Maple Jack's Arc

Chapter 9 of 14

Maple Jack lifted the Yellowknife spark from his upper branch and settled it against a living crook on his south side. The spark was heavy and red, ripe at last, with a thin pink seam where the kindness had sealed the rot. He could feel the path inside it. Two miles of packed snow, a girl's small boots, a stranger's mitten held tight against her coat. The story was ready. He turned toward the wind corridor behind the grain elevator and waited for the push. The push did not come. Behind the elevator stood the tall metal frame of chimes that always marked the corridor's pull. The tubes hung straight down. None of them touched. None of them rang. The air between the elevator and the day care had gone flat, as if someone had closed a door. Maple Jack stretched a twig out and felt nothing move across it. The corridor he had counted on was empty. He looked down at the spark in his crook and saw the seam begin to darken. The red dimmed at the edges. A small shape pulled itself out of the spark's underside, no bigger than a mouse, with thin arms and a sour green light crackling along its ribs. It grinned up at him. The story was turning again. He had stabilized it once. He could not stabilize it twice. He had no pale sparks left. Maple Jack reached past the dead corridor. He sent the spark low, under the still chimes, along the cold line of an iced path that ran from the elevator toward the day care fence. The path was the story's own. He pushed the spark onto it and let the story's weight carry itself. The spark slid forward on the ice, slow at first, then steady, the little sour imp clinging to its back. Halfway along the path, the spark brightened. The red pulled back into the center. The imp lost its grip and tumbled off into the snow, where it shrank and went out. The story remembered what it was. It kept moving on its own track, past the silent chimes, past the elevator's shadow, toward the yellow building two blocks away. Maple Jack heard, very faintly, the recorder inside the day care click on. He held still. The Yellowknife story was gone from him. The groove it had worn was empty for the first time in seven winters. Twelve red sparks remained in his branches, and one small yellow spark inside his trunk. The wind corridor was dead. He would need another road for the rest. But the oldest weight had left him, and somewhere two blocks south, a girl in January was walking again.