The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Movement One — The Narrator, on Love

If we're going to talk about love, I should tell you honestly that I know a little of it. Perhaps I know a great deal. I couldn't say for certain which, and I'm not sure the distinction matters much to you, reading this, so long as I tell you what I do know as plainly as I can.

Love in the Between tends to run deeper than the word usually manages to carry, back in the world you and I both came from. Purer, if that word doesn't sound too self-congratulatory coming from a narrator who has already told you, more than once, that he isn't to be trusted completely. There is no desire for a body here, because there is, in the ordinary sense, no body to desire — only the rough, hard-won shape a soul builds for itself out of stubbornness and memory, and even that shape rarely resembles anything solid enough to want the way the living want. There is no desire, either, to simply chase the loneliness away, because loneliness, out here, is not an ache most souls remember well enough to still be frightened of. They've grown used to it. It has become, for most of them, simply the temperature of the air they exist in, rather than a wound demanding to be closed.

The soul I want to tell you about now is no exception to any of that. If anything, she is the exception that proves how true it is — because I don't think, watching her from wherever a narrator watches from, that she ever wanted a body, or an escape from loneliness, or any of the ordinary things love is supposed to be chasing when it finally arrives. I think she wanted something else entirely, and I think that's part of why what happened to her happened the way it did.

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Iris gave her a name, eventually, though it wasn't the name she was born with, and it wasn't kind, exactly, though I don't think it was cruel either. She called her the homeless girl who doesn't want love. Sometimes, more simply, the local homeless girl. I'll let you decide, by the time we reach the end of this account, whether either name was fair.

Her own name — the one she carried before the household ever shortened her down to an epithet — was Vesper.

I want to describe her properly, before the story itself begins, because I think a soul this precisely built deserves better than to arrive in your imagination as a vague shape wearing a nickname. She had, by the time this account catches up with her, spent long enough constructing a silhouette worth keeping that something like features had settled onto her — a face built for asking questions rather than answering them, sharp at the cheekbone, careful around the eyes, the particular kind of composed that comes from centuries spent watching other people's faces for the small involuntary tells that gave away what they actually meant, rather than what they'd decided to say. She dressed, in whatever manner a silhouette dresses itself once it's decided to bother, in something plain and unadorned — no silks, no ornament, nothing that asked to be looked at rather than listened to. She had the particular stillness of someone who had trained herself, deliberately, to take up as little visible space as possible, so that whatever she was studying would forget, eventually, that it was being studied at all.