Maggie's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

The rose band at Maggie's thumb was still spreading when the lamp stuttered. A hitch in its pulse. The light dipped, and the man's slow breath dipped with it. His eyes lost the ceiling for a second and swam. Maggie felt the room tilt inside her chest. If the lamp went out now, he would drop back down into the ordinary version of himself and forget what he had just seen. She crossed to the lamp fast. Up close she could see the trouble. One of the color channels inside the glass had gone thin, running slow, like a vein starving. The heart shape flickered again. The floating lights above the river dimmed a shade. On the far side of the room, the quiet caretaker looked up from the water. He had been watching the blobs bunch near the bank, reading them. He met her eyes and said one word. "Failing." Maggie already knew what it would cost. She had done it once before to wake the room in the first place, and the gray on her arm was the price. She looked at the man in the glass chair. His hand was still open. The butterfly still sat on it. He was on the edge of the thing she had wanted every visitor to reach. She could not let the lamp drop him. She put her palm flat on the base of the lamp. She pushed. Not blood, she had none, but the light that made her. She poured it in through her hand. The thin channel filled. The heart brightened. The pulse steadied. She watched the rose band at her thumb thin out and vanish, and then the gray climbed a little higher, past the crook of her elbow now, cool and slow. She did not flinch. She had told the man to match his breath to the lamp. She kept the lamp breathing for him. The man did not notice. He was still inside it. His eyes tracked the butterfly, then the ceiling, then the river, holding each one. He laughed again, quieter. "It keeps opening," he said. The caretaker watched the blobs settle back into their drift. He gave Maggie a short nod. Beyond the river, past a patch of grass and small flowers she had never walked to, the light steadied too. Wherever the overflow had been needed, it had gone. Maggie lowered her hand from the lamp. Her arm was heavier now. The man in the chair was awake in the way she had wanted, fully inside the room, fully seeing. She had held the light long enough for it to take root in him. But the gray had climbed past her elbow, and the ribbon in the river still glowed with the worry he had not yet come back for. She looked at her arm, then at him, and understood she could not do this many more times.