Ollie tembers's Arc

Chapter 1 of 5

Ollie forgot his own name three winters ago, and without it, he could not leave. He knew he was dead. He knew the Fen held him because the shape of the word that belonged to him had slipped out of his mouth and sunk into the mud. He drifted under a cherry tree whose blossoms never fell, trying the sounds again. Oliver. Otis. Owen. None of them fit. None of them opened the door. A collie watched him from the reeds. It had been watching him for days. Ollie had learned that certain animals could still see the dead, and this one tracked him with a steady, worried face, as if it had a message it could not deliver. Then the silence started. It came down from the hill in a slow tide. Frogs stopped first. Then the wind in the grass. Ollie tried to speak the next name on his list and heard nothing leave his throat. He understood at once what was coming. The pale woman on the hill kept the dead unseen, and when her quiet reached you, it took whatever pieces of yourself you had left. If it swallowed him now, he would lose even the search. He would forget that he had ever had a name to find. He ran. His bare feet made no sound on the moss. The collie ran with him, herding him toward the cherry tree, then past it, to a hollow where a raccoon crouched over something small and dark. It was a china swallow, chipped at one wing. A child's keepsake, dropped by whatever living feet had passed here before. The raccoon pushed it toward him with its nose and backed away. Ollie remembered then what he had heard whispered among the other lingering dead. Her grip breaks on sound. Any sound, loud enough. He had no voice left. He had no stone, no branch he could lift. He had the swallow. He picked it up. It felt real in his hand, the way almost nothing did anymore. Above the trees the moon showed her face through the branches, pale and watching, and he thought for one bad second that the woman herself had bent down to look at him. The silence pressed on his ears until they hurt. He threw the china swallow against the trunk of the cherry tree as hard as he could. It cracked. The sound was small, but it was a sound, and it tore a hole in the quiet the size of a heartbeat. The tide pulled back. The frogs came on again in a rush. The collie barked once, sharp and bright, and bolted north through the reeds, looking over its shoulder for him to follow. Ollie stood shaking over the broken pieces. He had bought himself one more night in the Fen, and he understood now that the dog was leading him somewhere, and that whoever had dropped the swallow was still close.