The Wrong Time For a Conscience

Someone once said the first step in the end of the world was burning all didactic texts. They didn’t expect Lord of the Flies to become one of them. The world, After, was the sleaker, sharper, younger sibling to the world Before. If the baseline for the city before had been functional, now it was abusive.

The first year was a steep learning curve. The motto: nothing that isn’t needed. Everything was viciousness. Smiles with bared teeth. All sound edited to include aggression. The roadways had been some of the most monochromatic in the world, once. Strict laws and societal norms flooded road networks with Hyundais and Kias in all shades as long as they were shades of grey and silver and white. That was the first sign of the changing world. Cars as colourful as explosions, and the uselessness of the dashcam.

Everyone was watching for other signs.

In the first year, I wasn’t made for this city. It wasn’t the place for me anymore until the motto was destroyed, and we began to want again, instead of just need. I found that out when I was thinking of packing, leaving, looking for another place with a space for me.

Someone said my name.

“Theo Cole-York! Fuck me!” Someone tapped my elbow. I spun around. No one was supposed to touch me, ever. And no one usually did. A hand went to my skin; my and went to the switchblade in my pocket. The city was full of sharp people now. If you weren’t careful, you’d cut yourself on one. The guy didn’t look offended. His mouth wasn’t an O so much as a sideways D. I was about to tell him there was no way in hell I was going to take instruction from him when he kept babbling. “Jesus shit. Bro. I thought you were freaking dead. No one saw you. Theo Cole-York is alive and kicking. Do you still have your bass? Come on, tell me you have it.”

I put my hands in my pockets. The guy wasn’t much younger than me, but he was softer. Uncut hair, which was the style now, and tight blue jeans. He wasn’t wearing many colours, but he was still more colourful than me with my black pants and sweater and black hair. He smiled; he had the smile of a catholic cherub. It wasn’t for proof, it was just an ordinary smile. His teeth were white and even. I let go of the switchblade and slouched. “Okay. I have it.”

“Seriously? That’s awesome!”

“Not seriously. I lost it.”

He looked the way I thought a Disney woodland animal would look if you refused to befriend it. “That sucks. But dude, we can find you another one. You can come play at my place. The stages are opening again. Say yes. It’s exactly your scene. You’ve never played at a club like this, but it’s your kind of club. When was the last time you played? It’ll come back to you, whatever. Where’re the guys?”

There was a girl in the band as well, but I didn’t say that. I didn’t know where any of them were. I could guess. So I said, “Dead.”

He looked briefly disapproving, like I shouldn’t have said it so bluntly to someone as young and admiring as him. Then I saw it was disappointment, and a sort of snarl. He had vitriol in him, and no way to ignite it without burning himself up. Like the entire city. “We’ll get you a band. It’ll be good.”

One of the worst, undocumented symptoms of the virus was the anger left behind. It wasn’t a symptom of having a virus. It was just a symptom of being one of the survivors.

He pulled the band together from the sleek, young wreckage. A guitarist, a drummer, and a keyboardist, which I didn’t need or want. But the guitarist, Declan, said he was worth keeping, and I trusted Declan when I heard his first song. He took his time coming up with the simplest riffs, but once he had them, they shook the stage like a geological seizure. If there was ever going to be another Wikipedia article about the history of music, this would be a subsection called Aftermath. The sound was savage and starved, like everyone who fed it and ate it. It wasn’t music for people who wanted to escape. It was music for people who didn’t want to exist. Even people who didn’t know they didn’t want to exist.

Shows always had a quality of wet paint. They ran together, even separated by stages and cities and crowds. People still new the name Theo Cole-York, and they screamed it when I led the band onto the stage. The crowds were culled. Only the leanest and most feral attended. I pictured the rest of the crowd outside the door, waiting to come in, right until we left the stage again.

We went across the state, then across several more. Places that were unique when they were thriving were all the same now. Desperation, the great equalizer. The nights were weren’t on stage, I saw the changes in the world. Declan and I left the vans and equipment and went looking for food and new clubs. We took the cars with us sometimes. The more colourful they were, the more we were reminded of the conformity of Before, and the people who would have disliked us for them.

The streets were all the colour of sulfur. There were more empty houses than ever, but people preferred being outside of them to being inside. In the first year, empty cars had blocked roads all over the place. The new crowd had gotten loud about it, then productive, and they formed groups wherever one was needed to push an empty car over to the side of the road. The cars never went anywhere. Metal buckets on flat tires were a dime a dozen.

