AllFreeNovel
Share Us
While so enmeshed—knotting grass to grackle scold, the smell of leaf mold to sun’s azimuth—a tree swallow swoops near, scissors her peripheral vision, severs her from trancing reverie with its dissonance. It flashes blue at her eyes’ edge, stuns her with its unaccountable presence. There are tree swallows aplenty, but this one is wrong: This one approaches an empty nest in autumn, a nest that she was near to harvesting to show her nephew and teach him about how much weaving can be learned from birds.
She stands, and the grasses fall from her hand like seeds. She follows the swallow, watches as it deposits a damselfly in the nest and flies away.
She climbs, plucks the insect from the muddy twigs, hops back down. In the damsel’s needle-body, checkered in black and blue, she reads a letter.
She looks from the dead damsel to the scattering it’s made of her thoughts, fistfuls of green and gold heaped uselessly together, and feels nothing but a knifing, knotting happiness as she opens her mouth to devour it, wings and all.
Years later, a seeker shadows the grass where Blue lay. She scoops up a handful, then melts away.
* * *
My Blueprint,
I have read your first three sumac letters. I cannot let them go unanswered, though I fear to write without knowing what comes next. (I taste the letters still. They linger. They undermine all other flavors, pipe them full of you.) Perhaps I’ll ask a question answered later. Perhaps I’ll write a sentence that offends.
But if you hunger, I swell. You have me watching birds, and though I don’t know their names like you know them, I have seen small bright singers puff before they trill. That’s how I feel. I sing myself out to you, and my talons clutch the branch, and I am wrung out until your next letter gives me breath, fills me to bursting.
I miss you in the field. I miss defeat. I miss the chase, the fury. I miss victories well earned. Your fellows have their intrigues and their passions, and now and again a clever play, but there’s none so intricate, so careful, so assured. You’ve whetted me like a stone. I feel almost invincible in our battles’ wake: a kind of Achilles, fleet footed and light of touch. Only in this nonexistent place our letters weave do I feel weak.
How I love to have no armor here.
You wish you could hold me at knifepoint again. You do, still, in a way. So long as I bear these last three seeds in a hollow behind my eye, you are a blade against my back. I love the danger of it. Besides, I am not so naive as to think your posting to this strand entirely lacks purpose. Your Garden works slowly, works through lives. It burrows you deep, and through you wreaks great change, while we strive upon the surface.
And in your absence you are deadly as a blade. Lacking letters, lacking the tremors of your footsteps through time, I seek out your memories; I ask myself what you would say and do if you were here. I imagine you reaching over my shoulder to correct my hand on a victim’s throat, to guide the braiding of a strand.
I am being watched. The shadow, my Seeker, steals after me. I glimpse it in the purplish gloaming, but where I chase it, it is not. Smells: hard to say, though hints of ozone and burnt maple. It takes many forms. I worry it is just a phantom, a consequence of my breaking mind. I had hoped to catch it, kill it, prove myself sane (or not) before consuming your next letters. I cannot endanger us, endanger you, any further. But I am the songbird running out of air, and I must breathe.
I dream.
They’ve freed us from sleep as from hunger. But I like exhaustion, call it a kink or what you will, and in my work upthread it’s often convenient to impersonate humanity. So I tire myself with work, and I sleep, and dreams come.
I dream of you. I keep more of you inside my mind, my physical, personal, squishy mind, than I keep of any other world or time. I dream myself a seed between your teeth, or a tree tapped by your reed. I dream of thorns and gardens, and I dream of tea.
The work waits. They’ll catch me here if I remain. More soon, after I’ve put this shadow to bed, after we’re safe.
Yours,
Red
* * *
Red’s off to catch a shadow.
She lays traps. She doubles back in time to build dead ends of history; she tangles strands. Her quarry, whose quarry she is in turn, slips free, leaving now a sound, now a taste on the air, nothing so grand as a thread caught on a thorn.
In downthread server farms couched in remnant icebergs’ hearts, she circles back upon her trail, glimpses the shadow, fires her fléchette pistol through rackspace gaps, birthing blue sparks.
In Asoka’s court, an acrobat, she climbs, flips, turns, sifting a thousand-person crowd for a single predator, one watcher who should not be there. She smells the shadow, and smells it slip away.
She storms the falling walls of Jericho, and in dense streets she hears a footstep on stone that does not belong. She turns, draws, lets fly. An arrow embeds itself in stone.
She races gravcycles through a crystal forest coursing with the brilliant pulse of human beings whose physical bodies have been rendered, like bacon fat, until the fragrance of their minds expands to fill all space. Whatever she is seeking, whatever’s seeking her, it does not catch her there, though she does not catch it in return.
She finds a pregnant possibility by a riverbed and waits. She does not know why she thinks the shadow will visit here, but she feels she’s growing to know the thing, its habits, when it visits her and when it keeps away. She seeds the air with nanobots, weaves servants through the grass; she sets drone spies and sentry cameras; she tasks a satellite to her service. She watches the river, cautious, quiet, for seven months. She blinks once, and when she opens her eyes, she feels the moment has passed: The shadow has been and gone, and she’s learned nothing. No traps have sprung, the nanobots failed to register a presence, the cameras have one by one turned off, and the satellite orbits mute and broken.
Red aches for the letters she keeps behind her eye.
She can
