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Once upon a time, she loved this kind of story. When she was still a child, and the world was small, and she dreamed of open doors.
knows that these stories are full of foolish humans doing foolish things, warning tales of gods and monsters and greedy mortals who want too much, and then fail to understand what they’ve lost. Until the price is paid, and it’s too late to claim it back.
Adeline had wanted to be a tree.
To grow wild and deep, belong to no one but the ground beneath her feet, and the sky above, just like Estele. It would be an unconventional life, and perhaps a little lonely, but at least it would be hers. She would belong to no one but herself.
But the grass is only grass, and the wind is only wind, and neither answers, even when she presses her forehead to the ground and sobs.
She is a vegetable left too long in the garden, its skin gone stiff, its insides woody, gone to ground by choice, only to be dug up and made into a meal.
And why shouldn’t she be? This woman who taught her of wild dreams and willful gods, who filled Adeline’s head with thoughts of freedom, blew on the embers of hope and let her believe a life could be her own.
Time—how often has she heard it described as sand within a glass, steady, constant. But that is a lie, because she can feel it quicken, crashing toward her.
Her future will rush by the same as her past, only worse, because there will be no freedom, only a marriage bed and a deathbed and perhaps a childbed between, and when she dies it will be as though she never lived.
“So tell me—tell me—tell me,” it echoes. “Am I the devil—the devil—or the dark—dark—dark? Am I a monster—monster—or a god—god—god—or…”
do not want to belong to someone else,” she says with sudden vehemence. The words are a door flung wide, and now the rest pour out of her. “I do not want to belong to anyone but myself. I want to be free. Free to live, and to find my own way, to love, or to be alone, but at least it is my choice, and I am so tired of not having choices, so scared of the years rushing past beneath my feet. I do not want to die as I’ve lived, which is no life at all. I—”
“Ah,” says the darkness, reading her silence. “You do not know.” Again, the green eyes shift, darken. “You ask for time without limit. You want freedom without rule. You want to be untethered. You want to live exactly as you please.”
“I am not some genie, bound to your whim.” He pushes off the tree. “Nor am I some petty forest spirit, content with granting favors for mortal trinkets. I am stronger than your god and older than your devil. I am the darkness between stars, and the roots beneath the earth. I am promise, and potential, and when it comes to playing games, I divine the rules, I set the pieces, and I choose when to play. And tonight, I say no.”
A smile—just like the smile in her drawings, askance, and full of secrets—crosses his mouth. And then he pulls her to him. A lover’s embrace. He is smoke and skin, air and bone, and when his mouth presses against hers, the first thing she tastes is the turning of the seasons, the moment when dusk gives way to night. And then his kiss deepens. His teeth skim her bottom lip, and there is pain in the pleasure, followed by the copper taste of blood on her tongue. “Done,” whispers the god against her lips. And then the world goes black, and she is falling.
Sadness sweeps across his face, but not the kind that comes with knowing. No, it is the sadness reserved for lost things, a storm-torn tree, a horse made lame, a carving split one stroke before it’s done.
That is the nature of dreams. They do not last.
Hears his voice as he whispers that single, binding word. Done
“they say people are like snowflakes, each one unique, but I think they’re more like skies. Some are cloudy, some are stormy, some are clear, but no two are ever quite the same.”
“And what kind of sky am I?”
An hour of sitting on the hardwood floor, wrapped in only a blanket, listening to the murmur and scrape of Sam mixing paint, the hiss of the brush on the canvas, and then it was done, and when Addie came around to look at it, what she saw was the night sky.
She returns to her book, but it’s no use. She’s not in the mood for old men lost at sea, for parables of lonely lives. She wants to be stolen away, wants to forget. A fantasy, or perhaps a romance.
and she makes a mental note to return when summer gives way to fall, and the cold sweeps through. But her focus falls on the center of the room, where a dozen dress forms stand like dancers taking up their marks, their narrow waists wrapped in shades of green and gray, a navy gown piped white, another pale blue with yellow trim.
the absence of bone stays or bustled skirts, and thinks, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, how much simpler it would be to be a man, how easily they move through the world, and at such little cost.
The men in Paris are soft, even pretty, but they are still men.
Addie chooses a dark sapphire dress, its edges trimmed in gray. It reminds her of a storm at night, the clouds blotting out the sky. The silk kisses her skin, the fabric crisp and new and utterly unblemished. It is too fine for her needs, a dress for banquets, for balls, but she does not care. And if it draws strange looks, what of it? They will forget before they have the chance to gossip.
And then, suddenly, he is too close, the air between them snuffed like a candle. He smells of summer nights, of earth, and moss, and tall grass waving beneath stars. And of something darker. Of blood on rocks, and wolves loose in the woods.
“You think it will get easier,”
“It will not. You are as good as gone, and every year you live will feel a lifetime, and in every lifetime, you will be forgotten. Your pain is meaningless. Your life is meaningless. The years will be like weights around your ankles. They will crush you, bit by bit, and when you cannot stand it, you will beg me to put you from your misery.”
“I remember you.”
He walks away to order, says something that makes the barista laugh and lean forward, like a flower to the sun. He returns with a second cup and a croissant, and sets them both in front of her before taking his seat, and now they are uneven again. Balance tipped, restored, and tipped again, and it is the kind of game she’s played a hundred times, a sparring match made of small gestures, the stranger smiling across the table.
“Do you have siblings?” he asks. She shakes her head, tearing a corner off the croissant because he hasn’t touched it, and her stomach’s growling. “Lucky,” he says. “Lonely,” she counters.
“Your freckles look like stars.”
The kind of person who feels like they’re wasting away in a world full of food, because they can’t decide what they want.”
“Names have purpose. Names have power.” She tips her glass his way. “You know that, or else you wouldn’t have stolen mine.”
“You are a stubborn thing. But even rocks wear away to nothing.”
“You think yourself a cat, playing with its catch. But I am not a mouse, and I will not be a meal.”
Addie is like a clock wound tighter as the day draws near, a coiled spring that cannot loosen until dawn. And even then, it is a grim unwinding, less relief than resignation, the knowledge that it will start again.
“I don’t mean in that normal, time flies way,” Henry’s saying. “I mean feeling like it’s surging by so fast, and you try to reach out and grab it, you try to hold on, but it just keeps rushing away. And every second, there’s a little less time, and a little less air, and sometimes when I’m sitting still, I start to think about it, and when I think about it, I can’t breathe. I have to get up. I have to move.”
“Small places make for small lives. And some people are fine with that. They like knowing where to put their feet. But if you only walk in other people’s steps, you cannot make your own way. You cannot leave a mark.”
“It would be so easy to forget you. Everyone else already has.”
It’s just a door. Not a period. An ellipsis. A to-be-continued.
“Three hundred years,” she whispers. “And you can still find something new.”
The popcorn is irretrievably burned.
One time salt, and the next honey, and each designed to cover poison.
Henry is like bottled lightning, unable to sit still for long, full of nervous energy,