The people on the streets were the strong, the terrible, the rich, the ripped-jean crowd. Grey hair only came from a bottle now. Children were an endangered species, if they were even around anymore. I hadn’t heard of any in years.

And there were the profiteers. Beetles, they were called. They would die last, everyone joked. Or mocked. Or cursed. They lounged on the sidewalks. In the squares outside malls. Or they sat half out of the back of huge silver cars. With long, thin cases at their feet. Needles was their product, and their demand was high. Each Needle was a promise of extended life. That promise was enough to get someone’s attention a street away. Sometimes the cases were open, the Needles visible, and the barrels were dewed with condensation.

Declan refused to look. He didn’t desire them at all. He wasn’t like anyone else, and I didn’t want him to be. He was right. It was the worst kind of dirt to drag your robes in. But nobility had gone the way of grey hair. I counted the Needles, as many as I could see in the yellow pallor. Back in the vans, or in a rented apartment, I dug my pinkie nail into my arms. It didn’t feel like a Needle would have, but I felt less like a death clock on legs for doing it.

Declan saw it on my teeth first, before I even thought to check the mirror. During a gig, I turned away from the audience. They always wanted my face, and dismissing them was like dangling the rest of their lives in front of them. Looking away from them, I grinned at Declan. Or I bared my teeth. His cue was coming up. His fingers stopped. My bass riff waited. He watched me truly bare my teeth. His cue came and went.

I closed my mouth before I turned around again. I knew now, I was dying.

We had a room in the club for the night, for the equipment. Ben, keyboardist, grabbed my shoulder and turned me around. I swore at him before I saw what he was looking for, and saw that he had seen it. He didn’t leg go of my shoulder. “Why didn’t you fucking say you weren’t immune?”

I put my bass aside. He was going to dislocate something if he squeezed harder. “You didn’t say you were.”

Ben let go of my shoulder, just to throw the first punch. Once he’d decided to throw it, he had no regrets. He’d already weighed the consequences and benefits of the punch and found my unbruised face wanting. While I was running my tongue over my teeth to check for any sudden gaps, the drummer, Nico, said, “York, man. You need a Needle. ASAP.”

Ben took me to the wall with his forearm across my throat. My knee jostled my guitar. The strings rattled metallically. “Don’t be an idiot, Nico. Rich boy doesn’t have the funds he once did. Can buy yourself a million cigarettes, but not a Needle. But a knife doesn’t cost anything. Where’s the switchblade? Who’re you going to use it on?”

“You don’t need to worry about me using it on any of you,” I said, “because you won’t get that far if you don’t let go of me.”

Ben didn’t know enough about me to know whether I meant it or not. I watched his face change, as though he wasn’t sure what he was looking at anymore. Then I realized my mouth was open, my jaw clenched, my grimace at a warning angle. I could be dangerous without meaning to be, now. Ben took several steps back, as quickly as he could while looking deliberate and in control. “Even Theo Cole-York isn’t good for anything if he’s dead. Go get some functional organs. But if you touch me, I’ll take the rest out of you.”

Nico tried to exchange a look with me as he went after Ben. I ignored it. Declan put his guitar away and looked up. I allowed the look, then went to look in the mirror. The lichen was a little too thick on my tongue to get rid of with excessive swallowing. It wasn’t near thick enough to choke me yet. But it tickled in my throat where it crept up from my heart.

It came from an animal. All diseases came from birds or bats or rats when scientists didn’t really any clue where they came from. In three weeks, over two hundred thousands people that had been completely healthy at the beginning of those weeks had dropped dead. Sick before the news stations could properly report the illnesses. Cases rose. Hospitals overflowed. Freezer trucks stopped at hundreds of houses a day, then returned to those houses a few days later for the ones that had come into contact with the first. All of it the same symptoms. Choking. Vomiting. Lichen growing across the tongue. Similar to a species that grew in North America. Fingers were pointed. But what did it matter? The whole world was sick.

Francesca had played for four days after the vomiting started. She didn’t stop until she stopped breathing on stage. We hadn’t been sharing a bed on that tour, but I’d been exposed. The disease didn’t need touch. It didn’t need close quarters. It hardly needed air. It was everywhere. We were all just waiting to see who would be the last one, the one without anyone else to call for a truck to come pick up the body when they were gone.

