That Was Hers – 4

Aspen aims a kick at the woman’s chest and her foot finds the soft place above her mouth instead.

The woman’s teeth meet with a small click. Her head snaps back, blond hair loosening from its twist, and all four green wings fling open before her heels have finished slipping.

Air strikes Aspen from the first downward beat. She retreats from it, snatching her foot back and getting both hands up in front of her. The upper wings at her back spread to hold her away. The lower pair draw close to her legs. The wing the woman touched does neither.

It remains extended across the space Aspen has made, its nearest raised branch still turned toward the hand that is no longer there. Aspen hauls at the muscles under her shoulder blade. The other three answer with a hard inward pull. That one gives a small shiver at the root and eases another fraction toward the woman. Something cold pulls beneath Aspen’s sternum. “I said don’t touch me.”

The woman lands beside the tray. One heel clips its edge, sending the cup into the bowl with a wooden knock, but she keeps upright. For a second she only stares at Aspen over the hand pressed beneath her nose. Her mouth hangs slightly open, and the water along her lower eyelids catches aqua from the mushrooms.

Red gathers against the rim of her nostrils. It holds there in a round, glossy bead while a finer blue-green wetness spreads beside it. She looks down just as both begin to run. Her palm rises beneath them.

“Uh, sorry, I didn’t mean all of that—” Aspen begins and stops when the blood runs dark.

A red drop runs along her hand, the aqua wetness stretching after it. At the heel of her palm, both colors darken. Black spreads inward until neither remains. Another red bead is already forming beneath her nose.

Aspen forgets the sentence in her mouth as the woman’s fingers remain half open, held in the shape of the reach Aspen interrupted. Black wetness coats the joints of her fingers and continues.

Five narrow, dark lengths extend from her hand, not downward with the blood’s weight but across the gap toward Aspen. Each begins exactly where a finger ends. The smallest falters in the air. Another angles toward the membrane, corrects, and finds the raised orange branch the woman had touched. The others follow, spreading toward separate points along the same painted support.

The orange wing loosens, branch rotating into their path. Green and red tilt through the light as the body offers the blood a little more of itself.

The woman makes a sound through her nose. Her mouth draws tight, and the four wings that saved her from falling pull so close to her that their edges overlap. She slaps her clean hand over the bloody one. The black lengths crush between her palms and disappear there, leaving a dark line to squeeze out beneath one thumb. She folds both hands into a single fist and holds it against the center of her chest. Aspen’s wing stops. It does not return.

“What the fuck was that?”

“Mine.” The woman’s voice is muffled, thickened by the blood she is trying not to pull back into her throat. She keeps her fist against herself and takes one careful step away. “My blood won’t touch-t you.”

Another bead swells red beneath her nose. Aspen watches it because she cannot look away, and the park returns in pieces: the proper green leaf in her old palm, already severed from its tree; her blood resting red at the center. Hers had stayed red.

The woman wipes her nose with the back of her wrist. Red and aqua streak the skin, then blacken where the wetness gathers away from her face. She sees Aspen watching. Her jaw hardens.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have touched you.”

Aspen presses her hands against her own ribs to stop their shaking. “I, uh, yeah, I didn’t mean to make you bleed. I just—who are you? No, why… where am I?”

The woman’s gaze returns to her face. It does not begin the old route through hair, wings, hands. It remains on Aspen’s eyes long enough that Aspen feels the effort required to keep it there.

“You really don’t know me.”

“I’ve been saying that.”

“I know.”

The last word closes hard. The woman looks once at the wing still extended between them, then away. She backs up with each foot placed flat and exact. Only several paces away does she loosen the fist against her chest. Nothing reaches out. She closes it again.

Something passes beyond the green curtain. The cloth bows into the room, lifting a finger-width above the floor before its weighted edge settles. A second disturbance follows farther out, then the low, layered sound of wings moving through open space. Voices rise from somewhere below, indistinct but multiplying. One calls across the hollow and another answers from far enough away that the living wood thins the reply. The warmth under Aspen’s bare feet changes with a long movement deep inside the tree. The woman looks toward the curtain. Aspen looks at her.

“First light,” the woman says.

