Scareship_Issue8

would be all right. He smiles at her with only the corners of his
mouth and they find their way from the exterior edges of that plane
and into the midst of it, where stacks of rubbed-raw ash still have
tendrils of lions-beard smoke clinging to them and wind forces
itself through the tunnels of their mottled sunshine hair. It is an
enchanted world that was not made for them but has become their
own.
“What did they say on that day in school?” Kai says as he is
silhouetted by a flume of white light that splits the world into
pieces of hopeful turbulence. There are storms every night, but this
one is not the same. It is close. Em feels it like a heartbeat, a soft
pulse throbbing steadily away beneath twilight’s skin.
“They would not say. I meant to play in the dirt and make
planes, but there was snow.”
“Not snow. Ash. It was ash.”
“Ash is not the same as snow?”
“No.”
“What is ash, then?”
“It falls when the sun can touch the top of the sky.”
Though Kai fumbles his words and looks at the ground when
he makes his reply, he knows everything and Em takes him at his
word. There is a beautifully warped complexity in the phrasing of
his thoughts and though she carves her angle pictures into every
mud pit she can find, she feels that none of them compare to his
words. If numbers make you real, words make you alive.
“Why are we the last ones left?”
“You know why. We hid.”
“And when we hid?”
Kai makes his reply with rhythmic familiarity when she asks
this, as she always does, the ending line of some old rhyme that he
cannot remember save for the implications that smother themselves
inside his head now. “The world fell down and bumped its crown.”
“But why?”
“See the moon.”
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