I reach out for that old panic sensation to jettison myself back to Patchwork, but my concentration is shattered, split between my anguish over Troy and the threat of Osiris, standing only a knife stroke away. Seeing Troy die, even with the possibility that it might be impermanent, has sent spiderweb cracks through my world. Whether or not he comes back to life is hinged entirely on my next move.
Osiris seems to be savoring the moment, like he knows I’m too terrified of him to access my fledgling phoenix powers, and that the space heater must be starting to feel really heavy in my arms. This is a game to Osiris, some shitty, sociopathic game he gets to play every generation with the new phoenix, so he wants to make it entertaining. He may be murdering us out of some twisted self-aggrandizing premise that he’s forcing humanity to atone for its sins, but a part of him clearly relishes this.
Even though it’s an ambush, I realize that I have to try. That if flee isn’t an option, I’ll have to choose fight. That I may never get him in close quarters again.
This is my chance to end this.
So I draw first blood. What little strength remains in my arms, I heave the space heater forward, aiming for his wooden mask. Osiris’s reflexes are quick and he catches the heavy metal box before it can level his face, but at the expense of dropping his knife, which skitters away into the corner of the tree house.
In that deciding moment, I slide around him with the best form softball could have taught me. I rise up onto the floorboards, just as he’s turning around to face me. Then I slam my shoulder into the space heater and barrel forward, pushing Osiris toward the exit like a linebacker tackling a training sled, thinking all the way, You threw my boyfriend out of the tree house—now I’m going to splatter you on the ground.
Osiris is stronger, but I have the element of surprise. Before he can reverse our momentum, I force him right out the tree house door.
He drops the ten feet down the tree trunk and lands on his back in the snow. The heater that fell with him bounces off his chest so hard, that at first I think I must have crushed his rib cage.
After a brief dazed pause of lying still, Osiris peels his head off the ground. Readjusts his crooked mask. Then he gingerly attempts to stand up.
I’ve wounded him. If Tantalus was right about the sphinx having all of a phoenix’s powers, then maybe he shares my limitations as well.
Maybe his body stays the same between jumps in time like mine does.
Which would mean that now, all I have to do is finish the job, travel back to a time when Troy was still alive, and hopefully Osiris will stay dead.
I dart over to the corner of the tree house, where Osiris lost his dagger. As soon as my fingers tighten around the knife’s leather handle, I let out a war cry and charge for the exit, ready to plunge down on Osiris with the blade ready.
Instead, I find nothing but the hollow crater Osiris’s body left in the snow. When I turn my attention to the woods behind the house, I catch the last fleeting sign of his black cloak vanishing into the sullen forest. He may be wounded, but he’s moving with supernatural speed that will be impossible to catch. Following him into a dark wood would be suicidal.
I wait until I’m sure he’s gone, then tread hesitantly over to window. I don’t want to see Troy, but at the same time, it might give me the extra rush of adrenaline that I need to escape this reality. Seeing him dead might be the quickest way to bring him back to life.
Only it’s even more horrible than I could ever imagine.
His body is twisted, with his face half-buried in the snow. A lagoon of blood has soaked into the fresh powder beside his heart.
The familiar blistering pain finally sears through me as my body begins its transit to Patchwork.
But the true agony is how I feel when I look into Troy’s one visible eye, and only an unbearable lifelessness stares back.
Walter Lake’s Eulogy, Part II
by Renata Lake
My father taught me to always look up.
I mean that literally, too. Not just in the cheery blind optimism sense, but that we should all take a minute to admire the sky from time to time. In fact, it was part of Dad’s job as an animal scientist to keep his eyes trained up—he specialized in ornithology, which I called “professional bird watching” whenever I felt like giving him a hard time. Dad was always trying to convince me to go into astronomy, or meteorology, or even tornado-chasing. When he looked at the evolving world, he saw a not-so-distant future when people spent so much time glued to computer screens and phones and televisions that they lost sight of the bigger picture. He didn’t want that for me. He saw me out in the field, traveling the world, working with my hands.
In fact, there was this one month freshman year, right before I transferred, when I became the target of this senior bully who made a habit of tormenting underclassmen. Dad saw how much it was stressing me out one night, and instead of telling me to rat her out to the principal or just get over it, he offered me this advice: “Go out into the backyard and stargaze for an hour, or at least until you’ve decompressed.” When I asked him how that could possibly help, he said “because the night sky is the only thing that should ever be allowed to make you feel small.”
Dad was full of one-line nuggets of wisdom like that. Sometimes I’d laugh and tell him he’d missed his calling as a philosopher. For the most part, though, he was right—one sentence from him would put everything in perspective, if I actually stopped to listen to what he was trying to say.
This is me saying I wish I’d taken your words to heart that night. I wish I’d spent more time looking up with you while you were still here.
Because now every time I look up, I’m going to have to search the heavens for you.
Patchwork Haunted
When I spill out of the other end of the Patchwork wormhole, I nearly pitch myself out of the tree house entrance. For a long moment, I clutch the wooden frame, my back rising and falling with heavy breaths. My mind keeps replaying that awful memory of Troy standing there in shock, his forlorn eyes on me as the blood began to pour from his fatal wound. My friends had died during Osiris’s deadly games before, but this was Troy, and right in front of me. This time Osiris forced me to watch the life drain from my boyfriend.
