x.
He spun many stories in his youth, not all of them true, but the truth mattered less than the flash of coins and the believing eyes in his audience. They asked him for the secret, and he shrugged, smiled, winked at a few pretty listeners. “A story is just a beginning, a middle, and an end,” he’d tell them. “Stringing time into a long golden cord. Nothing else.”
But that had been a long time ago. Many times ago. He had never considered the possibility that the cord might unravel into a thousand alternate histories and splay him, too, into tangled threads of his own making. He frays among possible futures, among different lives. Along this strand, he is one man; a small shift in the fabric, he is another, and another; seeking a point of eventual wholeness he does not know how to discover.
i.
He does not love her in every life, no; never so simple as that; but he remembers her everywhere, glimpsed once through a curtain of falling snow. She was getting out of a carriage, or perhaps it was a puffing train or a palanquin; the times blur and confuse him. She had no intention of looking at him, but this was an eventuality of happiness, and she slips on a patch of ice. He reaches out to catch her with quick certain hands, and her breath touches his in the cold air. When she offers him a grateful smile, pressing his hand with the soft touch of her glove, his mouth curves apart like a shard in answer. He begins to divide his lives into those marked blue by her eyes and those left in the grey of her nonexistence.
In the blue worlds, he slays dragons for her, stops runaway horses for her, buys drinks he can’t afford in smoke-clouded taverns for her, until she tells him that she hates the taste of alcohol. They laugh, and the laughter loosens something in him so that he can unfurl into the sky. They kiss on street corners when they’re just tipsy enough for time and space to mean nothing, even to ordinary men with ordinary lives, and atop towers made of glass with the sleeping forms of defeated knights scattered all around in a story that is finally closed, and in his bedroom with the golden light of any sort of dawn filtering through the curtain. Curled together, she whispers to him the fairy tale about an elf-boy who was made human again in the arms of the girl who loved him. He knows she means them, and he aches with blooming.
But even here lies mischance, and not every time is kind. Sometimes, when he settles her on the unsteady ground, she merely thanks him for helping out a newcomer to a strange land and walks away to friends that await her. She will never think of him as anything other than a random act of kindness. Sometimes, he doesn’t reach her in time and remains an onlooker to someone else’s embarrassing moment. In others, he simply turns away, letting her fall. She curses the cruelty of this unknown country, and when he sees her in restaurants or concert halls, laughing on the same street corners with other men and other women, he turns away. He has always known fairy tales are a lie, and the frost seizes him in a winter he cannot endure.
There are, of course, great handfuls of grey eventualities when he never meets her at all, when he never arrived at that depot, never stood under the winter snowfall and thought about how the year always changes yet remains itself. Yet even in these false starts, the quirk of an eyebrow or a slender hand waving from a window stabs him with recognition and loss. The tall buildings fade to paper scenery, meaningless but for the brief flash suggesting a reality, somewhere, in which the shifting chances stop and settle, when he stops changing from lion to snake to flame and finally becomes a man.
ii.
None of these worlds ever conclude. He lives in snatches of disconnected moments, unsure of where they ever began. Time abandoned him long ago, and he has long since stopped trying to win back its affection. Even the origin of his wandering remains bleak and vague, snarled in memories of a beautiful woman and a tithe to the devil. Every horizon offers him a different answer, but he can never find the one where now meets tomorrow, where a singular choice leads to a singular conclusion. Ghostlike, rendered paralyzed by the fear of breaking apart further, he only drifts through the fringes of what might be.
He could embrace these multitudes he contains. He could use them as outlets for adventure, to become the hero in one piece and the villain in another. But he was only ever the storyteller, on the outside, and he has lost his own gift for continuity. These days, it’s difficult enough to recognize the sky he wakes beneath or speak to his friends the right way, not ever sure if this time, they may be his enemies. He harrows his own memories, unable to make the edges line up, and eventually abandons the effort in exhaustion, knowing himself a failure for never finding the key to set him free. He crawls into darkness like a creature run to ground, longing for her, for anyone, to tell him that it is all, finally, enough.
iii.
He lights a cigarette, but his fingers are clumsy, uncertain. They fumble, dropping the matchstick on a wooden floor; but that is in one life. In another, he blows it softly out and watches the smoke curl up into the darkness.
He does not know which is the true one.
x i.
She is there, suddenly, in the dusk. It is a world of rainfall and fog, and he nearly misses her as he crosses a steel-slick street, but the wind catches her hair and throws it out like an echo of laughter in a silent sky. He cannot find his lungs to speak, as if the storm-torn night is made of shattered glass. Anything he does might break this impossible spell. But when she cautiously forms his name, he becomes more himself at the sound, the pieces cohering where she offers a grateful smile. The point he seeks lies near, and he holds tight to the strings of fulfillment. At last, he might hold the fragments together, he might no longer be continuously broken by his choices, his words, by the very breaths he takes, every endless second.
She cries his name again. He hears the screaming of horses and the rattling of wheels, a voice shouting at him to get the fuck off the road—
ii iii.
Someone is yelling, pulling him back, but he must not let go, not when he found her and this universe where she alone survives, though the rest has been consumed in flames.
Flames?
His eyes open, and the room before him leaps orange and yellow and red. The fire licking the floor by his feet sounds like a lover’s whisper.
He has never died yet, in any life, and of course the one where he finally achieves it must be one without her in it to say goodbye. What he has waited lifetimes of longing to possess blows apart like flowers of ashes. Perhaps he had never been meant to survive himself. He wonders if she is still looking at him through the rain, if the moment has frozen for her or she is watching him die in slow motion in that life, too. If he is right about her, she will be, holding onto him as he warps and flickers, commanded to change by his enemy Time. But he can help her and, at last, help himself.
For the first time in his unreliable memory, he chooses to break himself in two. There will be another life for him, and if luck takes his hand, it will be one where she tethers him fast.
He shrugs off the arms seeking to drag him toward life and walks back into the fire.
x i ii.
The stars open around him, he who is the still point of a turning universe. He has become the eventual point he once sought when shivering from future to future: alone on the street listening to the sirens, their throats full of wreckage and other lost things. The sky is crying into his hair, and his bones jut too sharply against the pavement. He has not ever been so alive.
“That was stupid of you,” she says, kneeling beside him. Her smile is no longer—has never been—a stranger’s. She is the one who loved him, and the one who broke his heart, and the one who came back to him, remembered in sequence as though they had never been apart. “Are you all right? The driver is calling for a doctor.”
“You told me once,” he says, rejoicing in the harsh clap of his words on the air, “a story about the boy in the wood who became a lion and a snake and a tongue of flame before the woman who loved him turned him into a man.”
She laughs, and it is the kindest sound in every world. “So I did. About five days ago. Why?”
“How does it end? How does the man live as a man and not as what he was before?”
She laces her fingers with his, intertwining memory with hope. “The story doesn’t say,” she says. “But I always imagine that he kept trying. Until he arrives at where he always was supposed to have been.”
“I think,” he says quietly, “that I made it.” He holds onto her in return, and the sirens wail toward them through the night.
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Cressida Roe is a multiracial writer, whose work appears in Apex, Lightspeed, Fusion Fragment, The Deadlands, and elsewhere. Recent stories have been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for the Best Small Fictions. See more at www.cressidaroe.wordpress.com. |