Author's Preface
The second curtain closes beneath Aspen’s hand. Its weighted edge reaches the black floor and leaves two narrow openings where the cloth rises over the curve. Through both rooms, dulled first by the outer curtain and then by this one, the words continue.
“Let Hermit close.”
Each repetition begins at a different distance. The chorus is already coming apart—one voice near the terrace, another lower in the hollow, another so late Aspen nearly supplies it herself—but every voice arrives inside the same shape Hierophant put around her. The curtains soften the consonants first, then the words themselves, but the title continues tightening around the same place beneath Aspen’s ribs.
Aspen keeps her palm against the curtain. Something wet draws over the back of her wrist. One of the black threads from her wing-eyes lies across the curtain silk and passes through the opening near the wall; two more vanish beneath the weighted edge; the fourth disappears where the curtain gathers beside the wall, reaching into the room beyond it. She does not know how to make them stop. She can feel the pull of each thread only when the curtain changes its direction. The curtain is not enough.
She drags all four wings inward. The upper pair answer first, their membranes folding toward her back. The folded floor-silk still lies over the stool’s seat. Aspen lifts it without opening it and places it against the wall. Orange dust remains sealed between its layers. Then she shoves the stool sideways against the middle of the curtain. One leg lands where the floor begins to curve into the wall and hangs a finger-width above the wood. The stool rocks when she releases it.
“Let Hermit close.”
The shallow bowl is still on the disordered tray. Aspen crouches, slides it beneath the lifted leg, and presses until the wooden foot settles inside. The bowl tips under the pressure but holds. She wedges the tray diagonally between the stool’s legs and the curtain. Its lower corner skids along the grain. The cup rolls against her knuckles, forcing her to catch it before it can strike the floor, and for a moment she has to stand there holding a cup while human-shaped moths outside turn her disappearance into ceremony. She jams it into the space behind the tray. The cup fills almost none of it.
The largest opening remains where the curtain rises over the root-like swell in the heartwood. Aspen pushes the folded silk into it. The cloth accepts the curve better than the furniture did, but compressing one side makes another loosen. A narrow slit remains above it. Aspen retrieves a jar from the floor and pushes its rounded side into the opening. The curtain closes against its middle and rises along both edges. One gap becomes two. She stares at them. They are horrible.
Somebody would have to pass the first curtain, cross the main room, move a curtain, and step over a stool and a jar.
There are other things in the room. Aspen knows that by the number of interruptions waiting at the edge of her sight, and she refuses to turn any of them into objects. Her gaze travels from the familiar rim of the bowl to the cocoon’s raised edge and skips everything between. Once, her hand rises toward a shape resting beside the wall. Her fingers stop before their shadow reaches it and close against her palm. One upper wing draws nearer to her back.
Whatever the thing is, Lyra would have known where to hold it. Which side could bear weight. Whether touching it would make it open, spill, bend, or answer. Aspen does not look long enough to inherit another question. The stool, tray, cup, bowl, folded silk, and paint jar are things she has already touched. For now, that is enough.
She lifts the curtain’s edge. The main room waits beyond the barricade. Aqua mushrooms cup light beneath the low table. Aspen squeezes through, and every wing turns edgewise before she thinks about the width of the passage. The upper right lifts clear of the tray. Both lower wings overlap along her legs. The delayed one folds just in time to miss the stool.
She grabs a table by its nearest edge and drags. It was grown low enough that wings can pass above it and broad enough for several people to sit around without crowding one another’s membranes. Its legs curve with the floor instead of meeting it squarely. Aspen pulls it backward through the opening, stopping twice because a wing clears the opening by folding directly into the table’s path.
The table strikes the stool. The bowl gives a small wooden complaint. Aspen leans her full weight against the opposite edge and forces the pieces together. The construction occupies most of the opening now: table against stool, stool above bowl, tray caught crosswise, cup jammed behind one leg, the jar held inside the folded silk. Nothing meets anything at the correct angle.
The curtain changes shape around the furniture. Four separate pulls travel back to the wing-eyes. The upper pair begin opening toward them, meet the table and wall, and draw tight before Aspen forces them inward again.
