eatnanowrimo

He picked his nose in front of Dona Estella, who after ninety-three years had committed but one sin. He picked his nose at her when she refused to speak of that one sin. Dona Estella told him she had not lived to be ninety-three without ignoring the charms of silly young men, and this she said while waving her hand around her, at the great expanses of her estates — those that took up more than a quarter of Parafon.

In short, he had no shame and no honour, and one day he came home after dallying with the minister’s youngest daughter (he was thirty, she sixteen) to find that the key to his house refused to open his door.

Old Paolo told him that he knew exactly what he was doing and he had been letting people into their houses for more than Giovanni’s lifespan, and the only reason Giovanni’s key wasn’t working – well, it did not fit the lock at all. Therefore, he concluded, Giovanni lived here no longer, and had no right to tell old Paolo to let him into another man’s house.

‘But I live here!’ Giovanni said.

‘That,’ old Paolo said, turning up his nose, ‘is what they always say.’

‘How do you expect to make a centino if you don’t do your damn job!’ Giovanni’s face was red, but old Paolo’s was colourless and flat, as flat as the plains of Farandello. He packed up his little picks and wrenches, waggling his finger at Giovanni as one parting blow.

‘You get what’s coming to you,’ old Paolo said, and clumped away on his worn black boots.

Giovanni looked at his own boots. New, striped with a flash of the latest green from the artisan city of Someslo, they had made him rather proud until he realised that they pinched like a demon, or the grasp of a married lady who thought him suited to save her from the hell of domestic boredom. Giovanni was always rather sad when they told him such things; it was when he knew it was time to go.

At any rate, he was not getting into his house, short of breaking down the windows, and they were inexplicably shuttered, just as his door was.

Giovanni did the natural thing and went to the local cafe, where he detailed his woes to a gaggle of spectators. Parafono was renowned for its populace’s sense for the melodramatic, and yet the reception they gave him was shockingly frigid.

‘Oho, lies again, Giovanni.’

‘Should keep your nose out of trouble.’

‘Shouldn’t have played around with our good minister’s daughter.’

‘I saw him…’

‘Where’s the two centini you owe me, devil!’

So Giovanni, feeling rather down on his luck, decided to try his luck with the mayor, Parafono being too insignificant a village to have a polizia. In most of the villages around the region, the mayor’s word was law, if they even had a mayor — Giovanni had his reasons for staying, none of which he liked to disclose.

Sabatini was almost as old as Dona Estella and twice as sarcastic; so mordant that Giovanni suspected him already dead. His pate was so bald it glistened, but his ruffled coat was as sharp and black as Giovanni’s own.

Giovanni explained his story, flinging his hands out in the established tradition, and Sabatini listened, although his face was as sarcastic as his voice.

When Giovanni had finished, Sabatini said, ‘Well, Don Giovanni, that’s a pity.’ Then he smiled.

‘It’s a damn pity? Someone ’s stolen my house! You’ve stolen my house!’

The mayor lifted his shoulders for a second, then let them drop. He cocked an eyebrow at Giovanni. His lip curled into a tight, thin line.

‘Sit down,’ he said.

Giovanni realised he had been standing and gesticulating the whole time, and, because he did know what manners were and had some respect for the very old, he obeyed.

‘You can have your house back,’ Sabatini said.

‘Well!” Giovanni said. ‘That’s a fine thing to know.’ He rose again.

Sabatini’s finger waggled slowly at him, side to side, like the pendulum of a clock.

‘You think it’ll be so simple?’ he asked, shaking his head slowly, just as he’d waggled his finger. ‘Sit down, Giovanni Aragonesi.’

Giovanni sat, fuming.

‘Think you’re a fine young man, don’t you?’

‘Well, quite,’ Giovanni admitted. ‘What do you want?’

Sabatini’s smile was disconcerting. ‘I know where your money comes from,’ he said. ‘I can’t imagine our fellow townsmen would be particularly happy to learn about it, hmm? Your own father, Don Giovanni the younger. My, my.’

Giovanni’s face went blank. ‘I’ve no idea what you’re speaking of,’ he said. ‘Dirty lies!’

