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No matter how far you march, O best beloved mooncalf, the past will always drag around your ankle, a snapped shackle time cannot pry loose.
It’s a ghoulish cultural splinter the country has never quite succeeded in tweezing.
They killed their own just to see time pass. That’s how it started. Humans were as hypnotized by shine as magpies, but no magpie has ever been so thinkful about how many days it has left before it turns into a told story.
Without stories there is no past, no future, no We. There is Death. There is Nothing, a night without moon or stars.
Stories, too, they discovered. But it was a funny thing: They were shattered into pieces, like the Great Mother who had scattered them, and no one tale held to the ear by itself could ever be fully understood. To make them whole required many voices entwined. Then and only then could they become true things, and then and only then could we become the undying We, endless voices passing along the one song that is also Many.
The world’s so big and mean, and we’re so small in it with our hands and feet fettered. Little tiny helpless things, who can’t do a damn thing but cry and rage most days at the way the game’s rigged against us.
No matter what you did, forty or fifty or a hundred years passed and everything became a narrative to be toyed with, masters of media alchemy splitting the truth’s nucleus into a ricocheting cascade reaction of diverging alternate realities.
Death decayed into history decayed into poolside anecdote. Francium wishes it had a half-life as short as tragedy’s.
Her mind is the most alien thing Regan’s ever had truck with outside the God in her mother’s Bible.
She turns, asking, in the little language of twisted trunk-paws: Are you well? Can you walk? It’s just a little further. We’ll go together.
And even this much We is enough to drive the fear back into the high grass. Her mind stills. Her legs unstiffen. Together they cross the overwater, men flytrailing behind. Together they go to sing the song of their undoing, the joining, teaching, come-together song.