There would be no vaccine. There weren’t enough healthy people to develop one.

But a cure. It was an old story, in a lot of cultures. A belief that to become even stronger, you needed not just to defeat your enemy, but to eat him. Then you would absorb your strength. It was beyond belief now. The philosopher’s stone grew in the human heart and lungs, and it wasn’t a perennial crop. The cure was as finite as the population.

But for fifty percent of the population, things were looking up.

I threw up a week later. And every night after that. On the third night, I saw it wasn’t only me. Declan had just decided to do it in a trash bin outside a club instead of in the washroom. His vomit still smelled of vomit, regular sick and acidic. I could tasty the leafy sick in my own mouth.

Declan leaned away from the bin. He spat out a clump of wet lichen.

“Manners,” I said.

Declan snorted. He didn’t get up. His lean looked less like a lean every second, and more like a magician’s trick of levitating over magnets. “Where’d you hear a fancy word like that?”

“I know you’re trying to get me to feel all right, but I’m onto you,” I said. “You’re worse off than me.” Some people just went faster than others.

Declan lolled his head. Then he shook it properly. “York, go get a Needle. What are you waiting for?”

I searched for a moment before I found my voice. Declan never looked at the Needles. “You said your sister was in one of those. Kids. Parents.”

“Yeah, and they’re all dead already.” Declan spat into the bin again. He let his eyes close. “You’re not.”

“I’m not rich either. It’s not in my income bracket.” I sat on the edge of another bin. The alleyway smelled like the inside of a freezer truck. The smell of exposure. My stomach roiled again; I don’t know what with. My tongue was so thick with lichen I’d hardly eaten. “Between the two of us, if one of us was going to survive, it should be you.”

Declan leaned his head against the bin. He didn’t open his eyes. “This is the wrong time to have a conscience, York.”

I’d swallowed enough alcohol to drown a rat. It was the only rebuke the nausea listened to. I wouldn’t be on a stage again after this. I could feel it. Once you felt it in your chest, they said, you were on your last legs. Almost dead. I had a hand on my chest, like I could touch it from outside, and a hand on my bass, which was half holding me up.

Ben and Nico, and a few guys who worked in the club, watched me in between setting up and getting their own drinks. I smelled the disease on myself.

No one touched the guitar case. “Who’s seen Declan?” I asked.

Ben moved jerkily, like he’d been the one drinking. He kicked open the guitar case to pull something out of it. His voice was dark, unrecognizable. “He left this for you.”

I just caught it when he tossed it at me. Inside the silver case was a Needle, wet with condensation, heavy with Declan’s heart.  

Art by Alisha/asmeesh

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Crow and the Feather

I was unafraid. It isn’t the same as not being unafraid. I had never considered all the time I had spent, not being afraid, until I nearly sweated with the effort of being unafraid. If fear were scarlet fever, I had only now gotten it, and I walked and shuddered to contain the coughing. I my mind, two narratives played out: in one, I walked past the ditches near the river, and one day they were filled with plants, or water, or impossibly coloured fish, and my fate was not tied to them. In the other, I was remembered as a promising, young man, and the ditches filled with water, which slowly siphoned my skin from my bones.

If fear were infectious, it would have struck down all the animals of the Delta before they beat the first drum in their nightly dancing on the banks.

“You worry too much,” Crow said to me. “All your kind is good for. Even your memory is lacking. You don’t have the vocabulary for eternal promises in your kind’s language, do you? That’s why you’ve forgotten that I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.” She tapped the bracelet around her wrist. It was nearly invisible, except that her hair was ink black, and mine red as cliff grass, and wound around one another, they drew the eye. I disliked looking at it. It seemed improbable and destroyable, though it had never given any hint of coming undone, or being torn or tugged apart. “No one would touch this. And no one will have the chance.” She climbed onto the branch above me and tousled my hair with her dust-orange foot.

 Crow looked as feral and venomous as the rest of the animals in the Delta, but she was fine-boned and had eyes like a deep sea creature, all pupil, or else all black, so it was difficult to tell if she was looking at you if she did not face you head on. There were other fine-boned animals, but none that looked like a thing to fear between the trees at night. There were thick-boned, brutish beasts as well, who kept their distance from Crow. Some parties just didn’t associate with others. Some parties were safer to associate, recreationally, with than others. When Crow’s feathers began to veil her, there was another animal there to pluck them out. Some feathers came easily. Others drew blood from their roots.