‘I rather think you do,’ Sabatini said impatiently. ‘Would you like me to repea–’

‘No!’ Giovanni said, rising again, his head darting from side to side. ‘What do you want?’

Sabatini smiled. He didn’t move. Giovanni sat himself down.

‘I want you,’ the mayor said, his mouth twisting into a parched curve, flecked with dead skin. ‘I want you to find me Dona Estella’s only sin.’

And Don Giovanni sat very still.

I was eighteen; I was in Roumania, and I’d just saved enough money to visit my cousins in the old country, the summer before I started my scholarship at a prestigious East Coast university. I was taking math; I liked the way things worked when they summed perfectly, into sense.

My cousins — I didn’t think much of them, when we met; I thought they were bumpkins, and they told me stupid stories about how I should stay out of the woods because they were cursed. They plied me with drink and tried to fix me up with one of their friends, a girl from the city who turned her nose up at me, and flicked lint off her gleaming viscose coat.

Of course I went into the woods. I figured I would get a story out of it all, maybe make some friends at college by telling it, maybe keep some friends. Instead I took a turn down a path I was told not to go, and there I met a woman, flaxen-haired and beautiful.

She told me she was under a curse, and she asked me to stay with her for exactly one year. No more, no less. I was a product of cell division and genetic strands, everything reducible, explainable. Yet when I looked into her soul, through her eyes, something quickened in me, and it was wholly illogical. I gave her my heart. I gave her my soul, and drenched in sweat and lust, I understood love. I gave her her year. Almost.

The woods and the wilderness became home to me, and I thought a year was nothing, a paltry thing, a collation of days that segued into seamless seasons.

It was the penultimate day that broke me. I saw a girl, running in the moonlight, her ankles turned to me, her viscose coat swaying in the wind, the strips on her running shoes silver in the shredded light. It all flooded back to me. My scholarship, the bustle and crash of cities and dream machines — I set my foot down the path that led away from my witch woman, back to life.

But it was my woman who stepped out. She caught my hand.

‘One more day,’ my wife said (she was my wife, even if no paper ever told us so) — ‘one more day, and we would have been free forever.’

And she told me the curse had passed from her; it was on me now, to make a choice, to pick between my life, and that of our unborn son.

I was eighteen, and at eighteen you never realise how you will come to love something you made of yourself.

I chose to live. I left her. I went to school. I lost myself in calculus and figured I had my life worked out.

Nine months later, a rapping sounded on my door.

My erstwhile wife stood in the hall, something pink and mewling in her arms.

Our son died when he was eighteen. I told myself curses were nothing, coincidence, but that day he died, I started to see my life as a dream, something that had ended when I told it to start. I sat at his funeral, folding his shirt over and over in my hands, cubing it, as though I could reduce a lifetime into something solvable, into a simple matter of statistics.

No number will ever equate the death of your child. No equation will ever tell you how many long nights end up spent, rocking alone in lonely chairs.

His mother, long since back in Roumania, posted me letters, and pictures — our boy, growing old as I grew older. He was dead. I knew.

One day, at fifty, fifty-five, what does it matter – the letters stopped coming. I went to her. The cottage where we made love was empty. Empty, or void; I turned back the sheets, and there they lay, tangled bleached bones. Looking closer, curled up on her hand, I found it; the tiniest bones, foetal, a thing so small I breathed out and it was gone. I looked at my hands; the age spots had faded away, and I was eighteen again, and I stood and thought about love, and life, and death, and loss, and where I would go, and what I would do, and into whom I would, eventually, grow.

Now, at sixty, I wait for the dream; there are no letters, there never were. I wonder how it will end, but I already know. I go through the motions, but I have not been alive since I was eighteen, and everything fades, perfectly, to zero.

I took a walk along the bay last winter, past the dying rally. I picked my way through the detritus. Save this, save that. A clump of stragglers circled around me, flagging placards wavering in the wind.

“Save the whales,” one said. I don’t know but that the youth of today have too much time, that’s what. Never saw a whale I cared to save.

I kept walking. Near the factory creek’s mouth where the wet filth collected, I saw a mass of scales, and paused.

