His app was called Promises Promises, and its download page was one of the last things in Ellie’s search history—behind two hundred chapters of Fruits Basket and six clickbait articles with titles all on the pattern of “17 Spectacular Strategies to Strengthen your Psychic Supremacy”.
When 2008 hit and I got laid off from Circuit City, a friend of mine managed to get me work at the local supermarket deli. It was a shit job, but I was beyond grateful at the time.
A light, he realizes, piercing the dark. It’s coming through the keyhole of the door leading to the living room. But how can it be? There’s no one else in the apartment—hasn’t been for years.
What I’d taken for white beads are actually human teeth, mixed with white crystals I identified (via taste, to Mole’s horror) as salt. Mole looks at the mixture and shudders. I don’t know how to explain why I keep them. As much as I wish to deny the strangeness of our near-death experience…if some wyrdcraft did take place, this feels like a talisman.
But I am no king, no man. It is a role I assumed in serving, with perfect order, those who scarcely saw fit to name me. Wild and shimmering, I hide from myself no longer.
I was born twice from death. It is time to mend what was broken, even if they will not.
Maybe we overestimated ourselves, I thought, watching the ferries hum against the wine-dark sea. Even if we floated above it, we were still bound to the ocean, engulfed in all its weight and inescapable history. To believe otherwise was a kind of hubris. But we had believed otherwise anyway, and so each of us had become something smaller, less human, suspended in a brittle net of want and memory. And then she appeared. At the wrong time, in the wrong place. My Scylla, my monstress, my deathless siren of anglerfish light. Longing, in that empty, unmoving ocean, for things that had not existed for centuries. How could anyone blame her? The only alternative was to grieve.
If only Serthe'P had been able to fit in, maybe she could have protected —. No. This thought was dangerous. Mnth’R had helped her understand that their isolation had more to do with the Raja’s exploitation of their cast’s fears than any shortcomings of theirs, his Manifest Sight propaganda curdling climate anxieties into prejudice against community members. Serthe’P needed to remember that their lives mattered too much to be reduced by a tyrant’s ideology. Separated from the cast, they were still finding ways to take care of each other.
Without a name or need for one, he arrives scattered at the base of a tree and he rests like that, in pieces, for sixty-odd years. He is forty-nine sticky droplets of impulse and intelligence, tucked under dried oak leaves, clinging to a stone.
