by Paula Guran
Leonard drove on with unerring confidence, at once quieter and more intense. Alexandra’s face was turned out the side window, watching passing cars drag boats away from closed summer homes, her face grimaced in pain. She had traveled too far from home, her tether stretched near its breaking point, and as Leonard drove faster that tether continued to stretch thinner still.
She asked herself why she didn’t speak up, why she suffered quietly. Racing thoughts screamed something was wrong, but they were buried deep in a tangle of pain, slipping away with every second the Chevrolet closed in on the vast ocean. She had spent so many years – too many years – cooped in her small dry town, never moving beyond its imaginary walls, a bird in a cage. It was only as she approached the Atlantic and felt the difference in the air, the openness in the contrasted sky, that she began to suspect there were bars.
She had never felt so untethered, and it was terrifying. And yet, for all her freedom, she felt anything but lost. Her map was clenched to her chest, a symbol of her clarity; her life was the map, laid out in an exact path, the end-point of its journey set. The inevitability was itself a structure to which she was bound and soothed, and she felt no more in control of it than a bottle in the surf.
The transition from highway to street was seamless, and from there to side road even more so. Leonard guided the car through turns and stop signs without once stepping on the brakes. The tires squealed with each jerk of the wheel, and the momentum reignited Alexandra’s disguised pains, but she bore through them. Despite the pull back to where she had come from, back to where her father had stroked her hair one last time before becoming lost for good, she was convinced that her freedom lay in seeing the ocean, that it was only that sight, witnessed until then solely in dreams, that would ultimately and finally find herself. Leonard had to be right. Once she was able to stand in the water and look eastward toward where the sun emerged, she would finally stop running away from the world, and stop being afraid of running toward something better. On facing that immensity, her longing pains would reach their end.
Bearskin Point appeared no different than any small town she had seen, but Alexandra’s head swam so that she no longer trusted her vision. Behind the white and grey façades, she saw a large shape loom, its wide wings stretched outward, but in an instant the shape dispersed, the clouds that comprised it pushed apart by warm winds.
Leonard drove the car slowly along the short road to Bearskin Point, passing small stores with local crafts and paintings displayed in the dark store front windows, the warped glass reflecting strange shapes and colors moving. No one walked the abandoned road, and Alexandra wondered if she and Leonard were the only travelers left in the world. A sharp pain punctuated the thought – a charge through her head that Alexandra was unable to contain. The smallest moan emerged.
“Not much farther,” Leonard said.
Bearskin Point was a small circular outcropping into the ocean. Despite her draw toward it, Alexandra traveled the remainder with eyes closed, struggling to contain her encroaching delirium. Her tether was stretched to a thin gossamer thread, and she felt every tug on it, every twang. With clenched, bloodless fingers around the car door handle, she felt beads of sweat slip down her neck, steam off her chest. That thread was so taught, so painful, that it blocked the vision from her eyes. Blind, her body felt it continuous motion, falling into the depths of nothing, fading from a spiraling world of teeming shadows.
“We’re here!”
Leonard’s voice jarred her awake. She opened her eyes, though initially wasn’t certain she had.
She stepped out of the car onto her shaking leg. Leonard rushed to help, but she remained upright, never prying her eyes from what was laid out before her. All pain and discomfort forgotten.
“It’s . . .” She couldn’t think of words to follow.
The surface of the water stretched outward, encompassing the horizon. There was nothing else; only a line that met the clouded sky. It seemed unreal, the dark contrast of elements separated by that thin sliver; it went on and on forever. And, yet, there was something else out there, something more, moving toward them. She could not see it, but it was coming. Something large.
“Leonard, can you—” she looked at the wasteland of rocks between her and the water. “Will you help me down to the beach? I don’t think I can do it alone.”
“Yes,” he said, and held out his hand.
They took the first step onto the rocks together, then one at a time as he led her down to the ocean’s edge. With each successive step, she looked at the water’s calm surface, knowing what was out there was ever closer.
“Careful you don’t get your foot trapped,” Leonard said. “These rocks can be dangerous.”
“Okay,” she said.
It took ten minutes to reach the edge of the water, and when Alexandra’s foot first sank into the wet sand she felt an electric jolt travel through her. The air smelled as it did after a thunderstorm, wet and cold, and the standing hairs sent shivers over her arms. All sound ceased; she simply existed, as much a part of that place as were the rocks and sand and air. As much as the water and everything moving under its surface. She was at one with everything as she had never been before. Not in her own home, not in the arms of her father, not beneath any lover or among any friends. She struggled for a word that described it all, but as soon as she had it, it was gone, swimming away.
She released Leonard’s hand and stepped forward, each foot leaving a fading print in the wet sand. She stepped to the lapping edge of the ocean and then continued onward – the water rising first to her ankle, then to her knee, then halfway up her thigh. She stood alone in the water, watching the endless horizon, waiting for what was to come.
It did not take long.
