Amal El-Mohtar

They bring daughters of earth back down to the land of death—but death does not claim them.

Memory is tipped and decanted into Garden, life to life to life, always deepening, thickening, growing new roots and efficiencies—but Red’s letters she keeps in her own body, curled beneath her tongue like coins, printed in her fingers’ tips, between the lines of her palms.

She thinks without thinking, often, of what she will name Red in her next letter—hides her lists in plausibly deniable dreamscapes, on the undersides of milkweed leaves, in shed chrysalis and wingtip. Vermillion Lie. Scarlet Tanager. Parthian Thread. My Red, Red Rose.

She looks at Red—thirteen, alone, vulnerable, so impossibly fragile and small—and a letter rises in her throat like bile.

I wanted to be seen.

She sees her and breaks like a wave.

Destroy it on your own, in your own way, if you want. I won’t mind. We all have our observers. And this letter is a knife at my neck, if cutting’s what you want.

I’ve read your last missive and reread it—in memory, as you warned me I would so long ago, preparing myself for a fall. I see you as a wave, as a bird, as a wolf. (My wolf, with the six legs and double-banked eyes.)

So I change your shape in my thoughts. It’s amazing how much blue there is in the world, if you look. You’re different colors of flame: Bismuth burns blue, and cerium, germanium, and arsenic. See? I pour you into things.

I only worried you might view these long letters as the sign of a simple or a desperate mind. I worried—maybe you’ll laugh—that you responded on sufferance.

So in this letter I am yours. Not Garden’s, not your mission’s, but yours, alone.

I am yours in other ways as well: yours as I watch the world for your signs, apophenic as a haruspex; yours as I debate methods, motives, chances of delivery; yours as I review your words by their sequence, their sound, smell, taste, taking care no one memory of them becomes too worn. Yours. Still, I suspect you will appreciate the token.

I’ll try for a library next time. I hope you understand my need for a change of plans.

Yours,

Red

Briefly she wonders if the hardness in her throat is poison, her inability to swallow around it anaphylactic. This does not frighten her.

She closes her eyes against the alternative, which does.