She steps back. For one second she lets herself look at it as one thing instead of all the failures that made it.
Table.
Stool.
Tray.
Bowl.
Cup.
Folded silk.
Jar.
The table’s broad edge crosses the whole curtain. The stool is wedged beneath it at an angle no stool was meant to stand. One leg sits inside the shallow bowl, forcing its rim crooked against the floor; the opposite leg presses into silk. The tray runs diagonally behind both, one corner buried against the curtain, the other caught under the table. The cup has become nothing but a plug in a space too irregular for a cup. Folded silk swells around the root-like curve in the wall with the jar inside it, cloth pulled so tight across the rounded glass that she can see the shape without seeing the object.
And an inch of space still survives beside the curtain weight. Another opens beneath the tray whenever the cloth breathes.
The whole barricade is larger than either gap, but the gaps contain what matters because every object in front of them has failed to stop whatever might pass through. The opening contains the stool. The room contains the opening. The living tree contains the room and every terrace built into its hollow. The dark interior contains people at distances Aspen cannot measure, and somewhere past the heartwood is the place from which Hierophant keeps seeing the crying face. Whatever looks from there contains the whole arrangement beneath its regard. Aspen searches for the frame around even that gaze, and then for whatever might exist beyond it. Home does not appear.
The scale does not stop. Any enclosure she reaches becomes one smaller thing inside the next. The tree is not an outside. The hollow is not an outside. A slit beside the table matters as much as the rooms around it because sight needs only one relation that continues. The barricade shrinks without moving, becoming a little pile of objects inside a place that can still be held by something larger. Pain presses in Aspen’s wing-eyes, but those are not places she can reach.
She folds until her knees strike the floor. One wing hits the table’s edge. The pain from its raised branch reaches her shoulder blade, but it also gives the room one exact point. Aspen lowers farther. Her face comes within a hand’s width of the heartwood.
At this distance, the floor can be only the patch of black beneath her hand. One ridge rises beneath her index finger. A shallow groove beside it holds a bead of sweat from her palm. Heat crosses her palm from below, not as sunlight, but as warmth already inside the material. When Aspen shifts her fingertip, the grain continues farther than she touches. Its edge stays clean. She moves her hand back. The patch remains instead of softening into the next ridge merely because she cannot decide what it means.
Her breath reaches the wood and returns faintly warmer. Aspen follows one line of grain from the base of her thumb to the edge of her palm, then follows it again. The distances that opened beneath Emperor narrow until the relevant world fits between both hands. Nothing larger has to disappear. For several breaths, she refuses to measure it.
Inside that small field, Aspen tries to make a leaf. In her mind, her old palm forms first, wider than the hand resting on the floor. A stem lies across it. She knows the leaf’s outline, the way the main vein rises slightly beneath one fingertip, and the smaller veins passing toward an edge thin enough to bend with her breath. She places the want where the red drop had rested.
I want to see Mom.
The leaf arrives gray. Aspen remembers green. She knows exactly which green she would have called proper: not yellowed near the stem, not too dark where the surface thickens, clean enough to hold a direction without breaking it. She presses that color into the leaf. Green appears because she has supplied it. The moment her attention loosens, gray returns through the veins.
She tries the moth. The loose thread catches where it always caught. Blue waits outside the image until Aspen puts it there; then the cloth accepts the color as deliberately as paper accepts crayon. By the time she looks back, the leaf has lost its edge.
Jamie stands with both hands hidden inside his sleeves. Aspen knows the raincoat should be yellow. When she supplies it, his face begins flattening into the room behind him. She restores the warmth of his lips, then the tiny reddish place where he bit the skin beside one nail, and yellow leaves the raincoat. She cannot tell whether she remembered the mark or added it.
She cannot keep more than one supplied color stable. Every piece of home survives until she turns toward another. Home will not arrive around her.
