9 July, 1886 CE

Abyssinian Lowlands

Artemis lay her head on the heaving side of the elephant. The animal was a large female, eighteen or nineteen years old. The small watery eye searched frantically for the calf that had never been far from her side. The calf and the rest of the herd had fled.

2 July, 1937 CE

Pacific Ocean

This was like no cloud cover, fog or mist she’d ever flown through before. The needles of every gauge juttered, never settling in on a reading. She wondered how low they really were, wondered if the rush across her belly was a mirror response to the belly of the plane. It had happened before . . . the two bodies riveted together out of aluminum and human skin.

Chaos

Men name wars to pin them to paper, fold them up, tuck madness and destruction into a pocket. Forget. Never forget. Gain distance. Relive it. Blame. Ask forgiveness. Tidy up chaos into sentences and chapters. A title. A timeline. Statistics.

True chaos, khaos, cannot be scribed into dots and lines. No. Your people have forgotten that khaos is the void, the abyss.

7 June, 1941 CE

Oxford, England

"Lady Harris?" She heard the words as if she was far under water. The name drifted past, paling to an echo. She barely recognized herself by that name, or any other these days. Cold washed over the exposed skin on her arms and she instinctively drew the cape closer around her. It was more a work of art than a garment.

31 May, 1942 CE

Oxford

Floats. Water. Wings. These words tumbled together in Charlotte’s head coming to rest at the gate to her memories on the bank of the Thames. The gates opened with a click and the words rearranged into a vision of the ghost plane drifting silently past the girl and the tree. More memories came spooling out, some Charlotte couldn’t understand, didn’t recognize as her own. She sat very still while her insides whirled like a crazed carousel.

May, 1945 CE

The Village of Ash

Once there was a story and no one to tell it.

As Grandmother spoke, the girl settled herself closer; the pair were excused from the work of women and girls in their village lest their strangeness spoil the bubbling disks of injera as they baked or taint the healing essence of the plants hanged to dry in the African sun.

“Tell about the tree and the bird and the girl by the sea,” Asmeret begged.

Muck-North

They lay askew there in the muck—a stillness so complete you would think them dead. Silt billows up in dark, languid puffs. The body has settled on its back, not quite flat. Arms splayed, outstretched, palms to the sky; back arched, as are the feet, curling into the seabed as if grasping for purchase.

Kauaʻi

1969 CE

Alicia watched the postal truck pull away from their house on the bluff. Maneuvering up the drive backwards, the vehicle stopped and started several times. She raised an eyebrow.