Spindlefish and Stars

by Christiane M. Andrews

  “Can’t you?”

  The woman shook her head. “We are on different journeys here.” They walked forward in the darkness still echoing with k-k-k-k.

  “You are brave to travel here again,” the woman said at last. “Brave to travel here as you did.”

  “Am I?”

  “You unwove your thread.”

  “Unweaving… I don’t remember such a thing. I know I gave the man some thread.”

  “Yes,” the woman said, and her voice was sad. “You were brave to do so.”

  “It seemed like he might need it.”

  “It was very precious,” the woman said. “It held so much.…” She shook her head, and her voice grew even more sorrowful. “I did not intend this for you. I would never wish for you to give up so much. And he… he would not have taken it if he had known.”

  “Well, he did give me some pastries.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes.” She took one from her pocket and held it for the woman to see.

  “Lovely,” said the woman. “Jammy?”

  “Yes, very.”

  The woman nodded. “Lovely,” she repeated. “Jammy is lovely.” She raised a soft hand to point across the darkness to the shape of the tree and the island, now visible in the silver light. “Here we are.”

  “Oh, I left this island. The beetle was annoying me.”

  “Of course he was.” The woman guided her onto the shore. “He is very persistent.”

  They stood under the tree.

  The woman gazed up into the boughs. “Do you see this?” She lifted a finger where a spider dangled from a line it had stretched between two branches.

  “The spider? Yes.”

  “Watch.”

  As they stood gazing, the spider moved rapidly between the branches, pinning and dropping, pinning and dropping. A web, a hemisphere of silver, began to take shape.

  “She spins her whole life,” the woman said. “Remarkable, really.”

  “Her whole life?”

  “Her whole life. All her own.” She pointed again at the spider now resting on its haunches at the end of the branch. “See how she’s learned to use her thread?” As they watched, the spider spun a trail of silk out into the air. Caught by the wind, the silk whisked the spider into the darkness, carrying it across the waves. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Where is she going?”

  “Wherever she wishes. Wherever the thread she has spun takes her.” The woman pointed up into the branches where the beetle was still tapping its steady tattoo. “We ought to be careful your beetle friend isn’t caught, though.”

  “Oh, it would be fine if he was. That noise!”

  “No, no.” The woman patted her arm. “You need to listen to him.”

  “No—that sound—it’s terribly annoying. It won’t let me rest.”

  The woman shook her head. “That is the sound of love. You will hear it.… It will carry you from here, but…” The woman hesitated. “Afterward, you will not want to leave. It is easier there… where things are certain. Unchanging. It’s hard to trade certainty for sorrow.…” She paused. “Tell me, would you trade a pastry?”

  “My pastry?” She took a fruit-filled bun from her pocket and looked at it longingly. “Do you want it?”

  “I do,” said the woman. “But I’d like to give you something in return.”

  “What?”

  Rummaging at the base of the tree, the woman pulled up a bulbous, shriveled root. “This.” She held it out. “I will trade this for your pastry.”

  She looked between the shriveled, dirt-covered thing and the jammy sweet. “Um…”

  “I promise you,” said the woman. “This, this turnip is so much better. Truly. Please, trust me. I want you… I want you to have a life in the world. To shape a life in the world that is all your own. I have always wanted this for you. One day… perhaps one day you’ll return to the island, and we will know each other. I would like that. But you deserve your own life first.”

  The smell of the root, sharp, bitter, like dirt and darkness, told her it would not taste good. But the woman… her pleading tone… she did not want to refuse her.

  “Daughter. Please.”

  That word daughter—from the woman’s mouth—it did not sound wrong. She stretched out her hand, offering the sugared bun flat on her palm.

  The woman smiled in relief. “Here,” she said, pressing the tuber into the daughter’s palms.

  She dropped the turnip into her pocket, still uncertain. “Hmm.”

  “I have to leave you now,” the woman said.

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.” The woman gestured to the invisible beetle in the branches. “But listen to him.”

  “Must I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will I see you again?”