No other animals plucked their feathers, pulled their scales, tore out their fur, or scrubbed their skin. I didn’t know why Crow accepted the pulling of the feathers, and she wouldn’t say. She was the only one who bothered to speak to me in my language. Their language was a mess of sounds. It soundd to me like whatever sound each animal might make in death, they used to speak to one another. I wasn’t certain of the specifics, only that death wasn’t involved, or if it ever were, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between it and the hissy, growling, howling accents I’d heard all my life.

There was no space for me among the animals. There were hundreds of acres of land in the Delta, and never an empty spot of dirt to claim when the animals sat. Never a foot of ground on the riverbank for me. I had seen the other humans, before I had ever seen my own reflection in the river. Following the latter event, I knew I looked nothing like them. The beautiful dark-haired, dark-eyed, berry-brown children stolen from cradles and hammocks and basinets. No one had hair like ground tigernuts, or eyes like grey grass seed. Then I grew, and no one had features like broken china, or hands like spindly weed roots. Had I been born to an animal, Crow had once told me, I would have been left for a large bird to take away, while my siblings flourished. She did not say runt, but the other animals said it for her, when they turned away while Crow braided my light hair or touched my gold eyelashes, or pinched my eternally red cheeks. My skin did not believe we were in the Delta. Those from the Delta wore dark freckles over dark skin, roasted by the sun since birth. My cheeks thought I had taken fever, or the wind had chapped them over the course of years.

“Crow, why wouldn’t you change me?” I asked her once, lying on the riverbank, keeping my feet out of the water. Crow, the trickster she was, would let the current take me if it got a hold of my feet. She would let it take me long enough to amuse herself, no matter whether my heart would collapse from the terror or endure it. “Give me eyes and hair like yours. Or skin that doesn’t burn in moonlight.”

“How dull,” Crow said. “Little feather, I worked so hard to make you lighter and brighter, don’t you remember?”

Time had turned the memory into an ordeal that had happened to someone else. My mind worked had to destroy any memory of the world as it appeared from eight eyes, from the middle of the web had made when my brother cursed me with spider form. I remembered Crow, how she had taken me into her mouth and put me in her nest rather than eat me. Enchanted, when the curse broke, I believed she had known of my true form somehow. I had since learned that she had refrained from eating me only because she didn’t know if Spider was watching her and would be offended by her appetite.

I had been a side effect of the manners.

“I think they would prefer me as a spider,” I said. I had seen tricksters and their magic. Spinning grass into gold, rain into jewels, weeping into music. And Crow was one of the most gifted tricksters of all. “They don’t ever come near me.”

Crow turned toward me. In the nighttime, her eyes were pinholes. The night without them was false, the night within them true. “You? The problem here is not you.”

The ditches next to the river were larger the next night. The berth the animals gave them wider. Crow’s arms blacker and silkier. Feather by feather, she was plucked. Black river lines ran down her arms. She held them still, braced, for each jerk and release. The feathers were never left on the ground, but I also could never see where they went. They vanished into the darkness.

The animals danced on the riverbanks, then. The music was red and hot, like the deadliest part of a summer. The river simmered. Rocks bleached beneath the surface. The soil grew warm closest to the river. I stepped backward, avoiding, as always, wingspans and tails. And to stand on cooler ground. The bottoms of my feet ached with the heat. The music spun small glamours. From the corner of one eye I saw tigers hunting across a green plane. Shimmering like a mirage over the water, I saw salmon run, and the rocks that dashed the golden-lit rapids to shreds. Stories came and went, never begun or ended, just the middles.

Crow’s arms had smeared and dried when she stopped dancing. She sucked in each breath. She tilted her head, a habit she had when she was too tired to notice, or drunk on the music. On the other side of her, and the river, I saw one of the holes was larger than the others.

Crow did not always do well with answers. She did not like to give them out, for fear she would run out of them someday and have no more for herself. Instead of asking about the ditch, I asked, “What is the dancing for?”

She ran a hand down my hair, my neck, to my shoulders. I was sweating. Her fingertips stuck to me a little. “This river will grow one day and destroy part of the Delta. Then, perhaps, the whole thing, eventually. For now, we dance to keep the river from taking more than it already has, and to keep the dead from dancing with us. Why? Frightened?”