There I saw the mermaid. More a fish, you ask me. Her head poked out of her matted hair, and two tiny hands twitched, dangling on stunted arms like claws. Her face was a shrivelled little thing, and her moist body flopped. She lay smooth and scaled and dark.

“Save me, madam.” Her voice was barely a whisper.

Save the mermaids! What have the mermaids ever done for me? Mermaids, as far as I’m concerned, are like whales.

“No,” I said, and walked away.

But that night I dreamt of her, ragged and wilting on the shore.
 

I went out in the morning, following the seaway until I stood with my hands on my hips, looking down at her.

“I’ll give you the greatest treasure of the sea,” she breathed. She was down to half her size, dwindling, dessicating.

“I don’t know that I need that,” I said, thinking of barnacles and weeds.

‘Your heart’s desire,’ she murmured.

‘No,’ I said, and walked away.

But that night I dreamt of Arthur lying limp and empty in his bed.

‘Anything I want?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ the mermaid whispered. I could barely make her out. She shifted under the dead brown fronds.

‘And if I want to be rich?’

She sang of shipwrecks and bullion that glimmered gold under the deep moonlight.

‘And if I want to be famous?’

She sang anthems and jingles that trailed off into staccato snaps, the furtive camera clicks of paparazzi.

‘And if I want my husband?’

The song twisted, eerie and sullen, and I wished I had never said it.

I scooped her gently into my arms, and walked out into the fresh blue sea, where I knelt and let her float free.

She grew immediately, her body puffing up proudly, until the flesh of her body, dark and ripe, blossomed like a plum. Her face peered out at me. She extended an arm, long and slender, and her fingers danced with sea.

‘What will you ask for?’ she said.

I took her hand, and she nodded, once, and pulled me into the cold water. We turned and rolled and twisted, and the deeps smoothed away my old, broken body. I felt it; the sea change, in me.

The youngest of the squires, also the smallest, shuffled his knees in the dust, and tried to concentrate on his task. Cloth in hand, he spat on Lafian’s boots and worked at the spatters of mud and gore.

‘My master,’ Enrik said, shelving his iron-shod feet on the little squire’s head, ‘once quested for the greatest sword ever smithed by man. And he found it. It is very mighty, as befits the mightiest knight in all the world. The knight who is without peer.’

The little squire winced as Enrik shifted his overgrown feet, but did his best not to squeak.

‘Surely not,’ Lafian said reasonably, ‘my master has that sword. ‘Tis the sword of the wailing warp.’

‘No,’ Enrik snorted, ‘not that cheap piece of trash. He sought long and hard for the blade that cuts the wind, far at the height of the northern vale. And he found it. As he wields it now.’

Lafian scowled. ‘What of your master, little pig?’ He cuffed the youngest squire around the head, stretching himself out in the noon sun.

‘My brother?’ the boy stammered.

‘So you were squired only out of pity,’ Enrik remarked. ‘I did not think we’d see you again, not after we tarred you last fall. What’s your brother carry, then?’

The boy hesitated, and Lafian cuffed him idly.

‘A simple iron sword,’ he yelped, ‘that’s all.’

Both of the larger squires laughed.

‘My master coats his blade with crushed elderblood,’ Lafian announced. ‘None of his enemies have ever risen again.’

He leaned closer to the boy. ‘It makes a man breathe hard, and acid eat at his gut. Then the frothing at the mouth, the bilious acid bubbling forth; then his body stops. And then he dies, slowly, in agonising pain.’

The boy shrank back.

Enrik tittered.

‘Your turn,’ Lafian said to Enrik.

‘My master journeyed to the lands of the South Star Princess and stole her from the court of the South Star King. ‘Twas there he lost six fingers, and all his toes.’

‘Did that not make it hard for him to… balance?’ asked Lafian.

‘Why, he had them replaced with gold,’ Enrik said, thrusting out his chin. ‘Didn’t stop him from bedding the fair maid, that he did.’

‘By… by force?’ the squire asked.

‘She begged him to honour her with marriage, but my master refused to be tied down by any maid, fairest in the land or no. Why, he let me take a turn with her, myself. She was as fair as they say, and with a few smacks about the head, very compliant. Fill my cup, sprat.’

