by Tanith Lee
* * * *
About an hour later, I woke, thinking that I’d heard a noise. Walked back into the living-room. Or was that just a dream?
I’m still not sure. But the egg was glowing palely, whitely, in the total darkness.
I walked carefully towards it. Kept progressing, in the direction of the black pupil of one of Pan Gu’s eyes. Until I was so close to it that it was as large as a door.
I stepped inside.
And started falling.
* * * *
If I’d thought that it was dark inside my living room, it was nothing to the blackness in the egg. Except this blackness was churning. Making the same rumbling and crunching noises that tectonic plates must make, grinding together. I was whirled around and around as I fell, by some almighty force.
Gradually though, I slowed, stopped. Was I at the centre? A deep voice — its source unseen — came booming out around me.
“Why do you keep me from my rightful protector?”
It had to mean the priest. There was no answer I could think of.
“You know of my father?”
I thought hard. The story Billy had told me, of the creation of the universe, So I nodded. Yes, I knew.
“If he had been dropped down to the bottom of the ocean, you would not exist.”
“I’m not going to do that.”
“Were not. Now, though? Now you know the truth?”
“I don’t understand this,” I called back towards the invisible speaker. “Pan Gu came from a great egg.”
“And what is this ‘great’? Define it?”
“Big! Huge! Massive! The size of the universe itself!”
And the voice took on the faintest trace of humour. “And now, can you tell me how large that is?”
I thought about it all over again, and realised that I could not. All our measurements are rendered meaningless, in that context. The whole thing could be no more than a grain of dust in something else.
I began sweating, at that point.
“You love your life, yes?” the voice continued. “You love your existence. Yet you have been sent on a mission to deny that to others.”
I was finally understanding why poor Mr. Lain had been so angry and so scared.
“And if it means the end of ours —?” I yelled back.
There was silence from the swirling darkness for the longest while. And then —
“Ever since Nu Wa fashioned you out of dampened earth, you have sought to control destiny. And that is admirable. Yet, will you rob countless millions of others of the same privilege? Will you preserve what is by destroying what might be?”
* * * *
The voice went quiet again a short time.
“It is your decision. On your conscience. Leave me to my slumber now.”
I was back in my living-room.
The egg was just an egg, sitting there in the darkness.
* * * *
By the time the sun came up, I was sitting too. On the edge of my couch, in my undershorts, oblivious to the pre-dawn chill. I was staring at my tickets, which were draped across one leg. They were non-transferable, and the boat was due to leave at seven.
I’d been thinking all that night. About Melbourne and my home and family. About my new life here. About the great evenings I’d had, the girls I’d kissed. The meals I’d eaten, games I’d played. Jokes I’d laughed at, triumphs, small disasters, feelings of elation. Life. Mine and six billion others.
And I could preserve all that by the simplest of expedients. Going on an ocean trip, and standing by the rails one day.
And simply opening my hands.
I looked back at the mantel piece. The egg was just an egg, sitting there in the new day’s light.
Just letting it fall from my hands. Could I steel myself to do that?
* * * *
I got dressed and put it back into its box, without sealing it. Took Aberdeen this time, to avoid Cat Street.
It was too early even for the beggar ladies. But the Daoist priest was there, standing alone inside the temple.
I handed him the box quickly, and he smiled, thanked me with a nod.
Then, he knelt down in front of the golden cup, and placed the egg inside it. Clasped his hands in front of him, his entire body relaxed now.
I didn’t know if he spoke any English, but I crouched beside him all the same.
“How much longer will he sleep? Another eighteen thousand years?”
I got no answer.
“When his new universe comes, what will happen to ours?”
The priest looked round at me then. And I could see the answer, very gentle, in his eyes.
What happens…will happen. We can only stop that by destroying something.
And perhaps…perhaps . . .
That something is inside of us, we lose a part of ourselves when we erase it.
Faintly, off towards Pier Road, I could hear the honking of a ship.