  “I hope not for a long time. But… tell your grandmother I am still traveling home.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will.” The woman stepped out into the shadowy waves. “This journey from beyond, this journey through darkness, through formlessness, is long. But I am”—she lifted a misty arm—“becoming myself again.”

  “But…”

  “Listen to him,” the woman called as she sank into the water. “Listen! He will bring you.…” The waves closed over her.

  For a time, she looked at the place where the woman had disappeared, at the waves that rocked steadily in the darkness. Again, the beetle’s sound grew loud around her, so that even the waves reverberated with its k-k-k-k.

  Softer, though. Not a k, but a c. C-c-c-c-c-c.

  C-c-c-c-c-c-c.

  She could hear the soft, sticky hairs of its feet. Cl, the hairs shushed against the wood. Cl-cl-cl-cl.

  She looked up to see—the tree had grown taller. She could see neither the beetle nor the branches, just the trunk stretching up and up and up. A great shadow.

  Cl-cl-cl-cl! The sound was booming through the wood now.

  Cl!

  Cl!

  Cl!

  “Clo!”

  “CLO!”

  “CLO!”

  CHAPTER THE THIRTY-THIRD

  IN WHICH A POCKET HAS NO PASTRIES

  CLO!”

  “CLO!”

  “CLO!”

  The shadow of the tree towering above her reshaped itself into the shadow of a boy. Hands on her shoulders, the boy was leaning over her, shaking her, shouting, “CLO!” over and over.

  She took a deep breath and felt her lungs, which had been empty, fill.

  Clo. The name felt like air in her lungs.

  The boy closed his eyes, and relief softened his features. His moonish cheeks swelled and filled with light. She knew this boy; she felt she had always known him.

  “Cary,” she said. Her throat was dry.

  “You came back,” he said. “You were gone. I was worried—I thought you were never coming back.”

  “Yes. I was…” She tried to find a word to fit what she had been doing. “I was dreaming.”

  “I did what you asked,” he said. “But…” His voice trembled.

  “But…?”

  “Oh, Clo… when you collapsed, the thread…”

  She raised herself carefully on her elbows. “Yes?”

  “I thought I had removed it all. Like you asked. But then I noticed it was still entangled, there, in the weaving, that only part had come free… and the rest…” He held up a handful of tangled line. “Look,” he whispered.

  Long gray lines of gut—blood-streaked, slimy, fishy, clumped together, breaking apart, slipping through his fingers.

  “I don’t know what happened.” His lashes were damp. “It’s all falling apart.”

  Calm, unconcerned, Clo took the handful of viscera from him, little pieces dropping onto the floor. She thought of the thread she had been holding in her dream, the one she had just given to the man, how it had pulsed with color and light. “Was I…” She looked up at the tapestry. “Was I trying to help someone
?”

  “Oh, Clo…” Cary wore a pained expression. “Your father.”

  “My father,” she said slowly. “Hmmm.” She tried to feel around her mind. She had memories of Cary, of her arrival on the island, of the old woman and the piggish cat. But when she tried to recall the before, even though she knew there must be a before, she found only clouds as thick as the fish sludge in her hands. But the clouds were comfortable. Plush and full. She did not mind that they were there.

  “Clo, please.” Cary pointed to the fish gurry in her hands. “Have I ruined everything?”

  “Perhaps?” Clo was not sure. She was not sure it was important. She was content in her fish-clouds. “I gave someone some thread.”

  “Who? How did you give thread to anyone? Clo, please think. I pulled your thread.… I can’t have done so for nothing.”

  Closing her eyes, Clo thought of the kind man who had stridden through the waves of green and gold, who had given her fruit-studded pastries, who had lost his daughter. She thought of his painting—the boy with wings, a boy with wings like Cary—and stood slowly.

  “Well…” She was untroubled. “Where did this come from?” She held out an open handful of fish sludge. “Can you show me in the tapestry?”

  “Here.” Cary touched the fabric.

