Maple Jack's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

Maple Jack aimed his voice south and called again. The sound left him strong, then thinned at the end of the first block. By the second block it was a whisper. He could see the yellow house with the blue trim, the painted sign above the door, the row of small coats behind the front window. He could not reach it. Two blocks was too far. His bark tightened. The children were that close, and his voice still died in the air between. He tried a different shape. He pulled the call up from his deepest root and pushed it out through every leaf at once. The street carried it half a block and dropped it on the sidewalk. A pale wisp of breath curled up from the spot where the sound fell, gathered itself into a thin drifting figure with a small folded note pressed to its chest, and waited. It could carry a message, but only if a message reached it. His voice was not getting that far. Maple Jack stopped pushing. He listened instead. Wind moved along the gutters. A weathervane creaked somewhere behind him. He understood then that he had been trying to throw his voice like a stone. A story was not a stone. A story was a small living thing that wanted to go. He had been holding the sparks back for so long he had forgotten they had their own legs. He thought of the girl in Yellowknife and the mitten, the story worn smooth inside him, and he loosened his grip on it by a single notch. One red spark broke loose from his trunk and floated out into the street. It was the size of a sugar maple leaf and bright as a coal. It carried a small dark book clutched against its body, and it moved on its own, low and steady, down the sidewalk. The wisp lifted from the pavement and fell in beside it. Together they crossed the first block. They crossed the second. They stopped at the low fence of the day care, where a blue voice recorder sat fixed to a post beside the gate, its silver microphone turned toward the street. The spark hovered at the grille. The recorder's red light blinked once and held. A tiny speaker on the porch clicked on, and Maple Jack heard his own voice come out of it, two blocks south, telling the first line of the Yellowknife story to no one yet, but inside the fence now, inside the yard, inside the air the children breathed. A small coat moved behind the front window. Then another. Maple Jack did not call again. He had reached them. The next problem was already forming in his trunk: he had sent one spark, and there were hundreds more pressing against the bark, and only one of him to let them go.