The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Let's start somewhere strange, shall we? I do love starting somewhere strange. It's one of the small, private pleasures of being older than most things that still bother having pleasures at all — the luxury of never having to begin anywhere sensible, because sensible beginnings are for people who still worry someone might stop listening before the good part arrives. Nobody stops listening to me. I've made certain of that, over a great many centuries, through methods I won't bore you with tonight.

There's a man. I'm not going to give you his name, and I'm not going to give you a single other detail about him beyond what I'm about to hand you, because — and I promise this will make sense eventually, in the particular unhurried way most things I say eventually make sense, if you're patient enough to let me get there on my own schedule rather than yours — I don't actually know it myself. Not yet. Maybe not ever. That's not coyness. I want to be extremely clear about that, since I know precisely what the two of us must look like from the outside by now: an old, self-satisfied woman withholding a detail purely for the pleasure of withholding it. I withhold plenty of things purely for that pleasure, don't misunderstand me, I'm not above the accusation in general. But not this one. This one is a genuine gap, sitting in the middle of my own memory the way a missing tooth sits in an otherwise unremarkable smile — small, easy to overlook if you're not looking for it, and utterly impossible to stop running your tongue over once you've noticed it's there.

He runs, bare-chested, across ground I don't recognize, and I want you to appreciate, the way I appreciated it, the frankly excessive amount of muscle involved in that running. Not the kind that comes from vanity, from standing in front of some polished bit of glass and deciding, one morning, to be beautiful. The kind that comes from punishment. The kind that says, plainly, without needing a single word attached to it, that here is a man who has never once in his existence let a single day pass without driving his own body into something sharper than it was the day before — shoulders that have clearly spent decades absorbing weight they had no business absorbing, a back that moves like something built rather than something merely grown, the specific economy of motion you only ever see in creatures who have long since stopped needing to think about how to run and have simply become, through sheer repetition, a thing that runs the way water is a thing that falls.

I'll admit, watching it unfold behind my own closed eyes, that I spent a moment simply appreciating the view before I got around to being properly alarmed by it. I contain multitudes. Some of those multitudes are considerably shallower than others, and I've stopped apologizing for that particular one a long time ago — there is no version of eternity worth living through if a woman isn't occasionally permitted to enjoy the scenery before she gets around to being frightened by it. I'd recommend the practice to anyone. It has served me remarkably well.

The ground beneath him wasn't ordinary ground, either, now that I think back on it properly, turning the memory over the way you'd turn over a coin you suspect might be counterfeit. It had a texture I don't have a ready word for — cracked in places, the way old riverbeds crack once whatever used to run through them has long since dried up and stopped bothering to come back, and there was a light over the whole scene that didn't behave the way light behaves anywhere I've personally stood. It didn't fall from above the way light is supposed to fall. It seemed to rise, faintly, out of the ground itself, the way heat rises off stone that's spent all day storing a sun nobody else in the frame ever got to see. I noticed that detail only after several returns to the memory, the way you notice, on the third or fourth reading of a letter, the particular slant of a signature you'd been too distracted by the words themselves to properly look at the first time through.

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He plants both hands in the dirt. He jumps. And whatever happens next, whatever the air itself does around him in the instant his feet leave the ground — well, you'll have to trust me that you already got a fairly generous idea of his strength just from watching the jump alone, the way the ground seemed to flinch slightly beneath the push of it, the way dust rose in a ring around the point of contact and hung there a beat too long before falling, as though even gravity needed a moment to decide it still applied. I'm not going to describe the landing. I don't have it. That's rather the whole point of what I'm about to tell you, and I promise you it isn't a cheap trick, the sort of thing a lazier storyteller reaches for simply to manufacture suspense out of nothing. The memory itself simply ends there, mid-air, the way a sentence ends when someone's hand is clapped over the speaker's mouth before the last word can escape it.

What I do have is one single sentence, spoken mid-air, in a voice pitched somewhere between promise and threat, the particular register men like that always seem to reach for when they've decided a woman is worth chasing across however great a distance separates them, and have further decided, with the specific confidence only ever available to men who have genuinely never once been told no and meant it, that the chasing itself is already as good as finished.

"I'm coming for you, my queen."

That's it. That's the whole memory. It surfaced in my own head, uninvited, the way certain memories do when you least expect company — not gently, the way a proper memory ought to arrive, easing itself in at the edges the way morning eases itself in around the curtains, but all at once, entire, the way a stranger's hand might close around your wrist in a crowded room before you've had a moment to decide whether you want it there. It arrived, in fact, during an evening otherwise dedicated to activities considerably less dignified than metaphysical crisis — I won't tell you precisely what I was doing when it happened, partly because it's none of your business, and partly because I suspect the honest answer would undercut the gravity of everything I'm about to tell you, and I do have a reputation to maintain, even here, even with you, even after everything you already know about me by now.

I have spent rather longer than I'd like to admit turning that sentence over since, trying to work out where it came from, and why it decided tonight of all nights was the moment to finally arrive, uninvited, and refuse to leave again. I want to be clear that this isn't the sort of thing that usually happens to me. I am, by most reasonable accounts, an extraordinarily difficult woman to surprise. I've had centuries to build up an immunity to it — a considerable, deliberate, hard-won immunity, cultivated the way some people cultivate a garden and others cultivate a grudge, patiently, over a very long stretch of otherwise uneventful time. And yet there it was, sitting in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable evening, uninvited and entirely unexplained, the way a splinter sits in a hand long after you've stopped remembering exactly when you picked it up, making its presence known only when you happen to close your fist around something and feel, quite suddenly, the old wrongness of it again.

I can't tell you anything more about the man. I can't tell you his name, his face, the color of the sky he was running under, or which of the countless folded corners of existence that particular ground belonged to. What I can tell you — and I think, once I've finished explaining it to you properly, you'll understand exactly why one stray, unexplained memory has me sitting here at this particular hour instead of doing something considerably more pleasant with my evening, which I assure you was very much the plan before all this — is a great deal about the world he was standing in when I caught that glimpse of him. Because that world, unlike the man himself, I know intimately. I have known it for longer than I've known almost anything else worth knowing. And it is, at this exact moment, in more danger than anything in it currently understands itself to be.