Her hand slips on the warm floor. She catches herself with the other and begins moving before she has chosen a destination. One knee follows one palm, then the other. She crawls along the curve beneath the embedded moth with her gaze fixed on the grain. The wings lift themselves away from the floor. Three clear it. The lower left drags once with a dry whisper before rising after them. Heat enters through her palms and knees while the skin between them remains cold enough for the fine hairs along her arms to rise.
Her first broken breath makes almost no sound. The next catches higher and presses against the back of her tongue. Aspen closes her mouth around it. Her shoulders shake anyway. Moisture falls from her face and gathers in two shallow places between the ridges. She turns toward the curtain. The barricade fills the opening, but the slit beside the table remains. From here it is only a line of dimness between cloth and wood. Aspen imagines an eye fitted to it. Her palms are on the floor. Her knees are drawn beneath her. Her hair hangs around a face wet enough to shine. Three wings are raised above her with their membranes pulled taut; the lower left keeps giving small late jerks beside her leg.
She gets up so quickly that the upper pair beat once to catch her. She wipes both cheeks with the heels of her hands, pushes the unfamiliar hair away from her mouth, and straightens until nothing in her posture admits what the floor just held.
No shadow crosses the slit. Nobody needs to be there. The possibility has already learned how to watch her.
Aspen searches the room for somewhere it cannot reach. There are no corners. The wall grows into the floor through a long curve, and every recess opens again if she follows it far enough. The cocoon’s raised rim interrupts one line from the curtain, but another could pass over it. Crouching behind the cocoon would put her nearer the opening. She refuses to be near anything else. His eyes will crawl through the walls. His eyes will find her, but they will not see her. That comforts her, if only for a moment.
The woman’s question returns: Why didn’t you make a square? Hierophant had meant to conceal the terrace. Whatever he intended, the square was the part the triangle replaced.
Aspen reaches into her hair. The red pin is still caught above her temple. Without the bead and green thread, it hangs at an angle against several twisted strands. She pulls. Hair tightens across her scalp, then releases all at once. The pin lies warm inside her fist, one end broadened into the broken place where the ornament used to attach.
Its point skates over the heartwood and leaves a shallow line that catches the mushroom light. Not deep enough. She returns to the curtain and kneels beside one of its cloudy weights. She lifts the cloth just enough to fit the pin beneath the bead, presses the red point against its rough underside, and draws it toward herself. The weight taps the floor. She does it again. Tap. A third time. Tap. The rhythm soothes her.
The sounds outside falter around it. She isn’t sure if she hears them or simply imagines them.
“Let Hermit close.”
Tap.
The pin grows warm from her fingers. Fine red dust catches beside the sharpened edge. When the point finally enters the heartwood instead of skating over it, Aspen stops. She carries the sharpened pin to a shallow recess beside the wall. It is the nearest thing the room has to a corner. The first curve she makes against the floor is awkward because she tries to draw it from one position. Her reach ends before the line does. She has to shift onto both knees and move around the space, passing the pin from one hand to the other when a wing root prevents her shoulder from turning farther. The groove goes shallow where the floor curves into the wall, deep where it flattens beneath her, then wavers where her knee slips on the curve. She closes it anyway.
The final scratch meets the first with an overlap as long as her smallest fingernail. Darkness gathers inside the newly exposed wood. A thin line of aqua sap appears at the deepest point and stops there, held within the cut.
The circle does not shut out the voices. It changes the place from which she hears them. The chant remains beyond the curtain, or inside her head, but the word Hermit settles along the groove and makes the small recess feel complete without any of those things entering.
Aspen sits back on her heels. Self-contained. The certainty does not promise safety. It supplies an edge.
Inside the circle, she scratches a square. The first side follows the wall. The second turns across the grain. By the third, the equal directions have begun organizing the space between them. The cocoon rim becomes one exterior object. The pin, her knees, and the shallow wet lines from her wing-eyes belong inside. When the fourth side meets the first, the enclosed points become easier to measure against one another. This side against that one. Aspen within; the cocoon rim without. Emperor supplies a frame, and for one relieved moment she mistakes knowing where she is for being concealed.
