The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

I appeared out of nowhere, the way I generally prefer to appear, and settled myself neatly between Iris and Eremos without waiting for an invitation from either of them — a habit I've never once bothered breaking myself of, mostly because nobody in that household has ever managed to make me regret it, and partly because I've always found invitations to be a considerably slower way of arriving somewhere I intended to arrive regardless.

Iris opened her eyes at that — properly opened them this time, none of the half-drowsing pretense from before, the particular alertness she reserves for exactly two things in this entire existence: genuine danger, and me — and shifted, without complaint, making room for me the way you make room for family rather than for company, the small, wordless negotiation of bodies that have spent long enough being close to one another that no one bothers announcing the adjustment out loud anymore. Eremos looked at me with the particular unsurprised fondness he reserves for exactly this sort of unannounced arrival, the look of a man who has long since stopped expecting warning from the people he loves and has, somewhere along the way, decided he prefers it that way. It was simply me, being exactly the me he's always known, showing up precisely when I felt like showing up and not a moment before.

I hadn't told either of them about the man mid-air. I hadn't told either of them about the mirrors, or the bubbles, or the particular quality of silence I'd started noticing where a much older, much steadier presence used to be. Some evenings simply aren't built to carry that kind of weight, and I've learned, across a very long life spent occasionally getting this decision wrong, to recognize the shape of an evening that isn't built for it before I go ahead and try loading it anyway. This one — gold light, half-finished tea, a sneeze that made a man laugh like it was the funniest thing he'd witnessed all century — this one wasn't built for it. So I set it down, for now, the way you set down something heavy on a table you intend to come back to, and let myself simply be, for however long the meadow was willing to let me, exactly as unbothered as I've spent centuries training my own face to look.

"Tell me a story," I said.

I want you to understand that I asked for that the way I ask for most things — not really a request at all, more a soft, comfortable demand dressed up in the shape of a request, the kind of thing you only get away with when the person you're asking already loves you enough not to mind the presumption. I've never once, in all my long acquaintance with the man, actually needed to ask him for anything twice. It's one of the small, private luxuries of loving someone who has spent his entire existence learning to give people exactly what they're asking for even when they've dressed the asking up as something else entirely.

Eremos thought about it. I watched him think about it, the particular unhurried care he brings to even the smallest questions, as though every request deserves the full weight of his attention regardless of how trivial it might look from the outside — a habit I find, depending entirely on my mood in any given moment, either the single most endearing thing about him or the single most infuriating, since a woman occasionally simply wants an answer and not an entire quiet meditation on the correct shape of one. Tonight, watching the particular way his mouth had already begun, faintly, at one corner, to curve, I suspected I already knew which story I was about to get.

"You're going to tell the potato one," I said, before he could open his mouth properly, "aren't you."

"I am," he said, entirely unrepentant, "considering telling the potato one."

I should explain, for anyone reading this who hasn't yet had the specific pleasure of sitting through it, that "the potato one" is not, strictly, a story so much as it is a kind of household institution — a piece of shared, well-worn folklore that has been told and retold so many times, in so many configurations, on so many quiet evenings across so many centuries, that none of us, Eremos included, could tell you anymore with any confidence which version was the original. It is, ostensibly, an account of one of his earliest Missions, back in the years before he'd fully learned to hold this human shape without effort, back when the very concept of a task with an actual objective still felt, to him, faintly miraculous simply for existing at all. It concerns, depending entirely on which evening you're hearing it and how much wine has already been poured, either a potato that achieved sentience through what he describes, with total seriousness, as "an unfortunate accumulation of ambient want," or a potato that was, in fact, the disguised and deeply displeased soul of a minor deposed monarch, or — this was the version I personally favored, back in the early centuries, before I'd heard it enough times to have developed genuine, if entirely affectionate, opinions about its narrative shortcomings — a potato that simply refused, on unspecified philosophical grounds, to be harvested, and had to be reasoned with, at length, by a young man who had, at that point in his existence, considerably more patience than sense.

It is, by any reasonable literary standard, a terrible story. It meanders. It contradicts itself, cheerfully, from one telling to the next, occasionally within the same telling. It has, on at least two separate occasions that I personally witnessed, made Elowen laugh so hard she had to leave the room, and it has, on one memorable occasion, made Vesalia — Vesalia, who does not, as a rule, find very much in this gray world worth laughing at out loud — actually snort, an event she has denied ever since with a straight face so total I've genuinely come to admire the commitment.

It is also, and I want this understood clearly before I tell you what happened next, one of the truest things Eremos has ever given any of us. Not because the potato is true — the potato, I feel confident telling you, is almost certainly not true, in any sense a careful appraiser-soul would recognize as true — but because the telling of it is. Every version of that story is, underneath the nonsense, an account of a young, wordless thing learning, for the very first time in its existence, that a task could have an ending. That effort could produce something. That the universe, this particular strange gray corner of it, was willing, occasionally, to let a small and earnest attempt actually succeed. He tells it, I've come to believe, less because he thinks it's funny — though he does, visibly, thoroughly, every single time — and more because some very old, very quiet part of him still can't quite believe that first small success actually happened, and needs, every so often, to say it out loud again just to confirm it still holds.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

"Once upon a time," he said, settling more comfortably against the low stone wall, one arm still loosely, unthinkingly wrapped around wherever Iris happened to be leaning, "there was —"

I bit him.