Aspen’s spine straightens. Her weight shifts onto the balls of her feet before she decides whether she would run at the woman or toward the wall.

The woman flinches and turns her attention to the curtain. “I’m closing it.” She waits with her clean hand held where Aspen can see it.

Aspen does not lower her hands, but after a moment she gives one short nod. The woman crosses along the far curve of the room, and with her clean hand she catches the green cloth and draws it fully across the opening. The cloudy weights knock softly against the wood. The voices outside dull. She does not call to any of them.

When she turns, her eyes stop above Aspen’s head. Her shoulders lift without a breath. “What is that?”

Aspen follows the fixed line of her gaze to the moth embedded in the curved black wall. Against the black wood, its gray deepens where the plush body disappears into the grain.

The woman leaves the curtain but comes no closer to Aspen. She moves sideways until she can see the moth without taking Aspen entirely out of view. “Do you know what it is?”

Aspen bites her lip before responding. “Yeah. It’s, uh, my thing. My… moth plushy.”

The woman looks from the gray toy to Aspen. “What is a moth?”

Aspen waits for the woman to smile or correct herself. She does neither. Her eyes remain on the gray shape above the pale silk, then return to Aspen with the same strained attention she gave the missing smell.

“A moth,” Aspen repeats. “It’s a—”

Her gaze catches on the four green wings behind the woman. The upper pair have lifted slightly from her back; the lower two are folded close enough to overlap at the edges. Aspen looks from them to the orange surfaces occupying the room behind her, then farther: the low stool with nothing rising behind it, the tray made shallow enough to pass beneath a wing, the opening covered by cloth instead of a door that would have to swing through somebody’s body. Black wood has grown around every root and curve, aqua caught along its grain. Even the woman’s clothing begins again on the other side of four deliberate gaps.

Until now, ordinary words have at least meant the same thing. Then Qimmo comes back to her—the word the woman used as though Aspen ought to know it.

“It’s a bug,” Aspen says. “It has wings. Not like—well, kind of like yours. Are we even in Georgia?”

The woman glances at her own wings, and something begins trembling high in Aspen’s back. At first it is fine enough to feel like cold beneath the skin. Then the upper pair catch the motion and beat in place, too shallow to lift her but fast enough that their raised branches blur at the edges. The two lower wings join a moment later.

Aspen takes a step backward. The wings follow without stopping. “No—I’m stupid. You have wings. There aren’t moths here. How could this be Georgia? Or… Earth?”

The woman does not come closer. Her clean hand lifts a little and remains near her chest, open where Aspen can see it. “What’s wrong?”

Aspen looks past her at the weighted curtain, at the curved wall without a corner. The stool is not a chair with its back removed, and the curtain is not a door that failed to harden. Each is complete around wings. Along the wall, her moth smiles from inside the wood. They both look at it.

Is this actually—but then how am I supposed to get back home?

“Everything ulward that place was gray,” the woman says.

Aspen flinches. “What? What place? And what is ulward?”

“The dream.” The woman’s eyes move to the heartwood enclosing the moth. “Just like that thing, everything below it had no color except one figure. It was red.” The buzzing catches in Aspen’s lower wings, breaks, then starts again faster.

“It or-climbed toward Lyra,” the woman continues. Her voice has begun to fray around the name. “She thought she gave it somewhere to go.” She looks from Aspen to the gray toy in the wall, and then back at Aspen.

“N—No.” Aspen answers before the question has finished entering her. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“Then why do you recognize that thing?” Her clean hand points to the moth. The words rise despite the care she has taken to not move closer. “That must be from where you came from.”

“Well, yes, but it didn’t look like that—and I didn’t do anything!”

“What did it look like?”

“Blue.” Aspen looks up again, needing the color to be hiding somewhere in the folds of gray cloth. “My moth was blue. It had color.”

For several breaths, neither of them speaks. The woman’s finger lowers. She looks at the toy as though blue might return if she approaches the fact from another direction.

“They did this,” Aspen says. The claim steadies nothing, so she says it again. “The fairies did this. They’ve been taking my memory. I used to feel déjà vu at first, and then it kept happening, and the sky led to the treehouse because they wanted me there. They must have wanted me there.”

The woman’s brow draws inward. “The what?”