Like it was meant to be personal.
If I’m back in Patchwork, then I’m already well on my way to a time when Troy’s horrific stabbing never happened. I should be celebrating how I almost bested Osiris, how I may have injured him—how maybe I have a chance to defeat the ancient bastard after all.
The tree house suddenly bucks hard beneath me. The next hit rips me right off my feet and I sprawl out onto the unforgiving floor.
At first I think it must be Patchwork unraveling again. But on the third hit, I hear a heavy thuck sound. I’m standing by the fourth strike, and crossing the tree house to the window by the fifth.
Thanatos, looking more colossal than ever, howls up at me from the ground below. Then he wheels back his enormous axe one more time and drives it home into the tree trunk.
This blow does it. The wedge deepens enough that, with the groan of wood and a resounding crack, the tree starts to tip. The trunk keeps bending until it stops at a forty-five degree angle, and the sudden tilt sends me rolling down the slope of the floor.
Before I can fall out through the opening, I grab onto the doorframe and dangle, hanging onto the splintery wood with barely more than my fingertips.
Meanwhile, Thanatos, far more agile than he looks, crosses quickly under the tree. His furry fencepost-sized fingers hoist his axe. He cocks it back, ready to play executioner.
So I do the only thing I can think to do. I swing back and forth until I have enough momentum to launch myself at him.
I land on his hunchback and start to slide off, but my fingers find handholds in his bristly mane. The hair is coarse, not soft, more the bristles of a porcupine than the fur of a dog.
Unfortunately, my plan didn’t extend any further than jumping onto the crea
ture’s back. Thanatos drops to all fours and flexes his back muscles, trying to buck me off like some monstrous bronco. I keep my grip on the bristles, until he reaches back with his claws and seizes me by my leg.
I am a human tomahawk. My stomach inverts as Thanatos windmills me over his head and brings me crashing down into the snow.
My body bounces twice before it comes to a stop. The impact rattles me as though I’ve been glued to the inside of a church bell.
But those aren’t the only tremors. From the earth below, I feel those resounding, earth-wrenching vibrations that mean Patchwork is about to repossess another memory.
Thanatos shuffles patiently toward me, my living, breathing self-destructive instincts coming to reclaim me. For the first time, I get a good look into the dark, swirling pools of his eyes. This close, I can see that they seem to be made up of tiny dark particles, swimming in circles.
Memories.
“Guilt …” Thanatos rasps. As soon as he says it, I’m sucked into his pupils, and—
I’m at the New Year’s Eve party at Garrett’s parent’s house. Wyatt slides down next to me on the couch and hands me another plastic cup filled with spiked egg nog. My ears are already rosy and warm from the first two cups, but I take a long swig anyway. Cheers from the drinking game in the kitchen echo down the hallway, but I’m all too aware that Wyatt and I are now alone.
Wyatt sips from his cup, and nervously picks at the patch of gray tape on a couch cushion. Even though he won’t look at me, I can tell how his breathing has suddenly changed rhythm. I can sense his longing.
Marcie and Dana are chattering just around the corner about their spring break plans, but under the dim blue and green glow of the Christmas lights, I somehow feel anonymous, invincible. Something dark and hot and lustful takes me over. My hand finds Wyatt’s on the cushion, and he immediately stops fidgeting. By the time he looks up to meet my eyes, I’m already leaning into him, and—
“Stop it!” I shriek, back in the Patchwork snow.
Thanatos takes another step toward me. “Regret,” he snarls, then—
I’m standing at the end of my driveway. Troy tosses the last of my suitcases into the bed of his pickup. Even though it’s the first week of September, it still feels like summer in Reverie, and both Troy and I have sweated through our shirts.
I’m so busy lugging the duffle bag with all my softball equipment toward the truck that I don’t hear Mom approach until she’s right beside me. “Hey,” she says softly. She has one hand tucked in her denim overalls, and the other looped around a pair of my ragged leather sandals—my favorites, the same ones I’ve been wearing since seventh grade.
She attempts a smile as she holds them out for me. “The soles on these are so worn you can almost see right through them.”
“Thanks,” is all I can reply. Lately, our relationship has been like a limp guitar string. No matter how we play or pluck it, it never makes a sound.
She fishes around in the other pocket of her overalls and pulls out an envelope. “Here,” she says, and when I flip open the unsealed top, I can see a handful of green bills. “Some incentive to make sure you don’t spend all your time studying. Not that I want to see your grades slip, but it’s not the As and Bs you’re going to remember ten or twenty years from now.”
I nod and lean against the mailbox. My emotions are one big, snarled mess.
Mom kicks at a weed that’s growing out of one of the cracks in the driveway. “Are you absolutely sure you don’t want to stay, Nata? I know the Daedalus dorms are more luxurious than your musty old room, but …” she trails off.
I start to feel my irritation resurface. Why does everything these days have to be a question, a decision for me to make? All she has to do is say that she wants me to stay, that she needs me here, and I’ll unpack all my bags.
