The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Now. Let me bring you back to something considerably smaller, because I think a little smallness is exactly what this account needs right about now, after all that talk of bubbles the size of universes and powers I can't name and mountains that refuse to be moved. Smallness is, I've come to believe, the truest antidote to almost everything too large to properly hold — a lesson I learned late, and imperfectly, and mostly by watching a man who was never taught any other way to live at all.

Iris was curled in Eremos's lap, the way she sometimes ends up there on quiet evenings, half-drowsing in that particular boneless way she manages that makes her look, for all the world, like an ordinary tired woman rather than whatever staggering, unmeasurable thing she actually is underneath the borrowed shape — a shape she wears the way the rest of us wear clothes, comfortably, unremarkably, with no visible seam anywhere to betray how much larger the thing underneath actually is than the garment currently containing it. The meadow held its usual gold, the light settled at that permanent, held-breath hour Eremos built it around all those centuries ago, the exact hour he must have decided, somewhere in his own quiet architecture of longing, that an evening was supposed to feel like — not the beginning of dark, not quite the end of day, but the single suspended instant between the two where everything simply gets to be warm a while longer before it has to decide what comes next. The old nameless tree at the grass's edge was doing what it always does at that hour — nothing at all, simply standing, ancient and patient, the way it's stood through however many extinctions it's quietly outlived elsewhere before ending up here, rooted in soil that has never once asked it to prove it deserves the space it takes up.

Someone had left a half-finished cup of something warm on the low stone wall near the hearth. I didn't ask whose. It hardly matters, in a household this size, whose cup ends up abandoned where — there is a particular, gentle chaos to a family that large, cups and shawls and half-finished conversations scattered across every surface like small proofs that people had, recently, been here, been comfortable, been in no hurry at all to leave.

Iris sneezed. A small, undignified little sound, entirely at odds with everything else about her — the single most disarming noise I think I've ever heard that particular woman make, precisely because it asked for nothing, performed nothing, revealed absolutely no strategy underneath it at all. It was simply a sneeze. The most ordinary thing in any world, borrowed or otherwise.

Eremos looked down at her, and laughed — quiet, fond, the particular soft amusement he reserves for exactly this sort of thing, the tiny, human absurdities that remind everyone in that household, again and again, how much he treasures even the smallest evidence that the people he loves are still, underneath everything, capable of being ordinary. I've watched that specific laugh cross his face more times than I could count if you asked me to, and I've never once seen it grow tired, the way I'd expect any laugh to grow tired eventually, worn thin from overuse the way a favorite phrase wears thin from repetition. His doesn't. I've decided, somewhere along the way, that this is one of the truest things about him — not the power, not the grief, not any of the seven separate weights he carries around under that single deceptively ordinary face, but this: that a sneeze can still make him laugh like it's the first sneeze he's ever personally witnessed.

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Iris turned her head away, and didn't look back at him, and closed her eyes instead — a small performance of composure so thin, so clearly deliberate, that it was itself its own kind of confession. I know that woman well enough, by now, to recognize precisely what that particular half-turned face was hiding, and precisely how little it was actually managing to hide it.

She saw me before I ever arrived. That's simply how it works, with her — she'd already recognized the particular shape of my approach long before I stepped properly into the room, the way you'd recognize a familiar knock on a door before your hand has even finished reaching for the handle, and having recognized it, she decided, with her usual economy of effort, not to bother paying it any further attention. I'd been occupied, these past several days, with matters that had nothing to do with an evening visit to the meadow — matters I'll get to shortly, matters involving considerably more distance and considerably less warmth than anything currently unfolding in that gold-lit stretch of grass — and she knew that too, the way she knows most things she hasn't been told directly, the way she seems, always, to already have finished a thought the rest of us have only just begun having. Nothing bad was going to happen, in any case, not tonight, not in that particular hour. Everything currently unfolding sat safely under the dominion of Something and Nothing both, exactly the sort of arrangement that had no particular reason to spiral out of anyone's control.

So, instead, Iris simply watched a few of her own domes of memory drift past behind her closed eyes, the way you or I might idly watch clouds shift shape on an unhurried afternoon, no urgency to any of it, no destination the watching was meant to arrive at. I watched her watching them. That's rather the whole of what I'm able to give you, for this part — not what she felt, exactly, because I've never once been fully certain what that particular woman feels underneath the surface she allows the rest of us, but the shape of her stillness while she felt it, which was, in its own way, entirely enough.

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