Time and tide

They’re children the first time they meet. At least he thinks so later. It’s hard to be sure because what it means to be a child keeps changing, now a dreamy golden idyll of toys and nurseries and lessons, now a fast-moving, sharp-edged world full of bright screens and blue light.

When they begin, though, being a child isn’t very different to being an adult. They wear smaller versions of the same clothes and sleep bundled in the same rough blankets. They work as hard as everyone else, too, sweeping and hauling water and turning meat on the spit under the harsh supervision of the cook.

Sometimes he slips away between tasks, stealing time, and hides in a little-used room in one of the towers, where he can survey the endless fields and pretend they belong to him. From there, he often sees her in her own secret place, tracing pictures in the earth beside the curtain wall with the pointed end of a stick. He knows nothing about art, apart from the colored glass of church windows and the sorrowful, suffering faces of the statues inside, but he admires the way she concentrates on her lines and rubs them out if they fail to meet her standards.

An artist. He hardly knows what it means, but he knows she is one.

The only creatures apart from him who visit the tower room, as far as he can tell, are the birds that perch on the stone sill of the embrasure: thrushes and starlings and blackbirds and sparrows. When he has a crust of bread in his pocket, he takes it there to share with them and listen to the bright chirps and trills they make. It's what he's doing the first time she really speaks to him.

“Are you telling her your troubles?”

“What?” He turns around, cold with fear at having been caught, then hot with embarrassment when he sees who it is.

“My mother used to say it." She points at the sparrow he's feeding. "If you tell your troubles to a bird, she'll take them with her when she flies away.”

She comes all the way into the room, crosses to stand next to him at the window. In the strong summer light, he can see the shadow of her eyelashes on her cheeks and a scatter of golden freckles across her nose. The scent of sun-warmed grass and grain floats through the window, sweet and dizzying.

"Can I try?"

She takes the bread and scatters a few crumbs for the sparrow to peck. Her hand is as red and rough with work as his own, but it’s the same clever hand that knows which lines make a picture of a face or a flower or a tree.

The sparrow finishes her crumbs, cocks her head to one side and watches them both with a bright black eye.

“See? She’s waiting. She wants you to tell her.”

"I haven't got any troubles.”

"Don't you?" She laughs, warm and friendly rather than mocking. "You're lucky then. I've got a hundred, and that fat old cook in the kitchen is the worst of them all. He hit me this morning because he thought I was turning the roast too fast."

"Oh, him," he says with feeling. "I hate him too."

"Then we'll ask the bird to take him away," she says.

They do. And the next day, the cook falls and breaks his leg and has to go live with his sister in the town, and they are free.

After that day they’re friends, and then more than friends later, when they grow older. He builds a cottage, just two rooms, but enough for them and their family, two boys and a girl. She teaches the children to draw pictures with charred wood on the hearthstone, and tries to teach him too, but his hand is too stupid and only good for rough tasks.

When the fourth baby comes and goes on the same night, and she follows soon after, the world goes dark.

He brings crumbs to the birds and tells them his troubles, but the birds can’t help. They fly away and leave him alone to stare at the remnants of charcoal sketches: a face, a flower, a tree. The children won’t draw over those sketches, not wanting to wipe out the last bits of their mother any more than he does, and so they stay until enough time passes to fade them away to nothing.

Time fades him too, eventually.

As the years pass and the children finish growing up, he gets greyer and fatter, then thinner and slower as his vitality starts to ebb away. He shrivels and bends and weakens until all he can do is sit by the fire, until his daughter and one of his sons’ wives have to feed and bathe him, until the very last day of all days.

His final thought is now we will–

•••••

He expects angels and harps and trumpets, a joyous reunion beyond the veil. None of that happens. All that’s on the other side is him, living through another cycle that he doesn’t even know yet is a cycle.

This time he has a mother and father, and lives with them in a wood-framed house, buried in the warren of streets that make up a town. His father is a stonemason, and as he grows up, he learns how to chisel his own blocks and set his mark in them.

The two of them, father and son, are helping to build an enormous soaring structure, a cathedral. Day after day, he works the stone, and he feels as if he’s waiting for something to happen. But what? It’s not for the cathedral to be finished; that won’t happen in his lifetime, or possibly even the lifetimes of his children, if he has any.

It doesn’t begin to make sense until he sees her again, not as a servant girl, but the daughter of one of the artisans who are working on the rose windows. She’s at a distance, but he knows her, as surely as if they’d never been parted.

He doesn’t understand yet, but he will.

•••••

They’re always different, but they’re always the same. Sometimes one of them is older or younger. Sometimes they’re both men, or both women. More than once they’re in a war, on the same side or opposing sides, or just trying to survive as soldiers march through their town, smashing and burning and destroying. Their skin is every shade that skin can be: deep dark ebony; warm brown; olive; cream; so pale it displays the map of blue veins underneath. They don’t always match. It makes no difference to him.

He always remembers. She never does, though he sees a confused flicker of half-recognition in her eyes whenever they first encounter each other. He’s learned that if she says It feels as if we’ve met before, he shouldn’t try to explain. It never turns out well.

In some cycles, they're a pair again, and those are good times. In others, they're with other people, and he tries hard to respect that, even when it hurts. Sometimes he’s there when she dies, like the first cycle. Sometimes he’s the one who goes ahead of her. Sometimes they only know each other for a little while and part long before they reach the end of their lives. That’s all right. He’ll see her the next time.

He loses track of all the next times, but he feels the weight of them, as if every cycle is a stone he’s been given to carry. The stones get heavier as he goes. He keeps marching on.