‘My master had her too,’ Lafian said, not to be outdone. ‘But he said she was willing. I couldn’t tell.’

Enrik waggled a lazy finger at the boy squire.

‘Well,’ the youngest squire said, filling the cups carefully for his peers, ‘my master once ate too many sourbeans at the wedding banquet of the Winter King and Queen, where he was hoping to court the renowned Lady of the Golden Oaks. There he sat, hoping fervently that his gasgut would fade into fragrant air, and all of a sudden, the Lady of the Golden Oaks sat herself to his right…’

Lafian and Enrik looked at the boy.

‘Well, she married the Lord of the Silver Lake instead,’ the squire said.

‘Most… doughty,” Lafian said at last.

‘Indeed,’ the boy said.

‘A little unseemly,’ Enrik suggested.

‘Oh, well,’ the squire said. ‘She was old, and very ugly. Certainly a virgin, not by choice.’

There was a silence.

‘But very rich,’ the boy added.

‘My master,’ Enrik said at length, ‘took the rubies from the South Star girl’s dress, he did. And here they are.’ He stroked his bulging pocket and smirked at Lafian. ‘’Twas for her marriage that did not happen.’

‘Did it not?’ asked Lafian, scratching his head.

‘Well, she were no virgin, were she?’ Enrik chuckled and rubbed his pocket again. ‘Fit to buy a kingdom, these.’

‘My master needs not material wealth,’ Lafian said haughtily. ‘In the past year he has slain three great wyrms, deep in the bowels of the earth. And as for your silly South Star princess, he took her father’s castle, and turned it over to his friends. Such revels as they have, you’ve not seen.’

‘Mine needs not material wealth, yet likes to be in possession of it,’ Enrik retorted. ‘Why, in the past year he has slain five great earth wyrms! The treasure he had from them filled whole houses!’

Both of the big squires looked at the youngest one, expectantly.

‘Well,’ the third squire said thoughtfully, ‘my brother isn’t particularly special. He certainly hasn’t killed any great earth wyrms.’

‘Now come,’ Enrik said, ‘let us hear it. No need to feel embarrassed.’ He winked at Lafian.

‘Well, with his plain but very sharp iron sword, he stood himself by the cave of the Iron Wyrm, waiting for the four-fingered knight to come outside.”

Enrik’s jaw slackened.

‘Then with the blade that cuts the wind, he made his way to the Rift of Ravina, where he sat himself down. He sang some songs to pass the time, while waiting for the knight with the wailing sword to emerge.’

Lafian stood up.

‘But before he did all that,’ the youngest squire continued, ‘he bade his youngest brother powder the seeds of the elderblood tree, and shake them into the watergourds of the very two squires who tarred him last fall.’

At that a most peculiar expression came over Enrik’s face, and he clutched at his gut, curling up into himself.

Lafian turned to him before doubling over likewise. He grasped his belly.

‘The rubies,’ he gasped. And then he keeled onto the cold ground, convulsing. Enrik had already commenced frothing at the mouth.

The youngest of the squires, youngest of the South Star children, stood up and stretched, unwinding his fingers like pale snakes.

He watched for a while before the novelty faded.

‘Well, I’ll be taking those,’ he said, to no-one in particular, and went on his way.

Every night I got myself in a different girl, but in a small place like Shadford you run out of fresh meat fast. I got bored and tried to get them two together, but I think those days you had to go down to the big cities for that kind of thing. ‘Least that’s what my friends were saying.

I understood Shadford, I liked Shadford.

“I never saw the likes of it.”

“Don’t know what the young girls are wearing these days.”

“Not enough!”

There was that new store just opened up across the road. From the grimy pub window I could see the storefront. There was a girl’s face printed on the big glass window, or stuck to it, however they do it. Her face was sharp and elegant, like a proper magazine girl. She was not at all like the soft round simpering girls I spent my nights in. I wondered if her hoity-toity sneer would break beneath me.

I walked home one night after everyone had gone to bed, and stopped outside her window and looked up at her. She sang of cities and plate glass and invisible barriers and love and neverending nights. I wondered if I could keep up with a girl like that.