THE QUILTER, by Michelle Cacho-Negrete
Surrounded by velvets, silks and cottons, The Quilter dreams. Large spools of thread arranged by color line the walls. Thimbles, like silver wedding bands, nestle in a cracked china bowl. The sewing machine oiled and gleaming, a pincushion pricked with needles and pins like tiny metal hairs, scissors, pinking shears, rotary boards and cutters and extra blades, everything patiently waits. Outside, trees are blowing green gauze in the melting rain, and clouds flow the cool gray of a coming storm across the sky.
The dreaming isn’t hers, it’s the family’s whose father left scraps of clothing, neatly folded memories in two brown paper bags. A surprise for his wife, he’d explained, for their thirtieth wedding anniversary. He kept glancing at the bags as he spoke leaning towards her, glowing in an arc of light from the window behind him. The Quilter nodded through a pale mist from their steaming mugs of tea as they lifted their cups to their lips. He offered snapshots conjured from words, a photograph album he’d barely opened when she stopped him.
“The fabric will tell me,” she’d said, smiling. “When do you need it finished?” He’d looked at her curiously, leaning back in his chair again, but he’d seen her quilts and trusted her.
“Five weeks. Is that enough time?”
She nodded and said, “Done.”
Through the open door, she watched his cautious steps over the wet stones, shoulders stooped in a tan raincoat, hat tipped forward to shield his eyes, somewhat blurry in the rain falling all around. Turning before he slid into his car, he’d waved and she waved back. Then the car door slammed, the engine coughed wetly, and mud sucked at the wheels along her dirt driveway until he reached the road and gave a quick honk good-by.
She waved again then closed the door and leaned against it listening to the rap of the rain against the windows. Then, eager to get to work, she washed the mugs quickly, settled onto the rug and pulled the family’s past from the bags.
* * * *
This is how it always begins: sorting, cradling a piece in her hands, her fingers trailing along its length, and finally weaving disparate pieces into a fabric memoir. From the vibrant disarray sprawled over the rug, her fingers confidently examine each old scrap like jigsaw puzzle pieces to see what should go where; remnants of a cotton nightgown, of children’s clothing, of shirts, blouses, sheets, satin dress, silk ties, so much! She closes her eyes to blind herself to the temptation of guesses, wanting the cloth to tell the story, and as her hands move, the fabrics become pages of a book written in Braille. Images travel through her fingers to the place that reads cloth; a constant flow into a mind-vase, then a flow back through her fingers into the patterns of the quilt, and the vase is empty again once the quilt is done. Her own memories long ago vanished of their own volition and never intrude on those other lives she takes into herself and flings out in an explosion of beauty. Each quilt, each infusion of a past, is a light inside a dark room and when that past has given back, the room returns to shadows, a place she never enters.
The cares
s of soft folds against her callused fingertips tell her this quilt will be special and she breathes deeply, lost in the watercolor of sensations taking shape, brush-stroking over any shred of her.
She exhales, opens her eyes, and begins to pick and choose.
Here, perfumed with shy eagerness and trepidation, is a faded blue sheet from their wedding night, hands and lips touching; bodies uncertainly moving in a manner that mysteriously becomes familiar. The Quilter’s breasts swell, nipples harden, her hips move, and when the explosion arrives it’s sweeter than from any other scrap she’s handled before.
* * * *
But then, suddenly, The Quilter is eight, holding her breath, screwing her eyes shut tightly as the door opens and she hears slow footsteps and a quiet question, “Are you sleeping?” She drifts as she feels the bed lower beneath his weight and for the very first time dreams: a trip to Disneyland that clung to her friend’s jacket that she’d briefly worn that afternoon. She fades beneath her father like silk left in the sun, the pattern vanishing under his thrusting, greedy weight. Later, he rises, kisses her forehead, smoothes her damp hair. “Sleep well,” he whispers. The moon is a smooth white face with closed eyes. The night is made of chiffon; one layer over the other with embossed sequined stars that wink at her secret. In the morning he makes breakfast. Juice shimmers orange like the sun as he hums a song along with the radio and gives her toast and eggs sprinkled with cheese. He smiles and asks about school. He gives her lunch money and tells her that he’ll see her at dinner, and looking at the innocence in his eyes she wonders if once the new day appears like a window shade flung up he forgets what he did in the darkness.