Aspen waits for the room to lose her. The mushrooms beneath the cocoon still lean toward the recess. Air from the curtain slit touches the outer edge of one upper wing. Beyond the barricade, a voice begins the title, and the whole square receives it. She almost asks the moth how much time has passed. There is no clock, but beyond the barricade Hermit keeps time. Each distant repetition arrives like a tick. Against her will, the rhythm calms her. The four sides tell her exactly where she is, and nothing of why.
The square is not a shape for concealment, she realizes.
She drags the pin back and forth through the nearest corner. The meeting sides blur into a gouge, and she lengthens it until it cuts across the surrounding circle.
The place beneath the moth lies farther along the same wall as the curtain. From the surviving slit, an ordinary gaze could reach the cocoon’s outer rim but could not turn far enough to find the floor beneath it. Hierophant’s sight might not require a straight path. Aspen chooses it anyway. An imperfect obstruction is still something she can put between herself and him.
She begins the second circle wide enough to hold her knees and folded wings. Halfway around, its curve reaches the abandoned circle. She tries to pull it inward, but the cocoon rim takes that space; outward would carry the line back toward the curtain. The grooves touch. For a short distance, one cut has to serve both enclosures.
She thought the room was bigger.
The gouge from the ruined square corner now opens into the common groove. The cocoon rim occupies part of the new interior, and sap passes among every mark beneath Aspen’s hand. A strand of unfamiliar hair is still wound around the pin’s broadened end. She pulls it free and cannot decide whether that has removed anything.
She lowers the red point inside the second circle and begins the shape her hand already knows. Two lines meet near the wall. A third would close them across the space before her knees.
Look here.
Aspen stops before drawing it. She scratches through the two lines until neither keeps a point, moves the pin closer to the wall, and starts again. This time the broad side faces the curtain. The two sloping cuts narrow toward Aspen and meet between her knees. The triangle points into the place she intends to occupy.
Look away.
Her hand adds a curve outside by instinct. The spiral passes around the triangle once. On its second turn, the room contracts inside the larger shape. The opening, the hollow, and every gaze she has tried to exclude return as surrounding distances. Aspen keeps drawing, and the spiral gives them more space from which to contain her. Heat touches the place behind her eyes.
She attacks the curve with the pin, scoring back and forth until the clean relation breaks into scratches. Then she places the point just inside the inverted triangle. The new spiral begins near one sloping side. It curls toward the center, each turn fitting inside the last. The room remains where it is. The circle remains around her. Only the relevant place grows smaller: from circle to triangle, from triangle to spiral, from spiral to a point no wider than the end of the pin. Aspen presses the pin into that final mark and leaves it standing there.
Her wing-eyes ache. The black threads still rise behind her, bent toward a regard she cannot see. The mushrooms hold aqua along their rims. Green and red Qimmo lines cross orange membranes around a pale body with wet cheeks and hair disturbed above one temple.
“Leave me alone.”
“Hierophant.”
“Fool.”
“Woman.”
She hates that. “Her name.” That phrase feels worse. “Her Ainm. Whatever I’m supposed to call her.” The upper wing that kept opening toward the woman tightens once toward the curtain. Dried paint pulls across its fold. Aspen does not follow.
“Everyone outside.”
A near voice catches on the first sound of a word. Another answers from farther away. Before either can become a person doing something, both flatten into pressure against cloth, wood croaking, air passing through a space too small to identify its source.
“Hermit. Lyra. Titles. Names.”
The first sound tightens around the outer circle. The second reaches four old paths through muscle and wing root, where recognition begins and finds no one willing to complete it. Neither returns to the room as language.
“The Rooci. Whatever is above.”
The pull along the wet threads slackens. Immensity loses the direction from which it had been watching. The enclosure no longer has to fit inside a gaze in order to exist.
“The fairies. The red thing. The treehouse.”
Three routes lead toward the same absence. The inward spiral gives none of them room to continue.
“The moth.”
She waits until the ache in her throat passes around what she has named.
“The colors.”
The pin remains upright beneath her fingertips. Wet lines remain against carved wood. Light remains within the soft cups near the floor.
“This body.”