“Of the ditches. Those don’t look like things of the past.” I gave the animals digging the ditches a look, something as fierce as Hyena, as much as I could manage. “That one is for me, isn’t it? I can already taste the dirt in my mouth, I think.”

Crow flipped over my wrist and held it. My fingers tangled in the bracelet of our hair. Her wrist was flaky with dry blood under it. She said, “I have you life. I already told you, no one will be throwing you into a hole in the ground.”

I let Crow go, into the dancing. Some nights she tried persuasion. Others, she left me here. I plaited my own hair together into a meaningless knot, then unbound it and broke all of the strands. I kept an eye on the ditch, and the animals that dug it. It was too large for any of them.

In the wet days, the Delta tasted of dirt. Now, in the dry days, I tasted dirt. It was on my tongue, in my teeth, in my throat, at the edges of my vision when I woke from nightmares of the ditches. In my dreams I conjured up a scene of a burial from beneath. I saw nothing but the sky very far away, the walls of the ditch much higher than they truly were. My fear grew. In each dream, my fear was as potent as the dirt choking me. How fear grew away from the sunlight. When I woke, I reached for Crow, beneath the low branches of a bush tree, lying next to me. I said, softly, “I dreamed of my dying.”

Crow opened her eyes. She did not sleep, but her eyes did. Now she stretches, and as she did, I noticed her feathers returning already, sparse and course and so deeply black they looked purple. Her hands went above her head. Small birds left the higher branches to stroke her palms. She lowered her hands to her stomach and rolled over to look at me. She held up her wrist. “What is this worth to you?” She bit our hairs and pulled them taut away from her wrist.

I wasn’t sure how valuable something I didn’t want to own could be. I said, “If you want a gift, I already made one.” I showed her the circlet of flowers and grasses I had made while the animals danced. It had flowers from the riverbank that grew so low they were impossible to pluck without entering the water unless the river was running low on a night. Crow kissed the centre of one star-petalled flower before she slipped it over her head. It looked like an array of flowers that had got lost, and grown at night where they should have grown during the day.

Crow plucked one of the flowers from the circlet, so that one side began to fall into her hair, released. She put it in her mouth and smiled with her teeth. “Crowns are for royalty,” she said. “They will all have to love me now, won’t they? Queen of the Delta.”

I put my finger on the petals of the flower, right where it curved over her lips. She smelled of the other animals, and grass seed.

She stayed the same. Her black eyes could have been looking anywhere else. “What’s this, little feather?” She snapped at my finger, then gave it back to me. “You lie with me here and think you can lie with me like a woman? I’m not a girl. I am Crow. What would your people say to know you’ve lain with a Crow?”

“My people wouldn’t even think me a man, I think,” I replied, and took her hand. “And I’ve been away from them too long to care. About what they think, or whether or not you’re a woman.”

“You care. A condition of your kind,” Crow said, slowly and sadly, like she had handed me something that used to be living. But she stayed with me and didn’t stop me when I touched her.

I felt it in the soil before I heard it through the trees. They grew so thickly together, I did not even know the hoofbeats for what they were until they were almost upon us. I sat up. “Someone is coming.”

Crow said, “Yes. Your brother among them.”

She let me rise, then watched me crouch on the side of the river. On the opposite side, horsemen approached. They wore boots that might have never seen the ground, and hands that had never seen the rough end of a chore. They did not belong in the forest so much, they could have been put there by a badly done glamour. My brother was as fair and golden and despicable as I was, the most improbable person among them. He slid off his horse and stood next to the ditches. It did not seem to have crossed his mind that he was close enough to be tossed into one. He grinned a viper’s grin. He had a voice like charred wood. “We didn’t even have to call, and here they come to us. Animals.”

The horsemen laughed. The forest hated their voices. I did not think that they sounded very much like several crows hollering together from a distance. I did not think of how the fear had returned. I was unafraid, and busy at it while my brother mountain again and led them all back the way they came.

Crow rose. The circlet of flowers was a chain that limped over her crown and draped over her shoulder. “This is so dear to me. I’ll wear it all the rest of me life.” She touched one of the crinkled flowers.

“Why were they here?” I asked.

“To undo the dancing,” she said. “To encourage the river to grow. But they can never undo what we’ve done.”

