“A story is a flighty thing,” he’d say, “see how an open book looks like a soaring bird.”

The first sign that he was turning into one was the question mark at the corner of his mouth. Then the flashes of spidery black light above his head, as thoughts scribbled themselves into being.

She told him weighty tales of castles and oaks, monuments and mammoths, hoping they would bind him to the earth, to her. But she’d seen a word circling him while her hands shaped bread and her mouth shaped poems. A wanderer’s word. The day he vanished, it hung like imprinted smoke above his empty chair.

She searched the sunset for him, and the dawn. A page unfolded against the sky; fluttered to her window like a parchment moth. It settled on the sill with a high sweet chime, the flick of a fingernail on crystal. One word brush-stroked on the paper: Bellbird. Others followed in a flock, filling the air with crisp wing-beats. A solitary word or letter on each, rimmed with frost or leaf-mold, or scored, deep and red, trailing sparks.

She plucked them from the trees and the shore, breathing in their birthplaces.

Desire: the slip and glitter of panting deserts

War:  poppies, unpetalled

Quiet: chrysanthemums and cloud-shawled mountains;

H: the mouse-tracked dust of a hermit’s cell. He’d once told her how he’d woken from a dream and tried to remember a place called Home, and couldn’t.

She imagined him everywhere, writing himself into the future. She shouted stories of love and return as she scattered the pages on the table among half-eaten suppers and withered flowers. Her hands moving swiftly, she captured them under pebbles, seashells, and cracked china cups, fearful that they would fly away and leave her with only the blankness of his absence.

One morning, she found the papers curling in invisible fire. The wanderer’s word flickered once, starry, in the ashes, then went out. Her mouth shaping no, her fingers shaping hope, she ran to the place of wraiths and unfinished wishes; knelt and pressed her ear to the grey slab, afraid to hear the thud of a full stop. Heard instead the whisper in the grass. The rustle of a graveyard ghost is just the sound of another page turning.

***

Donna Shanley lives in Vancouver, where she can see mountains and sometimes, a half-inch of ocean. Her stories have appeared in Vestal Review, Ellipsis Zine, and Flash Frontier.