Next night I passed the girl in the window again. She wore a smile that brimmed over with promises and meaning. I put my hands on her dew-fresh lips, under the rain and vicious wind, and I felt warm and wet and quite content.

I didn’t get a village girl and I didn’t go to the back of the car that night. I stayed with her a while and then I went back home and got in bed and thought lots of thoughts about her.

Then I was looking at her so long my hands turned blue and I went back into the pub and gazed at her, and before I knew it the sun was up and Mr Morson was asking what the hell I was doing still there and to get the bloody hell out and get some bloody rest.

My girls got mad because I was never out with them anymore, and one of them waited outside the pub one time and saw me mooning at my stuck-up love. She was Oriel Morson, a pretty name dressed up in a dumpy girl. I had been with her enough times that I was beyond bored, and I told her so. That bitch gave me one hell of a look, but I didn’t give her any back, and eventually she went off.

Night after, I found the glass in front of my girl covered in black spray.

First I scratched all the paint off her with a cloth and scrubbed her until I wore my nails all the way down and my fingers were all black and wouldn’t get clean.

Then I went to find that bitch and I blacked her face with my knuckles until she said she was sorry. I told her I wasn’t sorry and I would do it again, mark.

That night I was a bartender no more. She told on me.

I went back to my girl and I told her that would never happen again, and there in the glow of the sodium lamps she closed one eye and winked at me, and her smile got a little bigger.

And I did not imagine that, because the next night I was back there looking at her again and she was still winking at me.

And her shirt, her pretty silk shirt had slipped past her shoulder a little, and her red lips smiled knowingly at me.

I put my lips on hers. The glass was cold but her lips were warm, warm and soft as the rain fell all down around me.

“Mate,” they said, and I turned around, mad ’cause they ruined my moment.

Five of them all standing there, and that Morson slag standing right behind them looking all smug with her covered-up black eyes.

“I’m busy,” I told the lot of them. “Can’t you see?”

They looked at each other. The one with the bat said, “Is it alright, beating up nutters?”

“Look what he done to my face,” cried the damn girl, pointing at her sockets.

“Improved it,” I declared.

“What you waiting for! Ain’t you men?”

I figured it might hurt quite a lot, and I didn’t want that, so I balled my fists up in front of my face like a shield.

The song started right around then, low and alluring and full of dreams and broken promises. I looked out from under my hands. One by one they ran towards me, and I put my hands up again, but when I heard the first thud I put my hands back down. One by one they ran right at the glass and smeared on it like jam streaking down a kitchen wall.

It was an amazing sight, and I wish I could bring it back from time for you. Anyway, I went and got the girl who was shaking over there, and I best not tell you what I did next because maybe you wouldn’t think so well of me.

Then I went and got the bin and smashed it against the glass until my lady love finally floated free.

She came to my arms, an angel in two dimensions. Her paper arms wrapped tight round my turgid heart, which slowed to beat in time with hers.

I kissed her flat lips and the flat curves of her fat breasts, and hey I took her back to Morson’s where the fire gyrated in the grate and the spirits were calling to me. Long before I knew I would do it, I grabbed the bottles and threw them all over and took the longest swig in my mouth. And I put my Zippo in front of my face and sent my lungs out so it all went up, all went up around me and my lady love.

I’ll say now the saddest part; she vanished in the fire, not me. In the hospital I lie with my face all gone and my body weeping like my eyes would if they could and this is it, the whole story, the real story. They want to keep it alive, this ruin of me.

I turn my face to get the sun from the window. Under the bandages it burns again. I dream she comes. I did it all for love. I did. I did. The door opens and it’s the doctor come to run his tests on me. I dream she does not forget I dream I dream she knows I gave this all to set her free.

.

Time went by. He married, but not the girl in the window.

I came across the photograph the other day. He had his arms around her. Her lips engulfed him, incarnadine and timeless, yearning.

It went to a girl in Connecticut who’d stepped on a cherry bomb, and Francie felt good, for a while.

When Francie tried to give away her other foot, the doctors started to get antsy.

You need help, they said.

Francie said the only help she needed came at the end of a rotary saw.

They ran the full gamut of tests on her, but couldn’t disprove her sanity.

