Maple Jack's Arc

Chapter 5 of 14

The test spark had reached the blue trim. Maple Jack felt the corridor still humming behind the grain elevator, a narrow sleeve of quiet air waiting for the next story. He loosened his grip another notch. Sparks rose to the surface of his bark like sap beading after a cut. Hundreds pressed forward at once. He had to choose, and he had to choose fast, because the weathervane behind him had already creaked a quarter turn. That was when he saw the problem. The sparks on his bark did not all look the same. Most glowed steady red, shaped like October leaves, edges crisp. But others flickered yellow at the core, jagged and unfinished, throwing off small sharp arcs that fizzed against the bark and went nowhere. He nudged one of the yellow ones. It spat and shrank. It was not ready. If he sent a half-formed story into the corridor, the wind would tear it apart before it reached the day care, and he would lose another spark he could not grow back. He needed a way to sort them before he released. He looked down at his lowest branch, where a single spark had lived for seven winters. The Yellowknife mitten story. It had worn a groove into his bark, a dark ring where the ember had pressed and pressed without leaving. The spark itself was deep red, almost black at the center, dense as a stone. Ripe, long past ripe. He understood then. The ready ones were the ones that hurt to hold. The yellow ones still needed time inside him. He moved his attention along his bark and tested each spark by how heavy it sat. The heavy reds he marked. The light yellows he let settle back into the wood. At the south side of his trunk, where the corridor began, a child had once jammed a stick into the dirt with a scrap of red and blue cloth tied near its top. He had never moved it. He used it now as his gate. Only the heavy red sparks would pass it. The others would wait. He began to send them. One by one, the ripe sparks lifted from his bark, drifted past the marker stick, and slid into the corridor behind the elevator. Each one held its shape. Each one cleared the first sidewalk square, then the second, then kept going toward the yellow building. He counted nine before the weathervane creaked again and the wind shifted half a degree. He stopped. He had not lost a single spark this time. The Yellowknife story still sat on his lowest branch, deep red, unmoved. He had not been able to send that one. Not yet. But he knew now which were ready, and the corridor was still open.