I want to be entirely honest with you about this, because I think you deserve honesty even in the small, undignified moments, perhaps especially in those — I hadn't planned it. It wasn't, whatever certain members of this household might later choose to believe, some carefully staged bit of theater designed to derail the evening toward something more interesting than a badly told story about root vegetables. It simply arrived, the way the man's sentence had arrived earlier that same night, uninvited, entire, impossible to properly explain even to myself in the moment it happened — his hand had drifted, easy and unthinking, into the space between us as he spoke, the particular loose, open gesture he makes with his hands whenever he's settling into a story he's told so many times the telling of it has become, for him, something closer to breathing than to speech, and I looked at that hand, and something old and entirely unphilosophical in me simply decided, without consulting the rest of me first, that it wanted to know what it tasted like.

He made a sound — not pain, not exactly, more surprise dressed up loosely as pain, the particular startled noise of a man who has genuinely never once expected a bite in the middle of a sentence about vegetables — and stopped talking entirely, staring down at his own hand and then up at me with an expression that managed, somehow, to be simultaneously wounded and delighted, which is, I'll admit, precisely the expression I was hoping to produce.

"Vaelira."

"You were being boring," I said, entirely unbothered, "and I find that biting is an underused method of correcting the problem."

"I hadn't gotten to the potato yet."

"You never get to the potato quickly enough. I've heard this story more times than I've heard my own name spoken aloud, and I stand by my assessment that it improves considerably with interruption."

He was still looking at his own hand, turning it over, examining the small, faint indent I'd left there with an expression that suggested he was genuinely unsure whether to be more amused or more suspicious of what might happen next — a reasonable uncertainty, I'll grant him, given how well he knows me by now, and given how rarely, in our long history together, a single bite from me has ever managed to be the entire extent of a gesture.

So I leaned in, unhurried, the way I do most things, and kissed the exact spot my teeth had just been, slow and deliberate and considerably gentler than what had preceded it, an apology that wasn't really an apology at all so much as it was the second half of the same sentence, the soft close after the sharp open, the specific rhythm I've always preferred to any conversation that could simply be had in words alone. I felt him go very still beneath it, the particular held stillness he gets when something small and unplanned lands somewhere in him that the rest of the evening's easy warmth hasn't quite prepared him for, and I let the kiss sit there a moment longer than it strictly needed to, because I've never once in my entire existence seen the value in doing anything by half measures when a whole one was so plainly available.

"There," I said, finally, pulling back just enough to watch his face properly. "Now you may continue. I've decided to permit it."

He laughed — the same laugh from earlier, the sneeze-laugh, quiet and entirely unguarded, except warmer now, closer, aimed directly at me instead of scattered generally across the evening the way it had been aimed at Iris's small undignified noise a while before. "You've decided to permit it," he repeated, "after biting me."

"I contain multitudes," I said. "I've mentioned this before. Some of them bite. Most of them, given the opportunity, apologize afterward in whatever manner seems most likely to be believed."

It was Iris, then, who moved — unhurried, the way she does most things, the particular slow economy of a being who has never once in the whole of her existence needed to rush toward anything, because nothing has ever once, in her experience, dared to leave before she was ready for it to. She took his hand, the same hand, gently, the way you'd take something you'd decided, on the spot, deserved a second and considerably softer opinion than the first, and pressed her own mouth briefly to the same small mark I'd left there, quieter than my own gesture had been, quieter than almost anything that woman ever does, and said nothing at all about it, as though the kiss itself were the entire complete sentence and required no further words to finish it.

Eremos looked between the two of us — Iris, settled again against his side as though she'd never moved at all, and me, thoroughly, unrepentantly pleased with myself, the both of us sitting there in the gold, held-breath light of an evening that had clearly, by now, given up any pretense of proceeding according to schedule — and something in his face did the thing it does, the specific thing I've watched cross it a thousand times across a great many centuries and have never once grown tired of watching happen again: the particular, quiet astonishment of a man who spent an age of the universe rooted and voiceless and entirely alone, discovering, all over again, in the smallest and least dramatic way imaginable, that he is not alone anymore, and hasn't been for longer than he sometimes remembers to properly notice.

"All right," he said, and there was nothing left in his voice now but the easy warmth of a man who has decided, entirely, to let an evening go exactly the direction it wants to go. "Once upon a time," he said again, starting fresh, unbothered, his free hand settling, this time, somewhere I couldn't quite reach without considerably more effort than the moment called for, "there was a potato."

— End of Chapter —