Victor Grimholt's Arc

Chapter 5 of 9

The tonic cleared her lungs, but nothing cleared her nights. Lunella cried from dusk to the third bell and started again before dawn. Victor walked her, bounced her, hummed the two notes he knew from a butcher's work song. None of it landed. On the fourth ragged morning he stared at his own hands and admitted a plain fact. He knew how to end a life. He did not know how to soothe one. So he wrapped the baby in her yellow onesie, tucked her under his coat, and went where quiet people kept answers on shelves. The library sat high in the trees, gold arches wound with green vines, its windows warm even at that hour. Victor climbed the stone steps and pushed open the door. Arboreen looked up from a stack of tilted books, a lit staff propped against her chair. Her red hair was a nest. Ink smudged one cheek. "Oh," she said, blinking at the bundle. "Oh, small one. You brought a small one. I don't— hello. What does it need?" "Sleep," Victor rasped. "Mine and hers. She cries all night. I have no songs." Arboreen nodded three times, already drifting toward a low shelf. "Songs, songs, songs. There was a— yes. Babies like patterns. Rhymes, you see, they hook the ear and the ear tells the chest to slow. I read a paper on it once, or wrote one, I forget." She pulled down a small storybook with a bright cover, animals dancing around the title. "This one. Simple verses. Read it slow. Same page, same voice, every night. They learn the shape of the ending and let go into it." Victor paid her copper for a week's loan and signed her ledger with a careful hand. On the walk home he stopped at his workbench thoughts. Lunella needed something to hold when he set her down. Rhys's carved rabbit was hard wood, no good for a cheek. He had leather. He had thread. He had made worse things with better tools. That night he cut soft brown hide into ears, a belly, four short legs. He stitched by lamplight while Lunella dozed in the crook of his arm. His seams were crooked. The head came out lumpy. He gave it a pale patch of chamois for a chest and a scrap of fur for a tail. When he set the finished hare beside her, she grabbed one ear in her fist and did not let go. Then he opened the book. He read the first rhyme in his low, cut-up voice. He read it again. By the fourth pass her breathing had changed. By the sixth she was asleep. Victor stayed in the chair long after, the lamp burning low, the leather hare rising and falling on her chest. He had bought them both a night. He knew already it would not be enough. Tomorrow she would want the book again, and the rhyme after, and a hundred small comforts he did not yet own.