Will bush's Arc

Chapter 17 of 26

The last of Will thinned above the step and then there was no step, no yard, no dog. He did not fall. He did not rise. He was somewhere without light or edge. He tried to picture the board on Kate's boards, the char of his thumbprint at the corner. The picture came, but he could not tell if he was remembering it or wishing it. He had no eyes to look back with. He had no ears to catch the door. He reached for the collie the way he used to reach, the small pull behind the ribs that had always found an animal's ear. Nothing pulled back. He tried the cat. He tried the ghost boy. He said the boy's name in a voice that made no sound. Ollie did not come. Nothing came. The place he was in did not answer names. He understood then that he was cut off. The sign was on the step or it was not. Kate had opened the door or she had not. He could not know. He would never know. The thought sat in him like a stone in a pocket he could not empty. He tried once more. He gathered what he was, small as it had become, and he pushed it toward the shape of his sister. He thought of her hand on the glass at the chalet window. He thought of the soup she had made the morning he did not come home. He pushed until there was nothing left to push. Something gave. Not a place. A single thin thread of feeling, the way you know a room has someone in it before you turn. He felt her. He felt her weight on the boards. He felt her stop at the step. He felt her kneel. He felt her fingers on wood, then on char, then still. He could not see her face. He could not hear what she said. He only knew she had found it, the way you know your own name when someone calls it in a crowd. She was holding the board. She was believing it. The thread held for one breath more and then it thinned, not broken, only quieted, the way a lamp is quieted when the room no longer needs it. Will let go. He did not disappear further; there was no further. He rested in the dark that was not dark and knew one thing he had not known a moment before. She had the sign. In February, when the seeds drifted out of the jar and were gone, the board would still be on her shelf. She would not climb the hill. The thread would stay, thin and quiet, between wherever he was and wherever she stood, until the day she came to him by another road.