So Francie gave her other foot away, took it off at the knee. It went to a lady who’d slipped on the edge of a crowded train platform, who sent Francie pictures of her smiling children.

Still, Francie found herself lying awake at night, staring at the last limb. It burned, without burning. Not a single doctor would agree to help her with the one thing she needed. She couldn’t afford it anyway, because nobody would sponsor her.

He appeared on her doorstep one morning, all Hollywood with his sharp cheekbones and sharper suit, and deep hollows under his sallow eyes.

‘I just want to thank you for my daughter. Elina. You know what you are, Miss Faucer? A national hero. You are.’

Francie had never thought of herself as a hero, much less a national one. She felt awkward and unclean, sitting under the glow of his perfect white teeth.

‘You’re a hard woman to find,’ he said. He smiled the smile they plastered across all the magazines.

Francie said she had never expected anything, and she wasn’t doing it for anybody but herself.

He didn’t believe her. People never did.

She asked timidly what he would like from her.

‘I just want to thank you,’ he said. ‘I want to help you.’

‘I’m quite happy,’ Francie said. Then she looked at her arm.

He looked too.

‘There’s just one thing,’ Francie Faucer said.

It went on a long time, and each time the lines in Smithe’s face deepened. He always asked her the same thing.

‘Are you sure?’

And Francie said, ‘Just one thing.’

But Francie Faucer did not belong to herself, not even when she’d given away her eyes, that itched and burned and wept.

‘Are you happy now?’ Smithe asked, somewhere in front of her..

Francie’s eyes would have seen the deep line that furrowed Smithe’s neat brows.

‘There’s just one thing,’ Francie Faucer said.

There was a long pause. Then Smithe’s feet broke into a rhythm of taps, and Francie realised he was walking slowly away.

‘Mr Smithe?’ she called.

But there was nothing but silence in her house.

Francie Faucer opened the mouth, and then she had the worst thought; that all along, it had been the body that belonged.

Somewhere, Francie Faucer screamed. 

Clarence fiddled with the elaborate poesy for the sixieth time in six minutes. Six hours he’d spent on it, and he was on the verge of scrapping it again. A rose loomed from the centre of the myriad flowers, threatening to spill out. Clarence shoved it back in and wiped the sweat from his forehead. 

He forced himself out of his groaning chair. The hour drew near, the hour that Clarence Cobb’s life rotated around every month; seasons changed, but Clarence lived his life by the calendar of Alicia Corval’s coming.

The Corval residence was lively that afternoon. Clarence’s heart had sunk to his feet when the time had come for her to leave for college; it had risen to the level of his stomach when he realised that she was no longer a child – and now, looking at her vehicle parked in the drive, his heart leapt and pounded against the upper bounds of his throat, threatening to sing.

‘Today, Alicia, I’ve come to tell you I have loved you all your life,’ Clarence said to the empty air.

There were voices coming from the living room window. Clarence caught his breath. He could see two figures through the lace curtains. A girl. A boy.

He stopped just outside. ‘I won’t disturb them,’ he said, ‘he must be a cousin, a childhood friend, perhaps.’

Yet he found himself creeping closer.

‘…But he proved too strong. What else could I do? I ran forward and snatched the sword from Helmston’s gut, and with a snick and a snack I took his head from him! Then I turned, and… there it was, coming at me from behind — but you know I’m faster than Helmston ever was.”

‘And I took the jewel from the very heart of the beast,’ the young man said.

 ’Oleander, you are such a liar.’ A giggle.

‘I brought it back for you,’ the young man said, and through the curtains, Clarence heard her gasp, and saw him sink on bended knee.

I would have done that. I would have stood under an avalanche for her. I would have fought beasts and dragons and gods. Clarence stood rooted at his spot outside the window, holding his wretched clump of flowers. 

‘I say,’ a skinny beaproned girl said, prodding him with a finger. ‘Might I help you, sir?’

‘N-not at all!’

‘Ah, flowers for the young mistress,’ the girl said knowingly, and the flowers were in her hand. Clarence’s hands hung limp by his side.

 ’N-no…’

‘Very sweet of you,’ the maid said, giggling. ‘I shall let her know you stopped by.’

Trembling, Clarence watched her vanish into the house. He stood rooted to the spot.

