[ it's delivered by an inquisition scout, who hangs about an awkward moment, before lingering to read it aloud. the words are unsigned, unaddressed, but a long black feather is tucked between the battered pages. ]
My grandmother wasn't born with us.
She saw pictures in water, found shapes in the skeletons of mountain birds. A white owl dropped from the sky once, dead before her feet, and that was when she knew to leave the place she’d grown.
I've never liked owls; they kill without thinking. They wait, and they fall. They were Made for endings, and nothing really ends.
This is the great secret: The one that nestles in the name of loss. Everything that goes comes back again as something different, something new. Cities once burned rebuild. Prophets live and die, and live and die again. A broken tree feeds others, a song in a deep places repeats.
An owl fell before me yesterday. She crashed through the ceiling glass, down into life, and lay still. Masks crowded. A child screamed. It cut my palms to hold her, but she didn't kill me. Her breath was shallow in her chest.
I took her with me. She'd broken a wing, but she lifted in my grasp. Talons dug. Bones mended. No one saw.
I didn’t expect to be away so long. Time slips from my hands in red hours — I think we’re doing good work here, but it’s full of endings, and I don’t know how to say when we’ve thought of them enough.
Nothing really ends. I’ll meet you again; I hope it’s soon.
[ enclosed is a rough sketch of a landscape, hazy and indistinct; grown with the telltale strangeness of dreams. ]
letter; at some point
My grandmother wasn't born with us.
She saw pictures in water, found shapes in the skeletons of mountain birds. A white owl dropped from the sky once, dead before her feet, and that was when she knew to leave the place she’d grown.
I've never liked owls; they kill without thinking. They wait, and they fall. They were Made for endings, and nothing really ends.
This is the great secret: The one that nestles in the name of loss. Everything that goes comes back again as something different, something new. Cities once burned rebuild. Prophets live and die, and live and die again. A broken tree feeds others, a song in a deep places repeats.
An owl fell before me yesterday. She crashed through the ceiling glass, down into life, and lay still. Masks crowded. A child screamed. It cut my palms to hold her, but she didn't kill me. Her breath was shallow in her chest.
I took her with me. She'd broken a wing, but she lifted in my grasp. Talons dug. Bones mended. No one saw.
I didn’t expect to be away so long. Time slips from my hands in red hours — I think we’re doing good work here, but it’s full of endings, and I don’t know how to say when we’ve thought of them enough.
Nothing really ends. I’ll meet you again; I hope it’s soon.
[ enclosed is a rough sketch of a landscape, hazy and indistinct; grown with the telltale strangeness of dreams. ]