•••••

On his current go-around, he lives in a noisy, sprawling city, which is something he tries to avoid when he can. A remnant of the boy who loved looking out at the green fields still survives in him, a man who in this lifetime is stepping from a driverless electric taxi onto smooth pavement, and walking into the quiet of a building with soaring ceilings and recessed lights and oceans of eggshell-white walls.

He taps on the screen at reception and explains that he's here to inspect the space for the installation on the fourth floor, and somewhere a silent signal goes out to release the double glass doors in front of him.

The echoing fourth floor smells of canvas and paint and solvents, of freshly cleaned carpet and drywall. Men and women in overalls move around, laying out tarps and readying the area for the display walls that he and his crew will start erecting tomorrow ahead of the opening. Even after so many lifetimes, his hands are still stupid when it comes to drawing, but they know all about hammering and bolting and building, and a computer makes the lines for him when he tells it to.

"Whatcha think, boss?" It's the foreman at his side, hands on hips.

"Not bad, Benji. You figure out the outlet problem we saw when we did the walkthrough?”

“Good old extension cords. We’ll run most of them behind the walls and tape them down tight where they show.” Benji grins. “As long as we leave a walkway open so people can get to the bar, no one’ll care what else we do. Art looks best when you’re drunk, right?”

“What doesn’t?” He scans the room again. “It’s a nice space, outlets or no outlets. This ought to be a good show.”

"Better tell that to the artist."

“She’s here?”

Benji nods toward another set of glass doors that lead out onto a balcony, where two days from now people will mingle with white wine and miniature goat cheese tarts.

"She came in an hour ago, walked all the way around the inside once, and then went straight out there. Not looking at her phone or anything, just watching the birds like she's got the weight of the world on her shoulders."

He looks where Benji is indicating and sees a woman leaning on the wide chrome railing. Thin legs in black leggings, long dark ponytail hanging down the back of her grey knit sweater. There's a sparrow perched on the railing, hopping here and there. His heart takes a fast skip followed by a thud.

"I'll go introduce myself," he says.

He's not sure at first. It's hard to tell sometimes until their eyes meet. But as he gets closer, the certainty grows, and by the time he's close enough to see her profile inclined toward the sparrow, he knows.

This time, he thinks, she must remember. She has to remember. It's too much like that first meeting to be an accident. This is the cycle where she will know him the way he's always known her, and surely that must mean something, mustn't it--perhaps even the end of this infinite treadmill they're on.

His hands are trembling. He clears his throat.

“Are you telling her your troubles?”

“What?”

She turns around, startled, and straightens up. She's tall in this cycle, and looks vaguely multiracial, as a lot of people do these days. He can see the freckles scattered across her nose from here. The air doesn't smell of grass, but of fresh paint and hot metal and roasting meat from an automated food cart down on the street. Still, he feels everything circling around, doubling back on itself.

‘It’s something a friend told me,” he says. “A long time ago. If you tell your troubles to a bird, she’ll take them with her when she flies away.”

She hesitates, and he sees that familiar flash of recognition. He hopes it’s genuine this time; would pray, if he believed in that sort of thing anymore; but there’s no way to know yet.

"But maybe you haven't got any troubles," he suggests. "I've heard some people don't."

He can see the results of expensive modern dentistry when she smiles, but it’s the same smile, the one that crinkles the corners of her eyes. When enough time passes, those crinkles will turn into fans of crow’s feet that she’ll lament and he’ll find beautiful. If he still knows her then. If she knows him.

“Maybe one or two,” she says. “That’s life though, right?”

“Sure is in my experience.”

“It’s just–I’ve been part of other shows, but this is my first big one on my own, and you could say it’s stressful, and–Jesus, why am I even telling you this? I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. People tell me things all the time. I’ve just got that sort of face.”

The sparrow ruffles its brown feathers with an impatient flutter of wings, and she glances over at it. "I wish I had something to give her. I know bread's not good for them, but..."

"She’ll understand. Birds always do."

"I hope so." She takes a step closer, uncertain. "I'm sorry, are you with the exhibition design company? The guy in there told me someone would be coming, and I wasn’t expecting anyone in particular, but I could swear we've met somewhere before. Do I know you?"

"If you do, I'm sure it'll come back to you," he says. "Why don't we go inside, and I'll show you what I have in mind for the space? It ought to put at least one of those troubles to rest."

"I'd like that," she says. “Have you seen any of the work yet? There’s a triptych I’d love to showcase, if we can. It’s called Face, Flower, Tree.”

“We’ll find a place for it.”

Behind them, the sparrow lets out a shrill chirp as she watches them go, a twin reflection in the inky black of her eye.

When the door closes behind them, she takes wing and flies.

-------------------------------------------

It's hard to explain why this story feels unfinished, even though it technically has a beginning, a middle and an end.

Reading over it for the first time in almost a year, I don't think the early sections set in the past are fleshed out enough, but also it seems that spending too much time there would drag things down. I originally meant to open the story with the section that starts "They're always different, but they're always the same," instead of telling it chronologically, but ended up dropping that idea because flashbacks felt awkward.

I also think it's possible that the story doesn't have a strong enough sense of who the characters are. The only section where I really feel connected to them is the near-future one at the end. (I actually like Benji the foreman more than the nameless couple, which probably says something.) I wonder if multiple perspectives would help instead of sticking to third-person limited.

I do love the premise, and I'd love to get it to a place where I'm happy with it. I just don't know what that will take!