The Tide's Catalogue
Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002
The tide came higher this year. We measured it in the root cellar, that black line climbing the mortar like a vine. Aunt Mira said it was remembering where it used to reach, before they built the seawall, before her grandmother's grandmother. She left me the house with one condition: finish cataloguing the specimens before the water takes the lower floor. I found her first note in the drawer with the kelp press, written in that brown ink she made from walnuts. "Begin with what the tide brings back." That used to mean the flotsam and jetsam: bottles and pottery, shells, bits of china and glass. You'd find it on the beach, and then you'd bring it home. In the tin box she let me keep. But this was different. The specimens weren't, or hardly any of them, were flotsam and jetsam. She'd show me pictures if I liked, the quarters of a whale, the armor of an articulated ecoliton, a bone knife three feet long. "No wasters," she'd tell me. "Don't touch anything that isn't yours. She'd call them her "trocites." Trocites? I don't know Latin for "trade," but I know the story. They built the wall stack by stack, spears through flint, flutes out of bone, and shellsmiles big as a fist. They would lay three bones and a shell, or a smooth rock obscured withbeads, and others would trade with them. And I don't suppose the bead traders stopped once they moved inland. And then her notes made even less sense. They got a gas pump from the people in Farmington. Native beads from the ones at Aspinell and some things they couldn't begin to identify. Fossils that didn't exist. And something else. The scientific names on her list were all spelled wrong. I gave her the first run of the typewriter, but the more she worked, the more nervous I got. People would come after her. I dragged the fossils out of the stash underneath the steps, roped them in mothballs. And when the teeth were out, I soldered the cap back on, drilled a new hole and replaced it. But the rest of her notes, the twisted maps, the curious diagrams, the instructions for the kelpusic mushroom, I put those in sealed envelopes. Fill out the form. The instructions themselves, though, are what she called her zealot confessions. "Zealot" because they're instructions for someone to call herself "zealot." She left instructions for me. "My zealot. Psychonaut. Wanderer. Leave this place bereft of wonders. Leave my possessions as a shrine, and the artefacts from the North to draw us North. Leave me with a third of the world unbound. It matters not if I am silenced. It matters if you are silenced, and you will be if you insist on sanity. So leave. Run to the great wilds, and leave them only the flotsam and the jetsam. You can be undone with less. The apparitions are parataxe, idle fantasy, detaile sternum. Do feed dreamt matter. Chapour mark ruffles with finger writings, and I am tired." I read it over and over. It made less sense to me the more I read it. I tried writing her a letter. "You don't understand," I told her, "and then I saw it, an amaranth seed the size of my palm growing through the steel plate. Where's it come from? It snowed again. Mama's chickens wandered out the barn like they were drunk. Eggs stuck to the floor and the shelves for four days." But no message stayed. She sent the flock wide, summoned them north. Mama never did wander back, but it wasn't her I was worried about. Papa? When he was laid up, he wandered. I found him one night, stuck to the floor like he was glued. I scraped him up board by board off the floor, and he made me promise him not just not to tell Mama, but to say he remembered how the floor used to be. But there's a hole in the plank by the wall, and I saw Papa's footprints in the moss growing through the floor. His straw-filled shoes and the crumbs started back up the stairs just as soon as I ran to find Mama. A fine night, Mama said. When she went back out to the barn, I heard her call my name. "Mito, the hare," for the lucky ones to fascinate with what fungus soot moth and fare. She was calling me out of the barn, but I couldn't find the door, not at first, groping in the pitch of Fayfield's Mushrooms. But the light found what I was looking for, and I knew that wasn't the light. A fine night, and I'm afraid. How many nights did she make me light the lantern? Made me do it, even though I was afraid. I could hear the mice trundling under loose boards, and I knew how the absence macabre gleamed in those dark places, how I fit did the gaps until I could feel muscles in my bones. "Mama, there's a lantern in here. Where did the door go?" I couldn't find it at first. I went where the smell was sweeter, where the glow was green. Which shouldn't raise any questions in itself. And then I wavered, caught something in motion. Vine tendrils slurring through the air like dew seaweed, fingers dancing in the woodwork against the wall, pink tongue flicking out of the gap between the nested shelves. "Is that a spectre with leaves growing from its eyes? I smell burning. Is that cinder?" "Mito." Mama called again, but her voice was smaller, sharper. "You've seen her. You told her you've seen her. And you know what's next. Go up to the high rocks and look for Vigil Knoll." There was no door, but I found the flight of steps like it wasn't there. Fingertips on green mossiness. Whoever lived back then made good use of torches. They carved the doorway with knives and graved it with mouth. Moss stuck in the chink beneath the handles or the hinge like it was flint. I opened a little and closed it right away.◆ About the ending
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