The sun fell behind the mountains. The riverbanks cupped the water like dark iron. There was no music, no happiness or history turned to stone, except for one melody sung by Spider, briefly, where I glimpsed, blurrily, a trickle of water that grew into a river, swallowing woodland and everything that lived in it. The animals didn’t dance, nor did they dig. Instead, they sewed. Grass seed, tubers, still living roots. Every kind of potential life they tossed at the soil on either side of the river. Acres away, something keened. In the way of dreams, and somehow in the way of this night, I knew that the keening meant mourning.

Crow pushed her fingers between mine. The feathers on her arms were still stocky, as small as a baby’s, as stiff as if they’d grown out of her skin years before. “No more hiding as a little spider now. Understand, little feather?”

She would not let me cross the river with her. I stood on the opposite bank as tiger extended his claw and pierced Crow’s throat, too quickly for me to speak. I jumped into the water and began to wade across as they tossed her into the grave. For months I had dreamt of what she must be seeing. Dirt falling and falling over her, until it was just darkness and weight. Her face was uncovered still when I reached her. Dirt covered the wrist around which my life was tied.

I lurched forward, as if to fall into the grave with her. My legs froze. There was too much terror to help her. Where had I learned to be this frightened? I didn’t think I’d ever learned it.

Next to me, Snake nudged my elbow.

“Let him try to drown us now,” he said to me, in the language of my kind.

Crow rolled her head to the side, as she did when she slept next to me, preparing to close her eyes.

“Now, little feather,” Snake said, “kill your brother.”

Art by Alisha/asmeesh

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Sleep Again

There had not been a storm like this in recent memory, and my recent memory stretched back generations. It was as near disaster as a storm could be without ending cities full of lives. It was a wind-spiked rainstorm, a lightning-seeking-earth storm, a storm that wet the ground so thoroughly that every once green avenue had a chance of forever remaining a river. For a week after it ended, rain dripped from trees and eaves and moss onto the ground, and onto the graves.

As though the storm were a bump in the night, they woke.

The sky was pewter for days after, as if the storm had taken all its energy and it couldn’t recall total light. Dark nights turned into dim mornings, fatigued into murky afternoons, and became dark nights again. I heard them on a gloomy morning. It had been so long since I had heard anything from them that I leapt off one of the headstones, onto the ground, hands up, knees bent. I didn’t have the thought to know what I needed to do, if anything needed to be done. I was too surprised to do anything; I knew only that I had to be ready to do anything.

But nothing rose. There was no knocking on coffin lids. No fingers thrusting up through the dirt. Only wakeful sounds from the dead. Sighing and a deep vacuous noise where some of them recalled breathing even while their bodies forgot. It was sonorous and languid, and it only lasted a few hours.

When the ill-lit afternoon arrived, the graves were silent again.

There was nothing to do. Heat returned to the city. The memory of the storm gave way to a nearly blue sky. The lichen on the headstones dried enough to crackle under me. I felt ancient in a strange way, like someone who had recently become too old to remember their childhood. I couldn’t remember my childhood, or my adulthood. Tourists and local runners and devoted rememberers tooled through the graveyard. There were colours among them that the graveyard would never have known otherwise. They were all hummingbird colours. A fantastical narrative trotted into mind, of my own hummingbird-hued life before I’d come here. Perhaps I had walked past these graves before. And past the one that used to perch where I did now, without seeing, like the tourists.

Tourists and rememberers visited graves, took photographs of charming cherubs and haunting angels, and named aesthetically crusted with moss. They spoke quietly, and sometimes laughed while looking abashed. They did not look at me. They did not stop by my grave.

Mine was not a grave to stop by.

None of ours’ were. We were not meant to be remembered. Only to inherit, and, eventually, to pass on.

Evening crept subtly in, tugging along sun and rain. The sunshower looked joyful and improbable. Birds sang apocalyptically until the rain became too heavy and they dove beneath the brambles for shelter. I waited as the rain chased away everything but the small animals. I shook water from my wings when the feathers felt heavy with droplets.

A hiss of restlessness washed through the graveyard. What were the sounds of the dead becoming restless? Fingers searching along coffin lid seams? Fingers bones finding ribs and noticing the bareness? Scull turning against decrepit pillows?

I had the impression of hair against a pillowcase. Not in a coffin. In a room, dulled by the rain on the outside of it, and sleepiness. I put my hand to my ribs and tried to remember, but the morning I tried to handle the memory, the more it thinned, like paper that had been in the sun too long.

