Whisperwind Wilma's Arc

Chapter 7 of 7

Wilma crossed the last stretch of prairie thinner than she had ever been. The girl's shout had jumped ahead of her, house to house, porch to porch, faster than any wind could travel alone. When Wilma crested the low rise above the town, she saw what her whisper had done. Children lined both sides of the street. They stood shoulder to shoulder in matching red and white shirts, small flags in their fists, waiting. Some sat on curbs. Some held their parents' hands. All of them faced west, watching the sky for her. Wilma dropped low along the street and moved between their feet. She had one job left. She had to touch every child before the fireworks began, so the whole line would feel the celebration land at once. A boy near the front clutched a round red button pinned to his shirt, a maple leaf stamped clean across its face. He kept pressing it with his thumb like a doorbell. Wilma slipped past his ear and let a thread of saskatoon smell go. His head lifted. He whispered to the girl beside him. She whispered to the next child. The line began to hum. She was running out. She could feel the bottom of herself. Half her power had gone to the brick wall, and each child took a little more. She reached the middle of the crowd and almost stalled. Then she remembered why she had started. She thought of the boy at the abandoned playground standing up. She thought of the girl under the windsock shouting east. She pulled the last of her scent loose from wherever she had been holding it and let it out all at once. The air above the street cracked open. A bright creature spun into view over the children's heads, all sparks and wheels of colored light, turning fast. It was the shape her whisper made when it finally touched down. The children screamed with joy and pointed. Above the rooftops, the first real fireworks answered, red and gold, right on time. Wilma had almost nothing left. She drifted along the line of upturned faces and watched them. A small girl at the end of the street held her flag against her chest and laughed without looking away from the sky. That was the feeling. That was the whole reason. Wilma had carried it from Saskatchewan to here on her own, and the other winds had never come, and it had not mattered in the end. The children had carried the last miles for her. She let herself thin out over the crowd. Her scent was gone. Her speed was gone. What was left of her lifted between the sparks of the firework creature and joined them for a moment, prairie breeze and celebration light braided together above the street. Then she was only a soft movement in the hair of the girl with the flag, and then she was quiet. Coast to coast, children were shouting her message to each other under the same sky. The celebration held. Wilma had done what she came to do, and she rested.