Scareship_Issue8

“Last night?”
“No, the rest.”
“What does it mean?”
“I do not know.”
“Why not?”
“If that was the end, what is this?”
Em does not know words like he does, but she knows angles
and she knows how to calculate what the world is as it spins
around and around itself, three hundred and sixty, plus a spare five.
Can such unassuming numbers capture what it means to force the
world from one axis onto another? There is an end to a year but not
a circle. The five was what they did wrong. She stares at her
grubby hand and finds selfish desperation in the ridged planes of
her fingers.
She sounds, to Kai, much older when she says, “This is the
world we make at the end of the storms.”
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