She doesn’t.
We hug goodbye. She draws me in tight like she doesn’t want to let go. I want to do the same, but my arms can only find the strength to limply pat her back. “You don’t let any of those foliage-hunting New York visitors push you around, you hear?” I whisper. Then I break away and walk to the passenger door that Troy’s holding open for me.
I don’t look into the rearview mirror even after we pull away, but in my heart I’m sure Mom is standing back next to the Lake Inn sign, watching the whole time as we—
The tears are flowing now. I try to beg Thanatos to stop, but only a hiccuped sob comes out. The weight of all my sins presses down on me, torturing me. The agony is so intense that I almost want to crawl for the edge of Patchwork and cast myself off. I hurt everyone that I touch. Maybe the people in my life would be better off without me.
But it’s not my time to go yet. I need to live through this suffering long enough to unravel the knots I’ve made, to heal the scars that I’ve left.
My gaze falls on the bent tree looming over us. It leans precariously in my direction. With a little push, the last vestige of the trunk that’s clinging to the rest of the tree could be taken care of. With a little force, the work that Thanatos started could be completed.
Thanatos picks up his axe and slides his clawed nail along the blade. It sings, spraying sparks over the snow.
I reach out for the wedge in the trunk where Thanatos’s axe did its worst. I focus on the rumblings of Patchwork beneath us, imagine that same force funneling up through the tree like a tuning fork. My memory travels back ten years to a spring day in the third grade, when I took a hatchet from Dad’s toolshed and chopped down a birch in the woods behind our house. I had only wanted to hear what it sounded like when it fell. I nearly dropped the tree right on myself. Dad caught me trying to smuggle the axe back into the shed, and in order to teach me to be more respectful of living things, he made me plant three new trees to replace the one I killed.
The lesson stuck with me for life, but for today, I’m not thinking about what I learned.
I’m remembering the way the tree fell.
Thanatos hefts his axe.
I tune everything out and return my attention to the old memory. Thanatos may be the sum of my regrets and fears and self-loathing for all the mistakes I’ve ever made, but I’ve spent the last five visits back to reality wrestling with those demons. They will not kill me now.
My hand trembles as I spread my fingers toward the tree trunk.
These are my memories, I say to myself.
These are the cobblestones of my life.
Thanatos draws the axe up over his head, like a drawbridge going up. The blade’s shadow passes over my face. I can feel myself inside the trunk of the tree, feel the tremors starting to zero in on the deep cut in the wood.
Osiris can steal days and months from everyone else.
But he cannot take these memories from me.
I hear Thanatos draw in a deep breath. The wood of the oak tree groans.
And while regret and uncertainty may always live within me,
May always populate my world, in this one or the other,
I will never let Patchwork belong to fear—
Because Patchwork belongs to me.
I make a fist and rip it in the opposite direction. The tree trunk snaps at the base, a clap of thunder booming out into the universe. I scurry backwards. Thanatos turns.
The tree house smashes into the behemoth, and the weight of the structure flattens him to the ground. I roll to the side as his axe spins past me and cleaves into the snow where I was sprawled out before.
“The thing about mistakes,” I say to Thanatos, “is that sometimes you learn from them.”
With his face pinned into the snow, he weakly tries to use his one free arm to pry himself out from underneath the burden. But the arm shudders and goes still.
Patchwork has already begun to devour the memory as I sprint up the snowy hill, away from the tree house. First the house caves in and falls into the oblivion as the edge of the world creeps closer, then the snow-covered patio. Eventually it reclaims Thanatos and the tree house o
n top of him.
At the crest of the hill, the landscape transitions back to the Daedalus quad. I stop running when I reach the seam between the two memories, where snow turns to grass. I stand my ground fearlessly, even as the unraveling rolls all the way up to my feet. When it’s done eating the last memory, I’m left with my heels on solid ground and my toes protruding out over the edge.
I’d always thought of the oblivion around and beneath Patchwork as nothingness, as death. But as I gaze down at the pulsing mass of darkness, I wonder if maybe it’s just another beyond. Just another frontier that will sooner or later come for me, whether it’s today or sixty years from now.
While I stand there at the edge of the world, in the shadow of the Daedalus clock tower, its hands spinning backward like the locket around my neck, I see the first roots of a plan beginning to slither through the soil of my mind.
I’m beginning to see that it’s not enough to be one step ahead of Osiris. I need to start thinking two and three steps ahead as well.
All this time I’ve been trying to outrun Osiris.
What if I outsmarted him instead?
Until now, he’s maintained the element of surprise. What I really need is a way to see him coming, a way to identify him …
It isn’t until I walk into the Daedalus academic complex that I feel my body begin to pass through the cosmic cheese grater, back to reality. In my last moment before I dissipate, I spot the red cross on the door to the nurse’s office. And that’s when I decide that my first course of action once I’ve returned to reality will be to visit some drug stores.
Lots of them.
Ripping out the Threads
Osiris’s Book of Riddles, 2016 A.D.
This body of mine
is falling apart
and once again
I can smell the rot
pungent like milk
under the hot desert sun
Patchwork Page 18