Breath enters too high, catches, and leaves along the roof of the mouth. Four roots pull against the back. A pulse beats beside one temple where several hairs were torn free.
“My memories.”
The park gate opens beside a bedroom clock. Chains move through the smell of warmed plastic. Shoes knock together by their laces.
“M…”
The unfinished name vibrates behind the teeth. It will not take the outward direction of the others.
One hanging thread of blood slackens. Its end touches the carved circle and holds. Surface tension lengthens the contact until the groove takes it, drawing the wetness along the curve in both directions. A second thread settles into the cut. Then a third and fourth, each finding the same circumference through a different trembling route. The joined current reaches the shared section between circles and hesitates. Part of it follows the older groove into the abandoned square. Four sides fill almost to their corners before the motion stops, reverses, and returns through the common line. The rest continues around the chosen circle.
At the inverted triangle, the current divides among the three cuts. They fill toward one another until the shape closes. Wetness gathers at the inward point, reaches across the narrow strip of uncut wood, and touches the spiral. One narrow line begins moving inward.
The cuts in the heartwood are already damp. Thinner sap lifts through the exposed grain as the other wetness passes, and where they touch, no seam survives by which one can be followed without the other. The spiral fills one tightening turn at a time.
Nothing erupts. The soft cups near the floor lose enough light that their rims no longer separate from the surrounding dimness. Their stems do not recoil. They simply cease leaning into the enclosed place. Air passes the barricade without arranging itself around an observer. The sounds beyond it remain small impacts and cloth-borne vibrations, never completing themselves into addressed speech.
The scale that kept opening one enclosure inside another reaches the spiral’s endpoint and stops.
One knee touches the floor, then the other. Weight settles onto one side. The grain stays warm against the hip. Knees draw close enough to press each breath into a smaller space. Four roots contract. Broad dry surfaces pass around the remaining air, one over another, until no draft reaches skin without first crossing a warm layer. The last surface arrives late, brushes the ankle, and closes over the others.
Small enough.
If I can love you, you have to have been there. Your hands disappeared into your sleeves even when the cuffs were already too long, and when I told you to pull them out before you tripped, you looked at me with one eyebrow raised as if you had begun to suspect I was stupid. Not both. Only one. You practiced because detectives on television did it when somebody lied. I never asked you to practice. It did not help me understand when you believed me. Half the time you used it while I was telling the truth.
You dragged two trenches through the mulch instead of lifting your feet. You asked for more before the swing came back. More, go beyond, come on, as though gravity were another person we could bother until it changed its mind. At the farthest part of the arc your laugh went thin, and when it came back it came back coughing. I asked if you were dying. You got angry because I had changed what kind of moment it was. I would have stopped the swing. You made me push again.
If you wanted something I did not want, there was somewhere inside you I could not reach. If I could be wrong about what would make you happy, you were not only the place where my wanting came back. You chose against me. You followed when I told you to stay. You hid badly and still believed the hiding belonged to you because I had not turned around. That has to count.
You chose the same character every time we played and claimed nobody else knew how to use him while pressing every button as fast as your thumbs could move. You accused me of screen-looking in a game played on one screen. Stop screen-looking. We are looking at the same screen. That is how I know you cheated. That is not what cheating means. You said it with your mouth full of the snack you had sworn you did not want, and crumbs worked into the space beside the trackpad until I had to lift the laptop and shake them out. Why would I make you annoying in ways that required cleaning?
Your hand disappears into the sleeve. When it comes out, it is carrying both pairs of shoes by their laces. The soles strike each other while you give instructions that cannot all be followed. Bend your knees. Stand straight. Not that straight. Stop bouncing, actually bounce if it helps. You laugh before I fall and harder when I accuse you of causing it. You bring my shoes after I say I can carry them. You forget which locker is ours. You free my hair from beneath the strap after I stop noticing that it hurts. One thumbnail catches against your finger because a corner has chipped away. You rub it while insisting it was always like that.
You could have understood me correctly the first time. You could have given one instruction and waited. You could have laughed only when I was also laughing. If I needed a mother, why make one who sometimes made needing her harder?