“The fairies.” Aspen points at the gray moth. Her wings begin to calm. “They can copy things. Look at it. That antenna was already bent. The thread was already loose. If they can make all of that, then the hand—” Mother’s thumbnail had been chipped in one corner. The hand had known exactly where to touch.

“The hand might not have been hers,” Aspen says. Her voice narrows until she almost cannot force it through the unfamiliar throat. “They made it look like my mom, and, uh, she even has red nails. You saw something red too.”

“What are fairies?”

Aspen stares at her. The woman’s upper wings have lifted farther from her back. “What are they? You know what took Lyra?”

“They’re—” Aspen looks at the four green wings, then at her face. “Things with wings.”

The woman’s mouth tightens.

“No. I mean, I thought you were one, but you…”

Aspen freezes. The answer should be older than the question.

She reaches for the first time she used the word. She finds the notebook already open beneath her hand, the word already written. She finds herself saying it to Jamie as though she has supplied an explanation. Before that, another blank space. No figure between the trees. No wings disappearing behind the treehouse. No small body, no light, no voice naming itself.

Why fairies? Why not ghosts, someone following her, sleepwalking, something wrong inside her own head? She used to think about those things, but every memory in which she asks what is happening already contains the answer she gave it. The name always arrived first. It was the same type of knowing as the one that told her the sky was a deep blue.

“I don’t know,” Aspen says. The woman’s gaze does the old route halfway and stops.

“I never saw them.”

Aspen hears the sentence in the wrong voice and knows it is true. Her wings start again, buzzing hard enough to drive air along both arms. The cloth at the opening breathes against its weights. A winged shape had been waiting inside the explanation long before she woke among people who possessed one, and the first winged person she finds does not know what either a fairy or a moth is.

The gray toy’s bent antenna points down at Aspen. Its stitched mouth curves without changing.

Her wings buzz hard enough to drive air along both arms. Aspen pulls against the vibration until three stop. The lower left continues alone for several beats before jerking inward.

“Uh.” She swallows. “This might sound crazy, but do colors here do things?”

The woman blinks at the change. “What kind of things?”

“Anything. Tell people things. Move. Point somewhere. I mean, you saw red and I saw red before this all happened.”

“Colors carry things.” Her eyes move briefly over the green and red lines painted across Aspen’s wings. “What are you asking?”

Aspen does not know how to explain the sky opening blue over the treehouse without making the procedure sound as thin as it suddenly feels. The woman’s gaze rises from the painted wings and catches for a fraction of a second beside Aspen’s temple.

Aspen follows it. Her fingers enter the unfamiliar hair and find a smooth hard bead hanging near her cheek, translucent blue bound in a loop of green thread.

“Don’t,” the woman says.

Aspen pulls. The green thread draws tight across two fingers. Something hard and red tugs sharply at her scalp, pulling several strands to their roots. She jerks again. The thread slips free, bringing the blue bead into her palm while a red pin remains caught in the disturbed hair.

The woman starts forward. Aspen puts one arm across the space between them. The movement drives a single beat through her upper wings, scattering the last orange dust across the silk. The woman stops so abruptly that her own wings open to take the momentum. She does not reach across Aspen’s arm.

The bead is warming in Aspen’s palm. Green thread lies over the creases of a hand without her cut. She went to the treehouse herself. She followed the blue sign, brought the colors, scraped one into the triangle, and told whatever waited there to show itself. It did, but she still got no answers.

Whatever the bead does, Aspen tells herself, it will prove only that the bead did it. Not that it knows. Not that it is telling the truth. She will ask, then test it. Then test it again. Heat gathers behind her eyes. She blinks it back and curls her fingers around the only procedure she has left.

“Cloud if I did this to myself.”

The blue bead remains clear. No whiteness gathers in its center. It neither warms nor cools beyond the heat of her hand, and the green thread lies slack across her palm. Aspen waits. The first breath hurts. The next travels all the way down.

Her mouth smiles before she has decided there is anything safe enough to smile about. Her shoulders lower; the four wings settle into their own weight behind her, three together and the last a beat afterward.

I didn’t.

Jamie is somewhere outside this room waiting to be found. She kept him home and safe. The treehouse closes around the simpler shape of a trap. She was just a victim. That sounded good.

