Almost too late he realised that wasn’t the right spot. A latch opened outside his hand and he had to swiftly move to keep it from closing. There was a grinding noise as the globe attempted to dislodge, and the whole world quivered and seemed as though it would topple.
But it held, the clicking latch pressed back on the Tailor’s sinewy thumb. It held and the bank of globes behind him waited dutifully, and the globes in front continued to bounce along, oblivious.
For one full rotation he waited. Then he waited another and another, averting his face from the dull glare of the spotlights (dimmed but not extinguished, signifying night.) He held himself in place with one strong hand gripping the appendage that kept the lights and plinth together.
The cloth grew faded.
Slowly at first, then like a day where the sun refuses to rise or set, the cloth faded as if smog covered the world. He should let go. Soon he should let go. One more moment, one more…
Brown patches of burn appeared gently, the soft cloth falling to ash. By then his thumb was so stiff with the weight of the latch that he couldn’t even be sure he was holding it anymore. And finally with a click, the globe rolled off.
For a moment, no globe took the plinth.
The tailor had to haul himself bodily over the spot, convinced he would fall, his knees so stiff and shoulders so weak he couldn’t feel when he was touching the track and when he wasn’t. He moved out of the way, willing the next globe into place.
Sure enough, the next globe rolled onto the plinth, latches and catches working perfectly to hold it steady.
The Tailor was too spent to even breathe a sigh of relief. He made to lower himself to the track, reaching out a shaking hand and bending to an awkward squat. He offered a silent acknowledgment for John Avery and his daughter, hoping it had been enough. Surely it had been enough.
He was so wrapped in his thoughts that at first he didn’t realise his hand had missed the track. His own hand, on which he relied every day, and now it fell beyond safety with an almost pre-ordained determinism. It dropped in something akin to slow-motion and pulled the rest of him with it.
His inside elbow scraped the track, following his hand. His chin snagged, but it wasn’t enough to hold him.
And then he was falling.
Head first, body unfolding behind, swooping with an uncanny grace. Plummeting through grey.
He fell and—
He fell and—
He fell.
Nothing caught or saved him. He plunged into the gap afforded by the precipice. He dropped towards a grey void that could’ve been anything but ultimately turned out to be stone and earth.
He fell and hit the hard ground.
He died.
The impact shook free the Tailor’s soul, which blossomed and ballooned above his crumpled form and then spread thin like a bubble exploding.
When it rose past the windows of the place that used to shelter him, only one witness was there to see it. Not the tyros, still busy at their work in the Tailor’s room, bald heads bobbing almost in time to the needle on the great machine.
It was the Engineer who leaned from the window, round-eyed with bemusement, reaching with short, stocky fingers for the suds of the Tailor’s soul. She rubbed with finger and thumb at the smooth stickiness it left on her skin. She frowned and gazed and wondered what other force could call her tailor-man away, and to where. What higher force could there be, she thought, than an engineer?
As he drifted from her reach and travelled, uncertain at first, then with increasing urgency into the grey-blank sky, she merely stood, paying heed to the last of her lost man.
The Engineer seemed—seemed, only—more human than her fellow occupants in this strange place. Were it not for the blank, calculating eyes and the permanent downturn of her mouth, she might be mistaken for a child of—what?—seven or eight. But she moved with the steely calculation of an intellect that had observed thousands of years.
One more Tailor, she calculated, had just been lost. The best one yet. One more disappearance, one more example of the only remaining mystery in a world she once believed herself to have built. It frustrated her. But frustration, like all emotions, was barely more than an intellectual effect. What benefits others received from emotions, she had never determined.
The remnants of the Tailor were all but gone, a bare shimmer in the distant air. The Engineer dismissed the sight, turning from the window. She slid to a seated position with her back against the stone wall, and pulled out a strip of plain cloth and a white tailor’s pencil. She looked thoughtfully to one corner of the ceiling.
Then, balancing the cloth on her knee, she wrote:
‘The Tailor hopes…’
In bulky, childish script.
She licked the tip of the pencil and chewed her lip and thought. She drummed her thumbs on the bones of her knee. Then she continued,
‘…hopes there were dragon flies and mud and spoke rattles for your bike and more—’
And more.
Then she crumpled the note in her fist, since cloth and pen marks cannot travel through whispers and rumours. John Avery and the unmet girl, Bella—if they were to be reached at all—must be sought in the traditional way, through muted words and the spaces in-between the words.
The Engineer leaned back to feel the smoothness of the wall behind her and to wonder idly, idly, what places she might visit. That is, if she could travel whispers and rumours, beg favours and elicit curses, roll across silence, across water-coloured skies. She wondered what more there was and more there could be.
ROOT AND VEIN
by Erin Hoffman
In the time before time, when the world was young and spirits now ancient walked the earth on their first legs, there lived a dryad of the green wood. In those days the trees had not yet their stillness, and roamed on curling roots dexterous as acrobat hands, searching.
The dryad gave her first heart to an alchemist. She watched him at his work; his blunt-fingered hands were soft and clever with herb and glass, and surely he would know how to care for living wood. With a paring knife she opened her chest, golden sap blackening as it ran in rivulets to her waist, and cut away the soft spring green of her first heart.
The two that remained skipped a beat, leaving a lingering moment of promised silence.
The alchemist accepted the heart as he would a great treasure, and studied it. “No,” he said at last, rueful. “I am afraid I can find no use for this. What purpose may it serve, needing so much care? A thing of value would live on its own. Imagine wood that creates its own light, and feeds upon air! Truly this one is quite plain.”
As the heart withered on the alchemist’s shelf, the dryad’s roots slowly stiffened. The packed earth of the town’s road confounded her footing, and she returned to the soft forest loam, where she found a painter who spoke of the hearts of trees with great reverence. He walked among the shells of the first stilled, spirits of trees whose roots had fled forever into the dark safety of the soil, silent monuments to love that feared and failed. Their branches, crowned with sunset stars in the crisp fall wind, whispered a requiem for their questing.
Under the shade of her brethren the dryad rested, and the painter remained, reciting his legends of arboreal beauty. He spoke of the glory of twilight, of the everlasting merit of shadow.
The dryad’s second heart was the color of falling leaves. When she pulled it from her ribs it gave a crack as of an autumn apple bitten at its ripest perfection, and her next breath was shallower than her last.