Unless that was what made you convincing. Unless love that never frustrated me would have looked like a leaf turning whichever way I asked.
You said you loved me before I could see you. The sentence reaches farther back than any room I can enter. I have the pressure of it, hands around my feet, light too strong for eyes that have only begun to adjust. If there was a you before there was enough of me to invent one, you were there first.
There was a girl in second period who borrowed a pencil three times and returned a different one every time. The last had tooth marks near the eraser. I did not chew pencils. I did not like her enough to remember whether she chewed them. The pencil never became important. The teacher once began class by finishing a story he had apparently started after the part of yesterday I could reach. Everybody laughed before he arrived at the part I thought was supposed to be funny. A boy from your grade knew your favorite chips and called me Jamie’s sister because my name had not survived whatever conversation introduced us. Something heavy crossed the apartment next door every night and struck the same wall twice. It had already begun when I came home. Sometimes it woke me later. Whoever moved it never knew whether I was listening.
Things that were not for me must have come from somewhere outside me. The wrong pencil existed before it entered my hand. The joke had a beginning I missed. The boy knew you along a route that did not pass through me. The thing next door kept being moved because somebody wanted it somewhere else.
Unless uselessness had a use. Unless the tooth marks were there so I would ask why anybody would bother putting tooth marks on a pencil. Unless a farther side was exactly what every wall needed to make me believe I had not built the room.
But you are not a farther side. You are the person who chooses the same character again when I get home because nobody else knows how to use him, pressing everything is not knowing, stop screen-looking, we are looking at the same screen, and you have already taken the good side of the bed even though I will tell you to move and you will move one leg and call that sharing. You will cough the next time you laugh. I will ask if you are dying. You will hate that I asked. You had a whole minute that was funny until I entered it wrong.
If that minute could belong to you without belonging to me, there is somewhere you continue when I fail to follow. If you carry me while I am missing, you hold a version of me I cannot reach. If people knew you before they knew me, there were directions through you that did not begin here. If you came after I said stay, if you wanted the treehouse because I forbade it, if you crouched behind me and decided your own fear was worth the answer, there was a person in those woods even when the view refused to turn.
Your sleeve hides your hand and the hand holds the shoes and the shoes strike together while the employee says we usually finish counting, you call him a snitch from inside the foam, your laugh enters the laptop fan, eleven fifty-nine waits in the corner while the game loads and we choose the same people we always choose, you take your character because you always take him and somebody with my hands chooses somebody else, asks if you are hungry, asks if you are bored, asks if you want an adventure, comes home with stained fingers and dirt on both shoes, fights you over the snacks, laughs when you accuse the shared screen of betrayal, keeps looking toward the numbers and pretends not to look.
I was not there to pretend.
The first thing I own is eleven fifty-nine in the corner of the screen. The room is already warm from two people. The laptop rests between us. Your shoulder presses against mine as if it has been there for hours. My back jolts hard enough to shake the picture. What happened. You look at me with the detective eyebrow because I am the one who has broken the evening by asking. The numbers change. Happy birthday, Jamie. I mean it. I know I mean it. At twelve-oh-one I ask if I am a terrible sister because missing the day feels like something I did before I understand that I missed it. You tell me I was there. You argue with the absence because from where you sat, something wore every habit well enough to love you.
If you were there with it and not with me, if you noticed no difference until I asked what happened, if it knew which character I chose and how I fought and kept looking toward the clock, then loving you continued somewhere I could not. Something before me watched the minute approach. I arrived already knowing why it mattered. When the numbers changed, your name was already waiting in my mouth. If that wanting crossed the place where I did not, it was already waiting when I returned. If it belonged to me, I can exist somewhere I cannot find myself. The part of an evening I did not live still exists inside you. You carry a day I do not own and that makes you more real than I am. I came back already loving you, so somewhere the love remained. I believed your face before I believed the clock. If the person who asked what happened could inherit the minute from the person who pretended not to watch it, if saying your name and meaning it joins me to everything before I returned, if I loved you while I was gone, if I was there