The bead shifts when sweat moves beneath it. She looks down. It is still blue. Still a bead. Nothing inside the blue has answered—not even enough to refuse her. She crouches, holds her palm a short distance above the curved floor, and lets the green thread hang.

It can’t be.

“Come back if you’re answering me.”

She releases it.

The bead strikes heartwood and rolls away. The grain sends it left and it wobbles into a wide curve. It rolls until the pale floor-cloth catches it in a loose fold. It never turns. The smile leaves her mouth.

The woman waits until Aspen stands and both of her hands are visible. Then she lowers herself beside the silk, the fist containing her blackened blood still held against her chest. With her free hand, she parts the fold and lifts the bead by its green thread. It remains blue against her palm.

“That was hers.”

The red pin pulls at Aspen’s scalp where the rest of the ornament used to hang. The woman is looking at the bead, but when she raises her eyes, they settle on the face beneath the empty thread. Aspen lowers the arm she had held between them.

“I—I needed it to answer.”

The woman’s fingers close around the bead until only a blue edge shows. “Why would it answer you?” The lower wings pull tighter against her legs on the last word.

Aspen looks at the moth. Sweetness gathers at the back of her tongue. A blueberry skin gives beneath teeth that have bitten nothing, releasing the same memory of the cloying juice that had meant Jamie was safe because nothing was coming for him. She swallows and the sweetness remains.

“And blue isn’t what answers,” the woman says. “It’s what comes back.”

The blue opening in the clouds returns first. Then the pens stained blue, mold around the floor-gap, the moth pointing toward her, Mother’s hand rising through it. She had taken each as a voice answering.

That’s what it seemed to do.

Aspen looks at the gray moth again. The woman said everything beneath the hatch was gray.

“Were there people without wings?”

The woman goes still. “What?”

“In that dream.”

The woman doesn’t answer, but Aspen doesn’t need her to. Her next breath stops halfway. Her eyes travel to the fist held against the woman’s chest.

The woman’s blood had left her skin and lost its color at once, leaving only wet blackness and the shape of a reach—the same black as the wood around them. But this tree had not gone black. It had been black and warm when Aspen woke. She had watched the blood become it.

Above them, the moth has crossed farther than any of those things and kept its bent antenna, loose thread, flattened middle, every pale stitched dot. Everything except its blue.

Leaving was not enough.

She looks down at the narrow fingers flexing near her waist. The skin remains pale and spotless where yesterday's cut should be. “What was the red thing doing?”

The woman does not answer immediately. Her thumb moves once across the blue bead inside her hand. “It pushed a seat hanging between two chains. The seat was empty.” The weight of Jamie’s swing gathers against Aspen’s palms, chains pulling forward as her shoulders extend.

“Then it laid its hand over something I couldn’t see,” the woman continues. “About here.” She raises the hand with the bead no higher than a child’s head. “It smoothed once.”

Aspen’s hands begin to tremble.

The woman notices the movement. Her voice lowers. “After that, it held something between its hands and tore it. I couldn’t see what it held, but a yellow vein broke first.”

The park exit returns around her with no path leading to it. She remembers her hand is already leaving Jamie’s hair. She looks down at this hand and imagines the red figure’s hand laid over it, color filling the pale fingers and continuing a fraction past their edges. That hand pushes Jamie. It smooths his hair. It closes around the proper green leaf and pulls until the yellow vein gives. She blinks. Moisture shifts across her eyes, and the red she supplied herself goes with it.

It did this. It did everything.

“Did—did that Lyra girl know any of this?”

The woman does not answer. The bead lies blue inside one hand, the other closed black against her chest. Her lips part. Her gaze leaves Aspen’s eyes and passes over the mouth, the hair, the red pin still caught above the temple, then returns to the eyes without a word.

Aspen lowers her gaze. Her hand hangs open between them, narrow at the wrist, pale enough for the veins to show, clean where yesterdays cut should be. The red figure no longer lies over it. Only a tremor passes from one finger into the next. She folds those fingers down until the nails leave four red crescents in her palm.

The palm.

Lyra’s palm.

It has to die.

She’ll strangle it with whatever hand works best.