* * * *
The Quilter clutches the worn blue sheet the way a child clutches a security blanket and the sharp edge of pain at this long-forgotten memory softens. Her fear quiets as she concentrates on only the soft material floating like a piece of sky between her fingers. For the first time she knows the stillness that comes after spent passion and marvels at the peaceful silence in her body. She opens her eyes dreamily and deftly shapes the fabric into a spiral. Searching, she finds the old lace of a nightgown, and places the spidery threads against the spiral so that the fragile sheet seems strong.
She studies the placement carefully then nods, reaches for a piece of yellowed gauze and closes her eyes. Curtains; she looks out at a summer garden of roses and coneflowers, then watches the gold flash of autumn leaves falling to the ground like dropped coins. The fine crisp white of a new snowfall appears through frosted windowpanes and buries the garden while thatches scatter tiny cross-stitches of black seeds from the feeder. The first spring crocus and daffodils that grow in furrowed rows of melting snow give way again to summer flowers. A sweet breeze blowing from a twenty-years-ago summer momentarily replaces the wood-stove warmed, wintry-edged air.
The Quilter touches the frayed edges gently as she opens her eyes then, scissors smooth and cool against her fingers, cuts the gauze into large irregular patches and positions it so that it seems somehow still in motion. She smiles, satisfied, and her fingers move once more over the passage of seasons seen from the window of the family’s first house.
She softly lifts a ragged strip of pink linen; a maternity dress, wild joy, butterfly movements of a child slowly growing. Fluttering so vivid that her back aches with the weight, she leans against the wall for support, adrift between dreaming and believing that this child waits within her own womb. The child becomes ready, impatient for the world and pushes, twists vigorously, and she drops the cloth before the piercing pain of contractions grows too strong to bear, then flushed with emptiness, she quickly reaches for it, but she let go too quickly and the child is gone.
She sits with arms folded tightly over the lifeless place inside as though she could prevent anything else from escaping, then finally stands and goes to the stove, strikes a match and lights it, then places the kettle with water on top. She gets some tea and puts it into the chipped china teapot that belonged to her mother who died when she was nine. When the tea is ready she pours it into a cup with roses twined around the handle, adds honey, and goes back to the rug, carefully placing the cup on a tiny table where it can’t spill.
Shirt fabric striped like old mattress ticking vibrates in her hands with such jittery energy that it is visible behind her closed eyelids…“Happy Birthday” sung in loud clear voices, the sweet taste of strawberries and fresh pound cake; love fills her chest till it seems stretched like a balloon buoyant with too much air to contain. In the ripped scraps of her own memory there are no birthday parties, but perhaps they’d been washed away by her endless laundering. She puts the shirt aside for a moment and reaches for a faded silk tie of blue and wine paisley; a raise, the tart taste of dry wine, masculine laughter in the deep tones of church bells, slaps of approval, hugs and congratulations. She smiles with the pleasure of somebody else’s triumph, then weaves the shirt and tie together in a braid that will embrace one corner of the finished quilt.
Throughout the next few days The Quilter drifts from one piece of cloth to the next; the birth of another child, the death of parents, school plays, parties, dances, dinners, arguments and anger, vacations and beach walks. A narrow slash of silk; their daughter’s first real kiss, fourteen-year-old lips receiving it like a holy wafer, a delicate trembling, the first curious waves of desire over an adolescent body like a pristine beach not yet discovered. She holds the silk to her lips and for this moment it is her kiss.
* * * *
The male bodies she encounters in schools and stores and streets appear elongated, grotesquely towering like buildings that obscure the light. Sometimes a boy from class greets her, smiles, asks about homework. Featureless, each one, their voices contain some dark element of threat, words lost in echoes of “Are you sleeping? Are you sleeping?”