Something hissed, like a length of fabric against a floor. Or loam churning against loam.

I nearly unbalanced myself as I rose, fluttering my wings, looking from headstone to headstone. The light was fading. Naphtha colours bled into wren-black on the horizon. In the dusk, the graveyard was a confusing landscape of black shadows against blacker crests and dips. My fingers moved on the headstone. My body seemed to know change before my mind did.

But I couldn’t see it. I closed my eyes and faded to nothing but listening. The sunshower slowing to restless fingertip movement. Leaves disturbing leaves. Timid creatures arguing appetite with safety. Owls- always owls- blearily preparing to hunt. Distantly as to sound like a monotone surf, cars on the roadway.

I let the sounds turn me.

She was only a few feet away, awake and wide-eyed, when I opened my eyes. I had been braced for a rotten face, for gore or empty sockets or missing appendages or bone. Not for her.

She was young, but old enough to know it, and resent it. She had been young. The pulled on the sleeves of her grave dress, though it destroyed their whiteness, made them as grimy as her fingernails. She was wearing half of her grave on her hands, and more on her feet. Her legs swayed as her knees juddered. Her body had forgotten walking, and remembering was exhausting it. She could not look at me for long. Her eyes were fragile and strange, with eyelashes the colour of dust. She looked like something unearthed- not like a corpse, but like a buried teacup or glass bottle.

She looked at the eyes on my wings. I looked back. There had been no lessons, no instructions; instinct lifted my hand and pointed it to her. Made me say, in a voice she could not not listen to, “Return to sleep. It is the night. It is time to rest.”

She pushed mud off one foot with the other. Clumps rolled away, leaving dark streaks. Grass stuck to her toes. She glanced at the empty path, then the plunging sun. She did not know it wasn’t time to rise. If she slept again soon, then when she did rise, with the others, as they did once every year, this night would seem like nothing but a short lucid dream in an otherwise dreamless sleep. She said, “I don’t want to go back to sleep.”

I said, “It’s your job to sleep. There’s nothing for you here.”

This was obvious. Not because her family might have died, or because even if they hadn’t, they would likely struggle with her sudden return more than they had her death. There was nothing for any of them here until one of them came to replace me.

“There’s nothing here for you, though, is there?” she said.

“I don’t know.” I saw that while she had been watching me, and I her, she had been puzzling her sleep, and my presence. She had enjoyed the puzzle of it. I saw the girl she had been when she was alive. “Sleep again, and forget this.” I thought, in a moment I was ashamed of immediately, that I would have been delighted if it were her. If she were anything but another soul wanting a warm body, or a pool of water to soak into, or a mirror to appear in, or an ear to whisper in. If she could perch here where I had been.

Her hands cupped her elbows. Her chest rose and fell without breath. She remembered cold, air. She remembered too much.

I did not know what to do, so I allowed my hands to reach for her, my feet to guide us to her grave. She closed her eyes. Her expression was strained and streaky. Weak, her knees shook as she walked. She nearly buckled over a rise in the ground, sinking just slowly enough to catch herself and rise again. The sunshower had nearly stopped. Two drops fell on her shoulder and forehead. In the soil, the dead hissed and sighed again, full of nebulous desire.

We stopped at her grave. She was older than I thought. Her death was earlier as well. There would be no family to frighten if she returned to them. She frowned at the dates on her headstones, as if she had not realized until now that she felt robbed, or that she ought to care. It seemed unfair to tell her that I was never going to experience the things she had not.

She stood on the grave’s edge and looked up at me. The light pooled in her collarbone. I saw there was dirt smeared on her cheeks where I had thought she was just gaunt. Everywhere she was the colour of dirt.

I held her elbow as she sat on the edge. She hesitated, sagging suddenly as if her strings had been cut. She put a hand to her breastbone. Perhaps she had just felt the absence of any beating. She shook her head. Her hair swung like a lace curtain around her. Then she leaned back, into my hands, against my crouching knees.

For all the memories I did not have, I knew this: I had not been here long enough. There might be no one to take over for me until I had forgotten the possibility of it. It would not be her. I had nothing to promise her. I could never do anything for any of them. And they could do nothing for me.

She turned her head against my leg and whispered through her hair, “I want to live forever.”

I sighed. Her eyes shut. I felt her full weight on me.

I said, “This isn’t living.”

Art by Jenna Barton

Text by Lucie MacAulay