Ficlet

Reveals have happened in both Remix and NFE, and I received some truly wonderful stories and gifts, and I wrote a couple things as well, and read some more, and very much want to tell you all about it — but this is not that post.

Today was terrible. So instead, here’s fic. This is probably part of a larger story inspired by an article about an old woman in Italy who practices the dying art of weaving sea silk. I’ll have to find and post it later.

nothing at all whole or shut

Breakage
by Mary Oliver

I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It's like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
full of moonlight.
Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

The harbormaster at Cair Paravel fancied himself a poet. One fierce winter, when his boy was lost, he put his quill away and took a chisel to the headstone to write his last lines:

For all the sea gives,
she taketh in turn.
And all that she loves,
she swallows.

One fine spring day, when the Kings and Queens of Narnia disappeared, the harbormaster took a chisel to the quay to write new last lines. Over the centuries, his words were worn away by the crashing waves, but in any age, the Albatross remembers.

Ask her, and she will tell the story. "It was said," she will begin, "that Aslan always came from the sea."

All the sea loves
she takes to herself.
Yet for all she has stolen,
She may yet give something in turn.

———

She rises before dawn.

The hair she ties back is coarser than it was once (twice) before. She pays it no mind, for the sea will not care.

In the village, they nod as she passes. They do not know her name, but they call her Regina for her stately walk, her head held high, her unfailingly courteous nod, her eyes belonging to an older (younger) world of stone parapets and golden crowns.

She should find that hideously amusing. But in her old age, her smiles are gentle (again) and not rimmed with sharpness. Like glass that has fallen into the sea and been worn smooth by tumbling waves, scrubbing sand and the numbing passage of time.

At dawn, she dives.

The strange, hairy mussels offer up their strands to her freely, and she receives them as Gifts.

She had other Gifts, once.

She has always made use of them.

———

"The door is shut," Susan says firmly, tucking her trembling hands behind her back so she isn't tempted to feel the back of the wardrobe just one more time. She has already bumped painfully against smooth-planed wood instead of rough bark and bristling needles. Instead of the warm flanks of her horse, the sun-warmed leather of her saddle and quiver, the cool ridges of the horn at her hip.

She didn't need one more reminder.

"It can't be shut forever," Lucy says confidently. "That's not how doors work."

Susan never could find the line between merely wishing and truly hoping, so she smiles and leaves the wardrobe open, just a crack. Just in case.

———

She weaves silk from the strands. Lighter-than-whispers, softer-than-dandelion-down silk, as fine as anything she had known in all the worlds.

It was a mermaid who'd taught her the trick of it, once upon a time. Named in the mertongue after the bubbles that form beneath the crest of a wave, the mermaid wove the silk with deft fingers, imbued it with the play of light in water, and threaded a murmur of song that shimmered like pearl when you listened.
It was a thing of beauty for all the senses.

Susan's early attempts made the otters roll with laughter.

Now, villagers paid her in vegetables for a wisp of a memory of a land they'd never known. Something for a daughter's veil, a mother's shroud, a brother's pocket square for his wedding day, something to be worn once and carefully preserved and treasured beneath glass.

At least they wore it, if only once.

She remembered dancing in a dress woven entirely from seasilk, embroidered with pearls to weigh it down. The skirts floated as if she were dancing underwater, perhaps in reflection of She-Whose-Laughter-Burbles-Beneath-the-Waves.

Lucy too had such a gown, one that whirled and eddied around her with every movement. And Lucy never stopped moving. The gown dazzled like light on the water, and so did Lucy.

Now, Susan's skin was old and rough and would shred so fine a cloth if she wore it. Except for her hands, kept painstakingly soft despite the seawater, soft enough to tease silky strands into silk itself. She could do the weave in her sleep.

Some motions, the hands never forgot.

———

"The door is shut," Susan says firmly, even as she remembers how her horn echoed down the rails when they stood on the platform moments or months ago. The curve of the bow in her hand. The bowstring quivering under her fingertips. The callouses are gone, but the sting remains.

Lucy opens her mouth and pauses on the threshhold of her words.

Unexpectedly, it is Peter who says them. "That's not how doors work. Maybe we're just... knocking from the wrong side."

She can see Edmund on the brink of making a sarcastic remark — that's not how knocking works, perhaps — but he too pauses at the threshhold of this new rift between them.

Now, the Four would become Two, for Peter and Susan would never return to Narnia. That door was forever closed to them.

"Maybe it's not shut completely," Lucy offers. "There's always a crack of light under a door, isn't there? Maybe we have to look for that here."

Susan squeezes her sister's hand gently, trying not to think of cracks as something broken.

But she keeps her eyes open for... something... anyway. Just in case.

———

Her hands are prone to chapping in winter. They stiffen, too, in the cold. She rubs linament on her tired, swollen knuckles like she once rubbed oil into her saddle. She does not mind. There is something familiar, almost comfortable about the thought: winters never had been easy.

———

When Susan returns from America, everything has changed again without her.

"Nothing will ever be the same." Lucy's voice hitches.

"No," says Susan. "It won't." And then, because Lucy looks even more glum than she did before, Susan adds: "That doesn't mean it won't be good. Just different."

"Since when are you an optimist?" Edmund's laugh sounds hollow and so much younger and more unsure than it did a day (an age) ago.

Susan doesn't see the same gulf between optimist and pragmatist that he does. Neither does she see much use in telling him so.

“It feels like it’s always winter now,” he tells her later, his voice quiet and embittered like she had not heard it for a year (a decade, an age). “Always winter, and never Christmas.”

“That’s not how winters work,” says Susan gently. “Narnia may be closed to us, brother, but Christmas always comes to England.”

Edmund looks at her with hope in his eyes, and she tries to hide her own sharp edges behind her smile. Susan wonders whether Father Christmas might find them even here, and then decides to make gifts herself instead. Just in case.