weird.
* * *
—
I shut down my Twitch account because someone keeps spamming my chat with bee emotes.
I got a text on my phone from Unknown that says Stop snooping, Miss Hawkins.
I didn’t reply.
All my texts to or from Z are gone.
THE SON OF THE FORTUNE-TELLER sits in a chair surrounded by keys in the middle of a starlit forest talking to a woman made of snow and ice.
At first he does not know what to say.
He does not think of himself as a storyteller. He never has.
He thinks of all the tales he grew up feasting on, myths and fairy tales and cartoons.
He remembers Sweet Sorrows and its test for keepers, the storytelling surrounded by keys and how they could tell any story but their own, but he does not have a story.
He has nothing practiced. Nothing prepared. But the request is so open-ended.
Tell me a story.
The request comes with no specifications or requirements.
So Zachary begins to speak, haltingly at first but gradually becoming more comfortable, as though he is talking to an old friend in a dimly lit bar over well-crafted cocktails instead of sitting in a snow-covered fairy-tale wood addressing a silent effigy.
He starts with an eleven-year-old boy finding a painted door in an alleyway. He describes the door in great detail, down to its painted keyhole. He tells her how the boy did not open it. How afterward he wished that he had and how at odd moments over the following years he would think about it, how the door haunted him and how it haunts him, still.
He tells her about moving from place to place to place and never feeling like he ever belonged in any of them, how wherever he was he would almost always rather be someplace else, preferably somewhere fictional.
He tells her how he worries that none of it means anything. That none of it is important. That who he is, or who he thinks he is, is just a collection of references to other people’s art and he is so focused on story and meaning and structure that he wants his world to have all of it neatly laid out and it never, ever does and he fears it never will.
He tells her things he has never told anyone.
About the man who broke his heart in such a long, drawn out process that he couldn’t discern hurt from love and how whenever he tries to sort out how he feels now long after the end of it the feeling is just a void.
He tells her how the university library became a touchstone for him after that, how when he felt himself falling he would go and find a new book and fall into it instead and be someone somewhere else for a while. He describes the library down to its unreliable lightbulbs and finding Sweet Sorrows and how that moment unexpectedly changed all the moments that followed.
He reads Sweet Sorrows to her, relying on memory when the starlight is not enough to illuminate the words. He tells her Dorian’s fairy tales about castles and swords and owls, about lost hearts and lost keys and the moon.
He tells her how he always felt like he was searching for something, always thinking about that unopened door and how disappointed he felt once he went through another painted door and that feeling still didn’t go away but how for just a moment in a gilded ballroom preserved in time it did. He found what he had been seeking, a person not a place, a particular person in this particular place, and then the moment and the place and the person were gone.
He recounts everything that followed, from the elevator crash to the voices in the darkness to finding Simon in his sanctuary attempting to record the story and out through the snow and past the phantasmagoric holiday party and into the woods with the stag until he brings his story into the clearing that they currently inhabit, describing it down to the details of the ships carved into her gown.
Then, with nothing left to tell that he has carried with him, Zachary makes things up.
He wonders aloud where one of the frozen ships in her gown is heading and as he speaks the ship moves, sailing out over the icy waves, away from Mirabel and across the snow.
The forest changes around it, the trees fading as the ship sails through them but Zachary remains in his chair and the ice