  Parting the warp, Clo searched in the mirror for the man to whom she’d given the thread. There he was. She followed the length of his line, tracing it back and back. She saw a time where it was entwined with another thread, a woman’s thread—a line of rotten gut that abruptly entered, twisted in and around the man’s thread, then disappeared again from the fabric. There the painter’s thread was dangerously wispy, so delicate it seemed ready to break. But just before the rotting fiber left the fabric, the man’s thread grew suddenly stronger, brighter: it was lonely, perhaps—hardly interwoven with any other threads—but it was vibrant, shimmering. It did not look like the tangle of fish guts she was still holding, the tangle of guts that twisted with it early on.

  “I don’t think anything has been ruined,” Clo said, still looking at the thread. She gazed curiously at the man’s recent life. What strange days he had had. He had been hiding beneath the straw in a pigsty. And he had been carried to a hut—and tended to. He had been feverish, delirious. A woman and her son had placed him on a pallet by their fire and had nursed him back to health, had spoon-fed him—potato soup, turnip soup, dark earth-tasting soup—and he had woken, just now; in the tapestry, he was awake.

  He was digging around in a bucket; he was searching for parchment. For ink. Intrigued, Clo watched the man sketch as quickly as he could. A seascape—cliffs and waves, an expanse of sky. A boy with wings falling out of the air.

  “Ah! And don’t ye look well!” the mother was exclaiming. “Picture of health, y’are. Why, y’ look like forty years’ve been taken from you! I told tha”—she nodded at her son—“th’ potato soup’d do th’ trick!”

  The son, lanky, cauliflower-nosed, was standing over the painter’s shoulder, watching him sketch. “That’s a good renderin’. A good likeness of th’ sea. And th’ boy. I heard a story, once, of a boy did fall like that.”

  The painter nodded his thanks but continued his breakneck drawing.

  “Do you remember, afore you fell ill, I gave th’ letter and th’ parcel to yer daughter,” the son with the cauliflower nose was saying. “Like y’ asked. She took ’em both.”

  “Daughter?” The painter was sketching now a girl standing on the cliff. Her hair was shorn as tight as a lamb’s in spring, and she wore a boy’s dirty tunic and leggings, but she was a girl all the same. “I had a dream I had a daughter…,” the painter murmured.

  “Ah… yer a bit confused still, then,” the red-haired boy said. “Y’ do have a daughter. Y’ told me she was a lass with all the beauty of th’ stars and sun.”

  “All the beauty of the stars and sun…” The painter shook his head. “In my dream… I had a wife and a daughter.” He continued to sketch the girl on the cliff. She was fishing, tossing a line into the water. It was clear from the angle of her head that she could see the boy falling into the waves.

  “But y’ do!” the mother insisted. “The village’d watch her skulkin’ round the corners. And we’d pity her—little slip o’ a thing, and no mother ’n’ all.”

  “No…” The painter rooted in his bucket again. “I’m all alone. I’ve been all alone.”

  The mother and son exchanged glances. “Well, is there anyone we can bring here to fetch you? Ye’ve been ill. My son found you collapsed in the pig yard. Someone must be worried.”

  “I need… I need a canvas,” the painter said, still pawing through his materials. “I must paint this.… And the sky and sea… I can’t quite… the color… I think I need to paint this outside, to get the colors just right.…”

  “Yer still a mite woozy, I think.” The mother put her hand on the painter’s shoulder. “A bit o’ bread, some more rest, maybe, ye’ll be feelin’ better.”

  “No!” he snapped, then, chagrined, softened his tone. “Something’s changed.… I need to…” He put his hand over his eyes. “I haven’t been able to… I was an artist… once.…” His voice shook. “Everything is cloudy. But I am certain of this. I dreamed… I promised…”

  “All right, then. All right, then.” The woman nodded at her son. “Why’n’t tha take him on outsides, and see if the fresh air might help him.”

  “C’mon.” The red-haired boy held out his arm. “Bring yer bucket. We’ll go for a walk, and if the notion strikes, why, y’ might paint a bit then. Oh, and here!” he exclaimed, stopping by the doorway. “Here’s th’ wood’n matter y’ told me to take from that lass, yer daughter. ’S all wilted and dried out now. She said I might sell it, but I kept it for you just in case.” He handed the dried plants to the painter. “A silver coin, y’ said I’d get for returning with that.” A grin blossomed under the cauliflower bulb. “Bit steep for some weeds.”

