The Starless Sea

“Which one are you?” Simon asks, scrutinizing him. “The heart or the feather? You carry the sword but you do not wear the stars. This is confusing. You should not be here. You were meant to be somewhere else.”

Zachary opens his mouth to ask what Simon is talking about, exactly, but instead he says the only thing that his thoughts keep returning to: “I saw a bunny.”

“You saw…” Simon looks at him quizzically and Zachary is unsure he spoke properly, his thoughts feel so separate from his body.

“A bunny,” he repeats, slowly enough that the word sounds wrong again. “A big one. Like an elephant only…bunny.”

“The celestial hare is not a bunny,” Simon corrects him before turning his attention to the ropes and gears above their heads. “If you saw the hare that means the moon is here,” he says. “It is later than I had thought. The Owl King is coming.”

“Wait…” Zachary starts, grounding himself unsteadily with a question he has asked before. “Who is the Owl King?”

“The crown passes from one to another,” Simon answers, preoccupied with adjusting ropes with well-practiced single-handed motions. “The crown passes from story to story. There have been many owl kings with their crowns and their claws.”

“Who’s the Owl King now?” Zachary asks.

“The Owl King is not a who. Not always. Not in this story. You confuse what was with what is.” Simon sighs, pausing his tinkering and returning his attention to Zachary. He explains haltingly, searching for the right words. “The Owl King is a…phenomenon. The future crashing into the present like a wave. Its wings beat in the spaces between choices and before decisions, heralding change…change of the long-awaited sort, the change foretold by prophecies and warned of by omens, written in the stars.”

“Who are the stars?” It is a question Zachary has thought before but not yet asked aloud, though he remains confused as to whether the Owl Ki

ng is a person or a bird or a type of weather.

Simon stares at him and blinks.

“We are the stars,” he answers, as though it is the most obvious of facts afloat in a sea of metaphors and misdirections. “We are all stardust and stories.”

Simon turns away and unties a rope from one of the hooks near the wall. He tugs it and far above the gears and pulleys swing into motion. A crescent shape turns in on itself and disappears. “This is not right,” he says, pulling a different rope that shifts the fluttering pages. “Doors are closing, taking possibilities with them. The story is recorded even when she is unsure of how it goes and now someone else follows after her, reading. Looking for the ending.”

“What?” Zachary asks though maybe he means who and he can’t remember the difference.

“The story,” Simon repeats as though it answers the question instead of creating new ones. “I was in the story and then wandered outside of it and I found this place where I could listen instead of being read. Everything whispers the story here, the sea and the bees whisper and I listen and I try to find the shape of it all. Where it has been and where it is going. New stories wrap themselves around the old ones. The ancient stories that flames whisper to moths. This one wears thin in the places it has been told and retold. There are holes to fall into. I have tried to record it and I have failed.”

Simon gestures up at the statues, at the ribbons and ropes and papers and keys.

“This is…” Zachary begins.

“This is the story,” Simon finishes his thought for him. “If you remain down here long enough you will hear it buzzing. I capture as much as I can. It eases the sound.”

Zachary looks closer. Within the ribbons and ropes and gears and keys there is more, shifting and glimmering and changing in the firelight:

A sword and a crown surrounded by a swarm of paper bees.

A ship without a sea. A library. A city. A fire. A chasm filled with bones and dreams. A figure in a fur coat on a beach. A shape like a cloud or a small blue car. A cherry tree with book-page blossoms.

The keys and the ribbons shift and the images within them grow clearer, too clear to be woven from paper and thread.

Vines climb through windows to curl around a ginger cat asleep in the Keeper’s office. Two women sit on a picnic table beneath the stars, drinking and talking. Behind them a boy stands in front of a painted door that will never open.

Zachary looks from another angle and for a moment the entire ephemeral structure appears to be an enormous owl encompassing the room and then in a fluttering of pages it fragments into bits of story again. The changed viewpoint brings both more and less. Figures that were entwined are now separate. Somewhere it is snowing. There is an inn at a crossroads and someone is walking toward it.

There is a door in the moon.

“The story is changing.” Simon’s voice comes as a surprise beside him, Zachary is so absorbed in the shifting images, though when he looks again there is only a tangle of paper and metal and cloth. “It moves too quickly. Events are overlapping.”

“I thought time wasn’t…” Zachary starts but stops again, unsure of what time wasn’t or won’t be or is. “I thought time was different here.”

“We proceed at different rates but we are all moving into the future,” Simon tells him. “She was holding it in like a breath and now she is gone. I did not think that would happen.”

“Who?” Zachary asks but Simon does not answer, switching more ropes with his one hand.