Only if we sit around a fire that lights our faces and dances to the dark treetops whenever one of us throws on branches scavenged from the woods, throwing sparks into the night, does she consent to pull out a stone and tell us a story. We have to beg and yell at her. She says that only then are our brains receptive, when we are parched of stories.
She says this is a way to go back to the beginning, to break down our brains to a place we had bypassed in our speed to understand, and that was during the time that we were supposed to look at other faces and wonder what they were thinking. We were supposed to learn to understand when they were sad, when they were happy, and when they had feelings that were more complex, like a flavor or scent or a sound that comes out of the deep dark forest that is a sweet, mysterious music that calls you to come. She says this is the beginning of love.
When she talks like that, when she tells us stories, her voice is rich and deep, her face fluid, when often it is flat, like some of ours.
Her stories change our brains. We can even measure where and how much.
It’s something to do.
Her eyes get very wide, or narrow to slits. Her mouth assumes strange shapes. Sometimes she opens it wide and screams, reaches to the sky and grabs at it, her hands open, then grasps as she suddenly! in an instant! catches something and pulls it to her chest, and bows her head over it, and her long white hair veils her mysterious face, pale in the moonlight, silent as one of her stones, and we cry without knowing why, feeling helpless and at the same time knowing that she will help.
It is the age of stories. We suck them down like nectar.
We search for our new home. We move like a sea creature through the dark, generating our own electricity. Fluid, ever-changing, Ship translucent or solid-seeming, as we wish.
We grow no older. Why? Biological processes continue; of course. We live. We do the things we need to do, but our horse is wise, and knows much more than we.
Pele is still there, though they don’t know it. Or they do, sometimes. She fears a foray through some other kind of spacetime weather in which they will all age to telomerase endgame and die in what seems minutes. Who knows.
The instant that divides life and death. We must learn to skip it.
Periods of waking like cards constantly shuffled, the deck and game continually changing—the rules, the faces, the very basis of the numbers and what they mean.
“This one is too cold,” says Isho, who is Goldilocks. “And this one is too hot.”
“And none is just right, and none will ever be,” screams Ta’a’aeva, who is always the biggest bear. She storms away from the cottage. Isho and Kevin, the middle-sized bear, drop into tiny green chairs, sobbing.
“That’s not how it goes!” says Alouette, kneeling and holding Isho and Kevin in a skinny-armed embrace. “You know the story. Happy ending, and all that.”
“No,” says Kevin, his voice wild. “No! None of them are right. None of them ever will be right! There is no place for us in any universe except Earth. And it is gone!” He flings himself at Pele and tries to hit her in a flurry of punches. “My mother is gone! My father is gone! My sisters and brothers are gone! All these stories are lies!”
Pele holds him back for a moment, and just at the right time, she lets him collapse against her. She grabs him, holds him, rocks him back and forth. “I know, Kevin. Except this is not the end of the story. It’s not the end at all.”
Kevin fights free and runs.
Pele drops to the tiny stairs of the cottage and drops her head to her hands. It no longer matters whether she did the right thing or the wrong thing. Those words have no meaning. Here they are.
Ta’a’aeva returns from wherever she went, and stands next to Pele. “Sit up straight.” Pele feels the girl’s sure fingers dance against her scalp, hears the swift thush thush of braiding. “We are Wayfaring. We need to watch the sky, the birds, the waves. Kevin,” she shouts. “Check out the signature of the star we found yesterday.”
Kevin’s sullen voice, muffled by tears, issues from the forest. “There is no signature. There is no star.” A rock bounces off the side of the cottage. “Liar.”
Pele hears Ta’a’aeva’s low chuckle. “Yesterday we grew new eyes. I just found out. Go and see. It’s true.”
Kevin hurries away.
Xia, the big organdy bow on her dress untied and trailing behind her, says, “Pele, none of us believe in these stories, you know. They’re all a bunch of hooey. An artificial organization that gathers reality together like a bouquet of flowers, just picking the prettiest ones and ignoring everything that has turned brown already. And that organized bouquet still dies the next day and gets thrown in the trash. We pretend to make you happy.”
“That’s quite wonderful of you,” Pele says. “I appreciate it.” She does not point out that in another of their flashes, their realities, their lives—whatever you might call it, when they wake, and wake again, resume their lives like nodes of blinking light in the depths of the deepest sea, none of them would have even understood that Pele could be happy or sad, and if they had, it would not have mattered to them.
Her clock is on the wall of the tiny bedroom upstairs. We wonder if she knows
