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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The old men watch as the children whirl past.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now you die, you bastardos!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He shakes a warning finger at the fat man.

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

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

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

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

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

For a time, the two men eat in silence.

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

“Sunflower seeds, jefe?”

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

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

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

Raul snorts and shakes his head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What the hell are you talking about?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paco shrugs and grins.

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

“What, you mean like magic?”

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

 Raul laughs long and hard.

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

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

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

“Where?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Buenas tardes, señores.”

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

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

“Si, very long.”

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

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

“They call me El Antílope.”

The two are standing now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raul laughs and waves his hands.

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

Then El Antílope chimes in.

 “Lack of virgins was a widespread problem.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Si, jefe, luck saved us many times.”

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

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

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

Raul and Paco lean in to hear his words.

“Years ago, I met La Llorona.”

“Dios mío, you met The Weeping Woman?”

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

Paco waves the bottle in the dark.

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

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

“Did you fight her?”

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

Paco passes him the bottle and sighs.

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

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

Paco laughs aloud.

“What’s so funny, Paco?”

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

El Antílope raises his hand in a solemn oath.

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

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

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

He waves the bottle at the night sky.

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

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

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

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

“I remember! Dios mio, I remember!”

“What do you remember?”

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

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

“Welcome back, Miguel.”

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

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

Calypso flies for days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fuck.”

“I do well with trust.”

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

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

“Goddamn it. You can trust me.”

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

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

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

“What the fuck do you think?”

He is nonplussed. “Have you been meditating?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I told you to rest.”

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

“I’ve been sleeping like a baby.”

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

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

“You don’t pay me at all.”

“I’ve paid you some.”

“You don’t pay me what you owe me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is this?” Calypso asks.

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

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

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

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

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

“How was that?” the sage asks.

“Get the fuck off me,” says Calypso.

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

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

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

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

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

“Like bits of my brain?”

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

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

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

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

“Nope. I never knew my dad.”

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

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

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

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

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

“If you say so.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Calypso wakes, her eyes are stained with tears.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You have the payment?”

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

“How?”

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

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

“Move it.”

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

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

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

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

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

Calypso makes a swipe for the potion and misses.

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

“Fuck. I’m sorry.”

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

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

“It’s a lot of money, Calypso.”

“Fuck.”

“I’d like the money now.”

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

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

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

“Do you trust his promises?”

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

“Can I trust your promises?”

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

“My patience is wearing thin.”

“You can trust me.”

“Tell me something to build my trust.”

“The money’s on its way.”

“How did your daughter die?”

“Fuck you.”

“Let’s trust each other.”

“I’ll bring coffee with the bagel.”

“Calypso.”

“Cancer. Leukemia.”

“Did she suffer?”

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

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

“Go to hell.”

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

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

“Did your daughter have to go through chemotherapy?”

“Fuck.”

“Calypso.”

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

“But your husband left?”

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

“Thank you for sharing, Calypso.”

“You’re sick in the head.”

“I feel certain I can trust you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s a lot of sap!”

“Damn straight, a lot of fucking sap!”

“A windfall.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That was last night.”

“You had a hard time sleeping?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No. No, no no.”

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

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

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

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

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

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

“Give me the potion.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I paid for the first potion.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll take that risk.”

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

“So, fucking administer it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I am a sage. I understand.”

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

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

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

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

“Then you know I killed my own daughter.”

“Yes.”

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

“The good outweighs the bad, Calypso.”

“No. This is all wrong.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I forgive you.”

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

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

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

“And I’m almost there.”

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.

enchantments. I wake up
full of myself like the earth,

full of the sun. The room,
full of my shadow & full of

my fear. The world is upside
down. And gravity levitates.

Levity gravitates. In this
world of mine, the sun falls.

& the rain rises. Morning’s
yellow glory sits at my

windowsill like a bird. On
the wall of my room, I make

a list of all my nouns. &
erase every one that pronouns’

pronounce me dead. In the
cavity of my mouth, my

teeth sit in the socket of
my alveolar process like

the keys of a piano. & my
tongue is the pianist. It plays

to an empty room. Emptiness
is a big audience. It sings along.

Night rises. & darkness goes
up on the earth. And I’m down

on the cloud with the moon
& the stars— shining until

we are out of light.

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

But that wasn’t all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is that a ribbon?” I asked.

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

“Where does it go?”

“To the moon.”

“To the moon?”

“To the moon.”

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

“So it doesn’t float away.”

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

“There are rules,” the girl said.

“I don’t like rules,” I said.

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

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

“There are three.”

“What are they?”

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

“It’s full, isn’t it?”

“The moon balloon cannot be pulled or released.”

“I won’t.”

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

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

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

I hesitated. “How long will that be?”

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

I didn’t move.

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

“Is it always a girl?”

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

“How can you know that?”

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

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

“I’ll take it,” I said.

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

“I have it,” I said.

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

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

“You miss her,” I said.

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

“But she isn’t,” I said.

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

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“No. But you will.”

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

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

“I’d like that.”

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

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

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

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess you are.”

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

“Do you feel her?”

I nodded.

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

I didn’t say anything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are you holding?”

“I called it a ribbon.”

“Where does it go?”

“To the moon.”

“To the moon?”

“To the moon.”

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

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

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

I knocked on the door.

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

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

“The moon,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Chinni?” Vimala asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Items Received in Sitaara Village:

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

Items Promised:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Field Note: 1

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

Field Note: 2

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

Field Note: 3

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

Field Note: 4

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

A Sari:

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

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

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

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

“A new beat?”

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

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

“Paths cut both ways.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subject: Community Engagement Updates —  Sitaara Site

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

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

Ma,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love, A.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subject: Local Recruitment Initiative — Preliminary Notes

Candidate Noor demonstrates unusual pattern recognition.

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

Candidate Saavi shows aptitude for mechanical restoration.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subject: Visitor Center Textile —  Interpretive Copy

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

Add a donor plaque.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subject: Community Signal Bell

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

Action: No action. (For once.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to Sitaara Launch and Learning Center!

Learn how humanity stitches Earth to sky!

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

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

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