‘Shall I find a vase for it, ma’am?’

Alicia Corval gave a light laugh. ‘That ragged thing? Don’t be silly, Lucy. Throw it out.’

Clarence’s feet dragged against the cobblestones as he trod the long road home.

The Midnight girls had been passing his house since as far back as Oswin knew. His house sat at the very edge of the world, where land dropped off into mist and nothingness, and where the hours came to die.

Oswin had been watching the Midnight girls die his whole life. Dawns glimmered away, Noons faded gently into the peace of twilight, but Midnights… They were the worst to watch, pale butterflies that cried, burned and rode ash winds into the heartless sky.

It was six in the morning, well past dawn, and the empty sky hung black and sunless. He had given his mother her water and medicine, neither of which seemed to do the least good. Oswin had long since resigned himself to the inevitable.

To take his mind off one problem, he went to visit the other. It had moist blue eyes, and paced the pokey cellar.

“Please, set me free,” the latest Midnight begged. She had been sobbing since the last stroke of twelve.

Oswin had caught her when she made the customary stop just before the edge of the furthest cliff, before she could spiral into the world’s end. He used a fine net so he wouldn’t hurt her, but she shrieked and screamed until he gagged her. He had cleaned out the cellar for her, but it was still sooty and damp, and when he turned the key her eyes flooded with tears.

Her feet were blackened and blistered, and she wept behind the barred iron door. Soot footprints blanketed the rough stone floor.

Oswin shook his head. “You don’t understand. You’ll die, if you follow your sisters. I won’t let you out until you swear you’ll stay.”

She stared at him. Oswin looked at her eyes and lost himself in a deep sea of blue.

“You understand nothing,” Midnight said sadly, turning her face to the wall.

The night spread over the land and did not leave. Nights became pitch black weeks. Crops shrivelled in the fields, the land withered, thieves prospered. Even the moon waned and hid her face; she had nothing to reflect. Oswin’s mother struggled feebly to turn in her bed, and Oswin clenched his teeth.

“You must let me go,” Midnight repeated, “or the land dies. Your mother is dying.”

“It’s her time,” Oswin said, but his voice brokered uncertainty. “Not yours. I brought you here to keep you safe. I’ll marry you, if only you swear to stay.”

At that, the girl flew at the bars and shook them harder than Oswin had thought possible. “You stupid, stupid boy,” she cried. “You know nothing!” She snatched her bowl of broth from the table and flung it at him. Oswin beat a hasty retreat.

“My mother is dying,” Oswin said. He was almost out of coal and food.

Midnight said nothing. She sat listlessly against the wall, her arms out by her sides. A great fear stole over Oswin, and he opened the door and stumbled down beside her. He turned her head to the dim torchlight, and his hand came away with a hank of hair. Midnight’s eyes opened, slow as twilight, and closed. Her head lolled back against his arm.

Oswin began to cry, quietly. He picked her up and carried her into the listless air.

Midnight smiled. She turned her face to the brightening sky, and the wind kited her up into dawn. Oswin watched the sun burst forth and break her into a thousand burning fragments. He kept his eyes on the sky so long that his sight was never the same; but as he was about to turn away, he saw a faint glimmer rise from the falling ashes. Only for a second.

The sun poured through the window and bathed the bed where Oswin’s mother lay. Her voice rang out loud and clear through the young morning. Oswin ran to her.

Oswin lived a long time.

He no longer stood at the edge of the furthest cliff. He never went to watch the hour girls. After a time, he married, and had children, and lived a life.

Yet still, on clear nights, he sat and dreamt of midnight bleeding into dawn, of wings sharping through the morning sky.

So here I am, my little world spinning around me, white sunlines burning up my failing eyes, optic dreams falling into dust and glory.

On the comscreen, Fry says, “We’ll come back — just hang in there–” his voice breaking into a million shards of static. I am a million miles from home. I am a million souls from salvation. I am a billion dollars of Confederacy hubris, sitting at the helm of a trillion dollar ghost ship.

And all that’s waiting for this cow to come home is six months in a vat.

I hit the button and blank the screen.

“So long, starlight,” I say, and I turn off the shields.