Mistwalker

THIRTEEN Grey

The fog comes and goes on its own now. I feel its currents. I could direct its tide. I won’t. I’m not. Instead, I stand in the lantern gallery and watch the shore. All those flickering lights, just out of my reach. All those flickering lives, going on and on without me.

One hundred years.

I asked for evidence of myself once. I wanted proof that I had been someone before Susannah’s kiss. That my life was no imaginary thing. And this after I had loathed it so much in the living. After hating my father and his dreams for me. After hoping to flee my mother at the very first opportunity. I wished for evidence of it; I no longer believed I’d been real.

The curse provided. Inside the gold-wrapped gift at my breakfast that morning were two slips of newsprint.

My father’s obituary was a plain affair. He passed fifteen years after I surrendered my soul to the mist. He died in his sleep, the memoriam said; he was survived only by his beloved wife.

A grainy photograph immortalized my mother in her obituary. So claimed the caption. The woman depicted there was decades older than I remembered her. She wore black; she looked past the camera.

When I saw it, I felt only numb. I studied the angles of her face. Surely I should remember the sound of her voice. At least one thing she’d said to me. Perhaps the texture of her hands—had they been cool and soft?

The color of her eyes remained clear in my memory, but time had shaved away the rest of her details. After the description of her good works, the obituary said she was survived by a son, missing since 1913.

Until the end, she had hope. Until the last of her, she refused to believe in the last of me.

All the while, I sat on this hellish island. A century past, and I am no better, no greater, no more finished, than I was then. Here I sit, staring at an unfinished music box, suffering an existential crisis.

I’m a frigid, prisoned Hamlet—I have no choice but to be. But I am haunted by the awareness that I cannot be. There’s but one in the world that could acknowledge me. The same one that would make me real again.

Longing breaks through my ice; it’s painful and bloody. I press my hands to it. Though I know it will mean nothing at my plate in the morning, I wish for the impossible. I wish for Willa. I wish for her to come.

Another voice in this tomb is sometimes enough.