  “Woad and madder,” the man repeated, lifting the plant stalks. “Ah, yes… Yes! My pots—I need to mix some paint. And have you a kettle for water? I need to steep these roots and leaves. Yes, woad—just the blue for the sky… the boy would fall through bright air… and the cliffs… just so, madder red, where the girl would stand…”

  Clo picked up the man’s bobbin. The coils of yarn sparkled and shifted with all manner of color and light and shade. Here was a life that still had possibility.

  “It’s all right,” she said slowly. “I think… I think we did what I meant to. I think it’s all done.”

  “And will I…” Cary spoke uncertainly. “Will I return with you when we leave? Or will I be left”—he gestured to the bottom of the tapestry—“somewhere else? Somewhere in the past?”

  Clo felt the fish-clouds turning in her mind. Had she wanted to leave? Why? She glanced at Cary. He wanted to leave. His moonish cheeks were tight with apprehension.

  “Well…” She touched the fabric. She thought about how the man had been sketching a boy with wings and a girl to witness the fall on the shore, how the man she had seen had promised a painting in which the boy was saved. She peered closely at the fabric—yes. Just there. A bubble was forming in the tapestry where the man was sketching… and a fine gold filament was spinning out, hovering inchworm-like above the spot where she had last tucked Cary’s thread.… Yes, surely this, and now another filament, shimmering out, would come to hold Cary’s line and anchor it there in the present, beside the cauliflower-nosed boy and the painter standing in the sunlight.

  “Yes,” she said. “I think he is painting you. I think his painting will hold your thread so that you could return”—she placed her fingers on the working edge—“here. Or near here, at least. I think we could return together. But…” She bit her lip, undecided. “Am I to leave? Do I want to leave?”

  “You want to,” Cary said. “You have wanted to leave ever since you arrived.”

  Clo tried to remember. Again, she could only find fis
h-cloud sludge in her mind. Why should she want to leave? Here life was easy. Predictable. The same gray sky, the same fish stew. The same task with the same fish-wool twisting through her fingers—everything easy and inevitable. A life as tepid as the island’s air—nothing much to feel at all. “I do?”

  “Clo, yes! You convinced me! You told me there was more beyond these endless gray days.”

  “I can’t seem… I don’t remember why I would want to go. And the weaving…” She looked at it now. It seemed as though she were seeing it—the entirety of its beauty—for the first time.

  Her throat tightened in astonishment and wonder. Oh, how beautiful. Even the holes—which had so bothered her, she remembered how much they had bothered her—seemed now a necessary part of the design. She saw their darkness against their bright edges, against the wide colors of the tapestry. Yes, from here, this balance, light against dark, suffering against joy, she understood why the woman would let the cat tear at the fabric.

  It would be easy, comfortable even, to stay, to card the fish, to spin the thread… to stay outside the tapestry. To enjoy its design. To avoid the pain of being inside it. She didn’t remember what her life had been, but she knew that to be inside the fabric… to be in a place where children coughed—hee—alone in the middle of the night… would involve grief.

  Here, in her white smock, she was, finally, comfortable. She looked down at the expanse of material, flat and empty. She felt flat and empty and content. Almost empty. There was a lump in her pocket. The pastries.

  It was not the pastries, though. It was merely her own thread, the blue thread she had unwoven from the cloak and rolled into a ball. She felt a twinge of disappointment that it was not the sweets from her dream. The memory of the imagined pastry, its jammy brightness, came rushing back. She tasted again the berries, the bread, the honey, and she felt the shape of the word comfort in her mouth. Comfort. Like the wool-stuffed bed in the next room. Like the certainty of dayless days. Like fish stew bubbling over the coals. Yes, here was full of comfort—as plush and easy and predictable as that pastry.

  There was something else as well in the pocket. Something small, hard, round.