Chapter Text
That was then, which hasn’t ended yet.
—Mary Oliver, “Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches”
#
Sometimes I dream of disappearing.
It is the same each time, and a little different: Pa’s voice calling out in a language I do not yet know, edged in false brightness or cracked down the middle with fear; cloud-grey or sunlight flickered through the canopy, branches blink-shifting in constant dappled reconfiguration. A bang, or two. A broken scream, varied by half-tones. Lying down in a cradle of yew roots, Marro’s child-small hand curled around mine, my mouth brimming salt and red and Pa gone gone gone.
Or the cottage, before that. The crackling fire, the blood.
Pa’s raspy intake of breath as my eyes found Ma’s body.
It is not the thousand lives the two of them have lived in total; it might not even have been a dozen. But when your world cracks open almost before you’ve learned to talk—when it etches itself on your bones, older than you can even begin to understand—
Sometimes I want to vanish again, just to leave it all behind.
Because no one but us may remember, but it still happened. It did.
#
After my latest spat with Pa, I storm off five centuries into the future.
It isn’t hard. I carry three knives at my belt, snares and flint in the pockets of my cloak; have since I was eight and Ma taught Marro and me to hunt. And the words from Pa’s book spider behind my eyelids, their spellings at once familiar and not: It ends where it begins. An instrument of time travel. The fresh nettle-sting of revelation: that my whole life, the secret of the yew had sat at the center of our family, silent as stone; that my gore-drowned dreams were not dreams at all.
That my body carries within it the seed of its own vanishing.
“Thea?” Pa’s voice carries from the cottage, already softened with a forgiveness I don’t deserve, and I slice the blade across my palm and press it to the bark.
#
I’ve never read much, as a rule.
I was allegedly a terror as a small child—always attempting to stow away in the saddlebags of some far-origined traveler or swim to the end of the river or climb so high in the yew that even Ma couldn’t see. The only time I sat still enough for stories was just before bed, when Pa would lull me and Marro to sleep with tales of dragons and fae and wicked queens slain by brave knights. (And if the latter happened to resemble Ma more often than not, I thought nothing of it—what is a story but a mirror for those you love?) After I learned to read, I tore through the lower shelves of the cottage library: folktales and mystery novels and tragic plays; a weathered tome of ancient poem-fragments by a woman with only one name. But I left the philosophies and treatises and mathematics (yech) to Marro; preferred to spend my days racing deer or turning cartwheels with the village children or whistling at the starlings until they whistled back.
Then, today: a leather-bound tome, tucked perpendicular behind the precarious book-towers wobbling on every available surface of Pa’s desk. His name on the spine; the pages a little warped, time and sweat and a stain from the time Marro spilled berry juice on it (absolutely not because I’d pushed him) while Pa was working through dinner. The words mostly modern Mothertongue, I realized while skimming the first few pages—which begged the question of who he was writing for, despite the words themselves, after a fashion, being addressed to Ma.
Yet the cadence of each sentence, their utter familiarity: like being told another fairytale beneath a brillantine fling of stars; like a song I’d been hearing since before I was born.
I snuck out, book tucked under my cloak, while everyone was otherwise occupied—Ma and the uncles chopping wood as an excuse to catch up, Marro pining over the village shoemaker’s son, Pa in deep conversation with a pair of Gallish monks about the looming wars of religion—and nestled in the branches of my second-favorite tree (the yew would’ve been too close to the cottage); carefully eased open the cover again, having received enough of Pa’s lectures about handling rare books to not crack the spine. This one could not have been old, but I’d seen how much it had cost him to write and then copy out again cleanly—the way he’d start shivering a little, and inform Ma in a conversational tone that his fingers were turning black; the care with which she would pull him to her chest, tell us children to go out and play. And then the story plunged from post offices and trains and war back into the green wood, our wood, and there was Ma and Hen and a queen scribbling furiously over the palimpsest of history, and Ma’s sections in Middle Mothertongue, in the shorthand Pa uses when transcribing, and, manifold gods, certain details in re: boardinghouses and sheepskins on cold nights that I immediately wished to scour from my brain. Still, by the end my head hurt from crying—none of my tears landing on the page, thank you very much, even as Marro’s berry stain on pp. 225–226 glowed as violently blue-black as ever—and a finch had affectionately deposited droppings on my shoulder.
Pa caught me as I was sliding the book back on the shelf. I was admittedly a little dazed, not quite sure of my own limbs—as if my body had, in the intervening hours, shifted slightly off its axis.
“Thea,” he said, and I thought: You might be a thousand years old; I thought: You and Ma only unraveled the last part of your story for us, tore through centuries and empires for another-another glimpse of our rather unremarkable childhoods.
I thought: You told us none of it.
And I felt at once furious and very, very small.
“What,” I snapped, turning away to hide the residual redness of my eyes.
“You’ve got—” he gestured at his own shoulder, and I swiped at the bird shit impatiently.
“I know.”
“Do you”—he swallowed, the scarred lump at his throat bobbing, at which I realized he hadn’t strictly lied about the robber on the side of the road—“want to talk about it?”
And I might have acquiesced, or at least hesitated a little longer to say no, but right then Ma stumped in with a brace of hares and the two of them exchanged this small secret look and I remembered a lot of things I wished I didn’t and made a sound like eurghk. “What, the—details?”
Pa reddened a little, but forged on. “We weren’t sure if—you know you can read any book you like, it’s just—”
“No, I would really have rather not,” I said, still not quite looking at him. “But I—I wanted to find out how it ended, and then—but—gods, you said your gun was witchcraft, you said you and Ma met each other on a road trip, I still dream about both of you dying over and over and you never said anything—” and then I burst into tears for no saintsdamned reason, and when Pa reached for me I brushed past him and Ma and Marro gaping at the door—back out into dusk-blazed forest, the unfurling shadows, my family’s eyes pressed into my back like the ink-dripped tips of quills.