She doubled over, unable to keep upright as waves of excruciating pain traveled from the frigid water around her legs. Leonard stood behind her – somewhere on the land or perhaps holding her, she couldn’t be sure – and she tried to scream but no words emerged. Or, if they did, they were inaudible over the rushing sound of the surf churning beneath her. It was as though she were being lanced by a burning metal rod forced though her skull one inch at a time, burning hotter the further it traveled. Her head was thick with pressure, and behind her tightly squeezed lids stars refracted and filled her vision. There were shapes in the endless field, enormous masses that moved in the distance, eldritch things that watched from the depths of a betweenspace she only now saw was connected to the ocean, the primal force of the drowning earth. And behind them all she saw him on the horizon, elephantine arms reaching out to draw her in close. Alexandra forced her eyes open, unable to bear any more, and the tears rushed forward, falling into the water. There, in the waves, each transformed into a silvery-sleek creature that darted away. More tears fell, more creatures darted, as though a tear between worlds had opened behind her eyes, and through it fell children of another place, all of whom were streaming toward the great thing that approached from out in the distant depths, something no doubt older than the earth, than even those ancient things behind her watering eyes. They swam forward in the churning ocean and she didn’t know why, didn’t know what it all meant, didn’t know where Leonard was or how many times he’d been there before, or when she had been impregnated with the horror. So many questions, burning inside her cracking head, so many tears falling she could not stop, and she prayed the pain would end and that she could once more be blind to the foulness she was a portal for. But she knew it would not happen; she knew it was too late. Whatever was inside her, whatever emerged from the beyond, would not stop until she was consumed, transformed from flesh and blood back to the essential salts that had formed her, left to mix and dilute, returning home at last to find herself within the great ocean of tears beneath which some unfathomable future approached.
Yoon Ha Lee first discovered H. P. Lovecraft’s writings in a collection in his high school library. “I was fascinated by the strong sense of place, particularly the creepy, inw
ard-facing nature of the communities (human or otherwise) he described. I wasn’t so impressed by the Cthulhu mythos’ One Ones’ indifference – not even malevolence, just indifference – to beings so far beneath their notice, because I was all too used to reading astronomy books and the universe is a big place that probably doesn’t notice me. In a sense, I feel that human indifference is worse because there is a conscious choice involved. ‘Falconand-Sparrows’ takes place in what I think of as the rural Koreanish equivalent of that setting, and describes the destruction of history by an uncaring force that people have bowed to – when they don’t have to.”
Lee’s first collection, Conservation of Shadows, was published by Prime Books. His fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and other venues. He lives in Louisiana with his family and has not yet been eaten by gators.
Falcon-and-Sparrows
Yoon Ha Lee
——
After the first shock of my mother’s death wore off, I traveled to Falcons Crossing. It was only two days’ journey by train – the Kheneiran Peninsula is not large – and I hardly noticed the small discomforts of travel.
My mother had come from a tiny village near Falcons Crossing. I had not first heard of the town from my mother, due to her reluctance to talk about her past. I’d learned of my mother’s origins from an unfinished letter I had found in her room. To my frustration, she had not addressed it to anyone by name, only a diffident honorific. I had brought it with me, tucked into my coat.
Now I looked out the window of the train. You could scarcely tell there had been a civil war in the past generation. Cranes stood like pale slivers in the rice paddies; if I had been outside, I would have heard the deafening chorus of frogs. I almost wished I could stay on the train forever. I would reach my destination in a few more hours, however.
My mother had never spoken of what had led her to have an affair with a foreign soldier. Even as a child I had only dared to ask once. Seeing her go white had convinced me never to mention it again. Yet she had kept a silver bracelet he had given her, so I always hoped that there had been some thread of affection between them. I never found out whether it was true that he had died in the unrest following the war that divided the Kheneiran Peninsula, or if he had abandoned her for some wife back in Ulo.
The bracelet was not the only gift my father had given her. Another Ulowen soldier, one of a contingent left behind to discourage a second outbreak of war, had told me that my father had secured my mother a job as a secretary at the military outpost. My mother was quick with languages, and her Ulowen cursive had precise, beautiful swells and flourishes. It wasn’t until I was older that I figured out this meant my mother, cast out by her own family, didn’t have to prostitute herself to bored Ulowen soldiers.
The other consequence of my father’s odd thoughtfulness was that my mother had ready access to paper. She often brought home flyers and memoranda that the Ulowen had no further use for. As a child, she had learned paper-folding. She taught me the mountain and valley folds, the trick of buffing a crease with my fingernail so it became crisp. She guided me in everything from simple boats to lilies whose petals could be curled gracefully with the aid of a chopstick or pencil.
While the variety of objects that can be emulated in paper is limited only by the skill and imagination of the artist, the one that fascinated me the most was the humble glider. I began with the simplest designs and later experimented with more outlandish ones with asymmetrical wings or flaps. Most of them flew drunkenly when they flew at all.
This brings us to the matter of Falcons Crossing. For many years I had thought little of it. But Kheneira’s Royal Historians – back in the days when there was a crown, anyway – had archives going back almost seven hundred years. During the civil war, some of those archives had been evacuated from the then-capital to Falcons Crossing because it was far removed from the front lines. Then the capital fell to West Kheneira, and no one ever got around to moving the archives to some more illustrious location.
