bait_backup | I was born to love a chosen few: the stars up above, my mother, and you

*It isn’t a very big hole. It’s almost anticlimactic, in that way.

He didn’t know, at first, if he could touch them, or even look at them, but as soon as he opened the box for the second time, days later, he took a deep breath and did not cry: instead, Xeno found himself cutting the cord that held the bones and unthreading them carefully, one by one. Separate, the bones look less like a trophy or a mockery and more like Clover, or something that could have once been Clover, and he knows what to do with them, then, as he holds them in his palm.

He puts the bones in a biscuit tin. Not very dignified, perhaps, but it’s a pretty one with a design of one woman reading to another, a sturdy tin with a good seal, one a child might use to keep his treasures in. First, though, he puts the bones at the center of one of her scarves and ties the corners neatly. The little silk bundle is cornflower blue, precisely the same color as the dress she wore to marry him--right over the hill, it was, underneath the big oak, bewitched paper lanterns wound in its branches. That’s where he goes now, in his crusted orange wellies: under the spreading oak. It isn’t a very big hole.

He doesn’t mark it. There are already clover there.

It’s fitting, he thinks, looking down at the little patch of earth. She would’ve preferred this to the handsome headstone in the cold cemetery, he knows: here, under the oak, under the clover, unmarked and secret--until some child dug it up, maybe, took the tin to keep treasures in, the bones for a necklace, perhaps. She wouldn’t mind it, not that way. Neither would he. After a long while, he wipes his eyes on the back of his hand and heads back to Rook House. Methodically, he pours himself a lemonade, and then doesn’t drink it. Instead, he sits at what used to be his kitchen table and is now his office and looks at the stacked books and bestiaries, the maps, the eyewitness reports and clumsy sketches: a very new creature sighted out in Sweden, a strange and beautiful creature--

Had he nursed the small hope that one day she'd show up at his door with a gleaming smile, a lovely ivory leg, and a tale of mysterious rescue and lost-then-recovered memory? He had. Of course he had. Stranger things have happened, after all. Stranger things. . .

Xeno looks around at Rook House, at what he's buried Clover's kitchen underneath, and sighs bitterly. He’s surrounded by handwritten letters and unconfirmed sightings, by blurry photographs pinned to the walls and clipped to clotheslines, by fabulous and thrilling possibilities, by the-truth-is-out-there, but he finds he is no longer willing to believe any of it, or even capable. The Crumple-Horned Snorkack cannot exist in a world where he can hold the bones of his wife in his hand, picked clean and threaded on a dirty string. The two are incompatible, and he knows which one is real.

It takes him almost an hour, but this, too, he does by hand: sifting through the papers and letters and books that have covered the kitchen table, and putting the vast majority of them into bags, and carrying the bags one by one into the dustbin outside.*