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filled with turquoise yolk-fluid swimming inside this cyanic egg, swallowing the Sea obediently, fish flopping in the draft of foam. Fast as I can, speeding through indigo waves crested with elephants starry pale, transcendental fedoras filled with meringue
(—when the stars threw down their spears—)
seeing nothing through blank eyes injected with oceanic dye, deep-ening, deepening. I am still I, arms drawn like a bow towards the sun.
(—Dare frame, dare frame, dare frame thy, dare frame, dare clasp, dare frame—)
Down, down, down.
I fall and fall.
11
Give me the numbers of the moon, the rock-salt tranquility.
I wake with hardness, the bumps and trickles of cobblestone under my ravaged back. It has rained, I can still smell the earthy thickness
of rinsed air. Still the Sea lies invisible, but it thumps loudly, much more loudly now in my breaking ears, a piano’s lower registers broken and crushed to ivory paste. Still the Walls rise up, these new manifesting in streaked bloodstone, carved skillfully, not a glimpse of decay anywhere, antiseptic and darkly beautiful, springing up from a Road of polished coral like sunburned titans, draped with wilted windflowers climbing into nothingness.
Desolate circle of stone, with the Sea screaming somewhere unseen. There is a click and clatter behind me, behind me where the Mirror should be but is not, unsurprisingly, blank stone. Just a tunnel, after all that ecstatic ideation, just a passage from one sliver of the Labyrinth to another. How many times have I known it and given it voice but must remind my unlearning self: there is nothing but this.
The clicking repeats, a purposeful morse code of tapping the coral Road and I turn to recognize it, now nearly accustomed to Others and their erstwhile Appearances, and so accompanying my turning with a great, burdened sigh.
“Don’t you sigh at me, landlubber. I am very fierce,” announced an extraordinary Lobster waving a claw at me with imperious airs, a flamboyantly large crustacean snapping at the Sea air. “I sleep the sleep of manic frog-songs, reel in bright rings of my-and-your sulfurous selves, my claws click on lacquered women and sandpaper men, leave puckered scars on their pretty, pretty skins. I am a Meaningful Lobster.”
His lithe shell was aquamarine and crowned by such deeply indigo claws rimmed in copper, drumming and clacking those fabulous non-opposables.
“Sigh, ugly human? Divine madnesses stream from my vermillion feelers, but only to be boiled and broiled and served to your slobbering lips with garlic butter and parsnips, followed by the delicate dessert of my soul, caramelized and en flambé, garnished with raspberries. Eh?”
“No—” I wanted to laugh at his indignation, his purpled face. But he blustered on.
“Who are you to sigh? You don’t even know your name. You tumbled through a Mirror and blundered into my Courtyard. Very rude. You’re getting everything dirty.”
CLACK! His claws snapped emphatically.
I bent my head humbly to pacify the storming creature. “I am sorry, I meant no offense. Others are so often strange and terrible . . . ”
He stood unmoving for some time, his stubborn brow coloring emerald with injured pride.
“They certainly are,” he said pointedly.
But with a courtly gesture of his claw, he acquiesced. “Very well, I shall not Scratch you to-day.” He clambered nearer to me, clattering on the slippery Road, little legs splaying out and correcting, until he sat next to me on a chalcedony bench. “I am the Rope-Cutter, the great Key-Maker, the Splitter of Bones and Eater of the Sea. In another life I was a Dragon, and I scorched the face of the world.” All this he laid out in a low, confidential music, by way of introduction.
“I am the Walker and the Seeker-After.”
“Seeker after what?”
I had no answer, of course. “I am the Woman of the Maze. I am the Compass-Eater.” At this last his scaly eyebrows raised in impressed surprise.
“Compasses are difficult to catch,” he nodded. “You are strangely colored, for a Seeker. I think you have undergone Assassination. Do you know the Way?”
I looked at my hands, the lined manuscripts of my palms, unable to speak for the frustration of tears. The Lobster shrugged.
“Neither do I,” he admitted. “The Labyrinth has a surfeit of Ways, and all the Ways are its own. I cannot choose. I stay close to the sound of the Sea. It is the best I can do. I am very fierce, I do not like Others. They Disturb me.” There was a long, pulsing, and pointed silence between us.
“What sort of Keys do you make?” He was such a strange, sad, frenetic little animal, flashing storms on his shell. He brightened immediately.
“I told you I am a Meaningful Lobster. All kinds. So few take an interest—it is an ancient and refined art, but makers are few in these degenerate days. Keys of baleen and Keys of dried mud, Keys of Door-meat, Keys of fishing-cages, Keys of rain, Keys of whitethorn bark. Keys of gold and silver and bronze and ivory, sodalite and beryl and amethyst and liquid rubies. Sardonyx and cat’s eye and hematite. Keys of wolf-tails and Keys of iron pyrite. Keys of gardenias and camellias and rosewood, of wine bottles and Wallbrick and Roadstone. Horse-hide and sweetgrass and priest’s collars, polenta and lizard claws and king’s crowns, chess pieces and cheese wheels. Keys to Castles and Treasure Chests and Queen’s Chambers and Cellar Doors, to Garden Gates and Serpent Cages, Witch’s Huts and Prisons, Stables and Wax Museums, Towers and Armories, Tollbooths and Secret Rooms. Keys to Rivers and Caverns, Keys to Wind and Body.”