A child’s nursery rhyme gone awry.
* * * *
She exhales shakily, breathes the memory away, and quickly reaches for a numbered tee-shirt lovingly preserved; the son, a lanky, long-distance runner. She takes deep heaving gasps of air, sweat-soaked she crosses a finish line to wild shouting, then is lifted into the air, knowing pride shy and self-contained in its own mysterious silence. She understands, this shirt must be used in its entirety, and tumbling over the dizziness of trophies she pins it to a shirt from high school graduation so the two seem one victory.
Waiting in a T-shirt scrap of fiery wheels is his first car. She thrills at the engine’s whine in the still serviceable body of the old sedan. The yellow sun flashes through flickering green trees whizzing by…the sting of dust and the excitement of the first solo outing. Such triumph! The only thing comparable is her satisfaction when a quilt is complete, so different from this male roar of success.
* * * *
Is this whisper his roar, the man who desecrates her childhood, this whisper “Are you sleeping?” He kisses her forehead later as though all he’s done is tuck her in. Then she reels in terror; his grunting sweaty roar smothers her as he touches her developing breasts and forces her legs apart. In the morning she averts her face from his eyes as she leaves for school wearing baggy sweaters and loose pants, and he kisses her good-by, chaste lips on her cheek. Outside the roar of trucks, and the subway on the elevator line, and car horns and radios, so deafening it hurts her head until she vanishes into a dream after she touches the coat of a girl besides her on the bus.
* * * *
The Quilter realizes there are tears on her cheek and touches them curiously with her fingers as she feels the burning between her legs. She stands and goes to the bathroom and runs a bath then sits in it, scrubbing herself with soap as she looks out the bathroom door at the fabric rainbow across her rug, wisps of dreaming floating over it like fog. The stinging grows faint, then vanishes, and she stands, wraps the towel around her and dries the body she’s rarely aware of. Dressed again in her jeans and sweater, she goes back to the fabric in relief.
* * * *
A thick black slas
h from a linen dress plunges her into a descent of madness and sorrow, the pain of a mother whose child has died; the boy with the numbered T-shirt killed in a traffic accident. The sickly smell of flowers burst with the last of their own lives before the petals brown and fall. Hymns are sung, a promise of eternal life. Food made with the love of neighbors and friends is spread across the table that once held his victory cake. Such sorrow, and then a wondering; was the pleasure of sharing his life worth the pain of his death? The Quilter weeps for a lost life in deep breathless gasps, and inside the child weeps too. She sprawls across the rug exhausted, cheek against the rough weave. The fire in the wood stove hums in red and blue and the familiar smell of burning wood rescues her from the bottomless fall into a place beneath the ribs that fruitlessly tries to reclaim what is lost. She opens her hand wide and the cloth falls from it, lingering against her fingertips. She curls her hand, retreating, and wonders how is it that a child can be here and then gone? Where do you go when you die? How is it possible that a child can vanish even in the living body as though lost in a cave with no light?
* * * *
She opens her eyes and her fingers crawl slowly across the rug and touch fine white cotton piqué; a dress from the memorial service one-year later. The closeness of this family weaves strands like the nets of fishermen, catching doubts, flinging them on the shore to be examined and tossed back like minnows too insignificant to keep. This proclamation is iridescent and irrefutable; this boy’s eighteen years is a gift that must be honored without regret. There is redemption here in the understanding that life is randomly kind and cruel, and the willingness to live despite tragedy rather than die inside.
The Quilter is tired. This quilt exhausts her in a way none ever has before. She gently lays a sheet over the scraps and makes dinner. She looks at books of quilts as she lies in her bed before sleeping. She covers herself with triangles and patches and chains and log cabin squares and the air fills with calico and velvet like incense. That night her usual nightmares are patch-worked with the family’s dreams, only bits of her terror exposed between the fabric.