The National Archives were not my specific interest, even if I had heard of them. Rather, the migrations were.
As I grew in years, I had participated in the new capital’s migrations – what we called the glider contests. My mother, bemused, had given me her encouragement.
Even today I don’t know what had led East Kheneira’s Cultural Preservation Council to choose the migrations as a designated cultural treasure. But the contests were held every year, not just in the capital, but in a number of towns. Glider artists from Falcons Crossing dominated the contests. I was not the only one to study their methods, desperate for some hint as to their mastery. It was unlikely to be in their designs, which were conventional. They used the paper provided for the contests, so that couldn’t be it either. Perhaps, as some said, it was their devotion to the art, which had a longer lineage in Falcons Crossing than elsewhere.
I had come to the town itself in hopes of finding the answer. What I expected to discover, I don’t know. But anything was better than lingering over my mother’s possessions, trying to puzzle out the mysteries that had led to her dying with no one to mourn her but a half-Kheneiran, half-Ulowen child.
It was a relief to collect my luggage and make my way to the platform. The confinement had been getting to me more than I had realized. I was only one of two people to get off, and the other hurried away without looking me in the eye, a reaction I was accustomed to.
The sky, unevenly cloaked by clouds, was darkening already. At least it didn’t smell like it would rain tonight. The train platform was hung about by low lanterns, which should have looked festive, but instead gave the place a sense of gloom imperfectly warded off. I resolved to get to a guesthouse as quickly as possible.
There was supposed to be a migration in four days. I had timed my travel accordingly. I’d expected that some sort of decoration would announce the event for out-of-towners, and indeed enormous banners had been hung about the station, but I wasn’t sure they were related to the migration. Anywhere else there would have been calligraphy. Here, the banners displayed paintings of birds, detailed down to the feather, but holes had been ripped into the fabric where the eyes should have been.
Perhaps the guesthouse keeper could tell me what was going on. From a newspaper account some years old, I had obtained directions to a guesthouse I hoped still existed. I rounded the corner from the station, luggage in tow, and was confronted by a sight the clipping had not prepared me for.
My first impression was that, by some misappropriation of angles, I had stumbled into the town square. What rose before me appeared to be a gallows tree of fantastic proportion. Streamers dangled from its limbs, stirring in the fitful wind. I had a vision of a storm of eyeless birds plunging earthward, barbed feathers, sharp beaks.
Someone bumped into me and hurried past without apologizing. This freed me from my imagination, and I saw then that the gallows tree was a shrine. I laughed ruefully at myself.
The shrine had been hammered together with blackened nails. The streamers were braided cords dyed red and black. Despite the initial shock of its appearance, it was not so different from the shrines I had seen in the past. There, people used bright ribbons to tie prayers written upon slips of paper to the branches of holy trees.
Here, people had tied paper folded into gliders and knotted the cords through their pointed “beaks” in such a way that I thought of eyes. I wondered what was written inside the gliders, but it would have been taboo for me to open one up to look.
As a child, at our neighborhood shrine, I had once broken the taboo. I had been disappointed by the ordinariness of the prayers. Most Kheneirans are literate, the result of a cultural fervor for education and the classics, but not everyone is equally skilled with brush and ink. Some of the prayers had been scratched out with a stick of charcoal or graphite; others were written in calligraphy so fine that I was sure a local scribe, versed in the formulas of piety, had been paid to do the work.<
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People had asked for loan sharks to develop forgiving hearts; for injured relatives to regain enough mobility to work; for the rainy season to bring rain, but not too much rain. For healthy babies, for well-favored marriages, for high scores on critical exams. Even as a child I knew how these stories ended. I slipped back home, secure – as only a child could be – in the knowledge my mother would take care of me. No doubt the prayers here were much the same.
I made my way past the shrine of Falcons Crossing, determined not to be intimidated by it. Strangely, I counted not one scribe booth near the shrine, but four. Were people especially devout here? What was more, each had a sign marked simply with the traditional drawing of brush and inkstone, but no example verse to demonstrate the scribe’s skill. In addition, banners hung from each one, their color indeterminate in the low light. I would have to ask about the booths when I had the opportunity.
The guesthouse was where the newspaper had said it would be, flanked by two enormous wisteria trees. At this time of year they weren’t in bloom, but I inhaled the evening air deeply, remembering the heady scent from my childhood. I contemplated the guesthouse’s sign as I did so. To my puzzlement, it had no writing on it, only a painted lamp.
I had worried that I’d arrived too late – especially in smaller towns, people go to bed early – but the guesthouse keeper let me in. He was a wrinkled man who spoke with a wheeze. I paid ahead for the two weeks I planned to stay. Before I asked if there was any leftover rice I could have, he said he would have a dinner tray sent up to my room. At this hour the common room wouldn’t be open anyway.
“Does it ever get busy this time of year?” I asked, the most direct way I could think of asking if there were other guests.
“We do well enough,” the guesthouse keeper said.
I couldn’t tell if I had offended him. “I have another question.”