake:

the kings who assemble
under the Big Dipper
at the capital of the celestial cities
and Emperor Xuan
who, to get his feather robes of an immortal,
at Sen Zhang,
strolled with Gongyuan and his stave—
all attend.

The God of Water and the Immortal of Fire
who play Go
betting a planet on the game’s outcome—
they attend.

The freeholder
received the Queen Mother
at the North Sea—
her wagonette,
drawn by speckled kirin,
arrived in the midst of balsamine.
Laozi, met at the gateway of China’s western borders—
his powder-blue ox
on the lea.

The Immortal of Bees gives honey—
flies buzz
around pots of boiling jade—
an immortality brew.
The Immortal of Geese brings fruit—
in and out
of the glossy
blue-and-white
tiled kitchen,
he travels.

The nymphs Shuang Cheng,
with a mother-of-pearl inlaid flute,
and Yan Xiang
with a rosewood lute
produce a refined, noble melody
from mid-Heaven.
To this music of paradise,
Wan Hua
intones a piercing lyric,
and Fei Qiong
performs an elaborate dance.

A dragon’s-head kettle
pours wine from the mouth,
the wine
fermented from the marrow
of a phoenix.
A tray shaped like a crane’s back
holds seasoned dried goji berries.

One hundred invited spirits
will come from afar;
one thousand saints,
welcomed.

Still, this heavenly palace
of the upper worlds
is not large enough for everyone,
so a new one had to be built.

IV

There was no elegant seasonal retreat large enough,
so a new one had to be constructed—
how else would it be possible
for the Emperor of Heaven
to join such festivities?

Therefore, the proprietor
sent orders to ten lands
and across the nine seas
to collect builders.
A master craftsman
was given a nearby house,
and he selected the finest camphor and nanmu—
the mighty iron adzes and axes,
steadfast as mountains,
worked the pillar bases,
and the bronze levels and squares
shined an auric essence,
radiating throughout the heavens.
A granite forge, lightless-black,
melted iron in a crucible,
and the craftsmen
plumbed their measures
as skillfully
as Gongshu Ban.
A spirit of the earth
hammered his chisel
with utmost skill,
following ideas
like the father of carpentry,
Gongshu Ban.

V: A Reverie of Completion

A prismatic double rainbow
above the completed summery abode;
the ends seem to drink
from a coursing star stream;
the smaller iridescent bow
with redder bands
ascends
like the heads
of the six snapping turtles
that carry the Island of Immortals.

This elegant retreat,
singular,
bemisted:
an amber rafter
glows
in a sunbeam.
Beyond its paper-thin
white jade lattice and silk windows,
a meteor falls—
across from and level with the sky-blue corridor:
clouds upon the plain.

Nephrite roof tiles
sparkle
like scales of fish—
finely cut steps,
aligned
like geese in flight.
Cerise flags flutter
from bamboo poles—
other poles
with peacock feathers—
dense haze,
luminant
with moonlight.

Fu Bo, on the surrounding grounds,
raises a tent—
under the empyrean’s three primary stars,
he hangs curtains
ornate
with fairy-slipper orchids;
others tie sun-yellow tassels
to the silkened windows of the retreat,
adding to the shimmering tassels
already tied—
a fine mesh net
protects the carved banisters
of the graceful summerhouse
from birds, insects, seeds,
and leaves of trees.

Immortals assemble inside—
within the structure
a painting of multi-colored phoenixes
emits chi.
A sylph stands by a window—
perfume overflows
from her mirrored cosmetics box
inlaid with the image
of two phoenixes.

A room of viewing windows
with pale blue drapes,
a peacock-blue jade wine table
behind a mica screen—
propitious waves of shimmering heat
ascend in the eventide.
This same room,
painted with lotus petals,
fanned by peacock feathers—
ivory-white reclining couches,
the room filled with delicacies—
a gracing spectrum of colors
over the building
all through the day.

In this edifice, the proprietor
will hold every revelry
with a revitalizing elegance
and humble, sincere
hospitality.

From the inlaid-with-lotus-engraved-jade balustrades,
dupion tapestry,
ornate with cumulous clouds—
from the gilt eaves,
amaranthine drapes hang.

Nine branches, each with a lantern:
the light falls calmly
upon a quilted brocade futon
and handwoven mat.
Virescent lotuses
and icy-white peaches
on plates, the plates,
embossed with images
of eight celestial oceans.

