She had lost her mother a few weeks ago, the lonesome child who sat in the darkness of her carpet. Numbness overcame her, and reality became impossibly elusive. Slowly, the strands of woollen thread rose above her, engulfing her. She was aware. The drawers across from her were open, towering over her, shadowing her. She knew that too. A single lunar tide would have blown Elinora away. She was smaller than she ever could have imagined, even smaller than the tear-rotted woodshavings on her looming desk, austerely smaller than the grief she thought she could swallow. She thought she was brave.
Darkness crept along her shoulder, along her neck. It engulfed her. And she drifted, climbing the threads of her carpet. Elinora made her way toward the door as darkness chased her. Time and I followed.
Smoothly, quietly, the hallway made its way toward her. Its carpet lay still, bathed in moonlight. The last curling tendril of her room released her. No, she thought, this light is something of which I must be afraid. Still, she waded through the bleached prairie. And I eased into her pocket. Into her. Here, in this hallway, this thread that held past and future, no tendrils held her. Nothing followed her. Nearly everything lay behind Elinora, or with her. That was me.
A smoldering smell surrounded her, a warm, fearful smell. Her mother’s room. Everything darkened, and once again something towered over Elinora. Stepping out of the thick, curling past, she climbed up into a sea of words. She drowned in them, horrific fragments she learned as a child that no longer made any sense. Heat chilled her. Flowered curtains wilted, recoiling from her gentle touch. See, you are not welcome here, the words whispered, the past echoing them.
“I - where am I?” Elinora whispered. Dissapearing gradually, her words hung as wisps of steam in the dense air. She wasn’t quite aware of the workings of anything, yet, but she had not truly thought of them either. The past met her feet once again, escorting her back into the moonlight.
She wasn’t going to notice me in this house, not unless she woke up, not unless she realized. Not unless she disposed of all the illusions place before her, those that lie before everone else as well. But it was too dangerous for her to wake up, and far too early. Then, she would realize, and she would collapse into the million shards that made her, the million woolen threads holding her. The million dark curtains wavering and shriveling in her presence. Thus, the past lay ahead of her on the staircase. It commanded that she step down to her childhood. Years played themselves in front of her, as she walked toward me. I tripped her, yet, I walked side by side with her as I had since her birth. Elinora plummeted onward, where blank steps and pale windows waited. Patiently – very, very patiently, much unlike me.
Finally, she made her way downstairs. She began to realize - time, the past, the future - it all ran simultaneously. Then, there is what lies between her past and the hallway, me. I watched Elinora pass, farther ahead of me with each perilous step. Still, she was unwitting. I am always there.
“Mother.” Gazing at the piano that had swept her off to sleep in her childhood, she sat at its bench. Her fingers laid themselves on pale, futuristic keys, and swirling notes of the past sounded. They bled, dropping thirteen years into time, resembling ink in water. So I woke her. She was dazed. Elinora sat at the bench, still, no longer in a dream. And realized. And thought.. Time melted, expelled from her in transparent drops into past and future, dark and bright. No, her strength was limited here, for nothing, not even time, is sequential. The past finally caught Elinora as the last of her seeped into the discordant instrument. It swallowed her, but she towered over it. She threw away what could have discarded her - life. Then, Elinora lost me, in another sense, she left me. But in her silent, seeping blood, there drifts still a drop of moonlight, and a tendril of woolen thread - her future, and now her past.