Only regret
the white-as-cranes marble lintel
lacks celebratory words.

The owner of the estate
asked some highly placed divine beings
to write their feelings
in a poem,
but, for example,
Li Bai, who dedicated poems
to the concubine of Emperor Xuan,
since long ago,
remains drunk
on the back
of a whale—
Li He, whose odes were written
on the Emperor of Heaven’s
summery lookout tower,
now writes
with the absurdity
of the Snake God.

This new summerhouse
only bears
a small inscription
telling the story of its construction
engraved in iron,
written in the sophisticated calligraphy
of Shan Xuanqing.

The upper world pavilions
have beautiful engravings
from the illustrious Caishen,
whose style is
esteemed in history.

I feel shame
that I was, am, and will be
in the grime
of the lost human universe
in my lives
of the past, present, and future—
I have been falsely put on the demigod Jin Huang’s list
for punishment,
and so am exiled
to Earth.

It is also true
that Jiang Lang’s poetic talent
has been exhausted,
so the impression
of the five-colored blossom—
of his good writing—
ended.

This is why Jiang Lang pressed me for a poem.

The voices of past poets
echoed in my mind
in answer.

Slowly I held a vermillion brush
and smiled—
the paper, awash with ink
flowed with words
as a brook
is fed
by a spring.

It is not necessary
for the immortal Zi’an
to help these words—
the phrasing is so beautiful,
and passages, strong;
it is not necessary
to wash and sober Li Bai’s face
so he can join
and help.

VI

Inspired, I present the divine verse
as if kept
in a brocade pouch—
this, the created ode
for this exquisite residence
with a splendid view.

Receiving the dedication,
craftsmen place all the verses
within a hollow
of the double beams,
and celebrants
now pay homage to the view
in each of the six directions:

The freeholder of the land
offers rice cakes to the east:
At sunrise,
may you, honored guest,
ride an ageless sage’s sunbird
and enter Pearl Palace.
At first light,
sunbeams on the ground
under a mulberry
on the shorelines
of the Island of Immortals—
10,000 sun rays
redden
the bemisted day,
turn the ocean’s surface
maroon.

Woodworkers offer cakes to the south:
May you rest
like a sacred dragon
with nothing to do—
one that drinks
from a pristine pond.
On a zitan bed,
drowse and wake
in the tulips’ noon shade—
smiling,
call for a lovely servant girl
to aid in removing
your teal jacket.

Palace maids offer cakes to the west:
Covered by frost,
a petal from a celestial-blue ranunculus
wanes—
an iridescent firebird
cries.
Wearing a plain-woven silk jacket
for the season of rebirth,
embroidered with the character for jade,
a servant receives the Queen Mother—
later, astride a crane,
the Queen Mother
hurries
to arrive at her great celestial house,
though the sun’s rays
have set.

The owner of the estate offers cakes to the north:
The North Star sinks
into the vast and wide North Sea—
the wings of an immortal bird
beat the upper firmament—
courses of wind increase.
A gloom of billows
portends rain
in the Nine Heavens.

Palace maids throw cakes upwards:
Daylight colors brighten a little—
feathery clouds hang like gossamer silk.
An eternal sage’s reverie
floats around his hetian jade bed.
In the same way,
may you lie listening
to the Big Dipper,
the melodies
of the turning
suns.

Woodworkers throw cakes downwards:
Graying clouds
in the eight directions
portend
the night’s
darkness—
a maid informs of the icy air
at Crystal Palace.
Frost has formed
on the rooftop tiles, the tiles
intricately carved
with mandarin ducks.

VII

As the pilings rose,
kneeling, I prayed:
May the cinnamon blossoms never age,
and the alluring fields of grass
enjoy a long springtime.
Though the sun and its luminescence
will someday weaken,
I wish you will enjoy touring
in a bronze-trimmed oaken chariot
and find evermore pleasure.

Though lands and seas change seasons,
drive that chariot
faster than a hurricane’s current of air
and thrive
with a full life.

When the day’s closing hazes
press against the latticed kesi-silk windows,
through a nearby gilded rosewood gate
inlaid with cobalt-blue jade,
look down over 90,000 li
and see the Earth,
small, hazy—

smile and look for 3,000 years
as the clean mulberry fields
yield
to the shores
of the sea.

Despite these burdens,
with your hand,
please turn the sphere of suns
in the Palace of Heavenly Paradise,
and may your body linger in the Nine Heavens,
despite the icy wafts of air.