Free Weird Tales, Volume 51 by Ann VanderMeer Page B

pale shadow of what he had said.
    “I'm sorry,” she said, when she read them back to him.
    He smiled and looked at her with his eyes that were so dark she could barely see her reflection in them.
    “Tell me a story,” he said.
    And she told him the story of a woman who sat alone in her chair, waiting for the moon to come out. She told him of the silver sickle moon, of Wordeaters sliding down the moonbeam onto her bed, of the words she had eaten and the way they tasted.
    When she was done with telling, he was fast asleep.
    She held him in her arms and sang the songs that her own mother sang when she was a child, and she cried a little because she didn't know how to sooth the ache inside her heart.
    “If only we could stay like this forever,” she whispered. “There would be no need to say goodbye.”
    It was dark in the house when her husband came home. In the bedroom, the sheets of white paper were scattered around the bed like fallen leaves.
    “Ariel,” he whispered.
    He ran his fingers over the words.
    A breathe of wind fluttered the pages in his hands and from outside the window, a flame of light illuminated the dragons rising up from the page. He watched them tumble in graceful flight. Green-gold fire licked at the pages, curling the edges, turning them to ash.
    He watched as miniature cities rose and crumbled; stars stumbled and collided, warriors clashed in battle, the world fell from its axis, and righted itself again, and at the end of it, Ariel was there, staring at him, his eyes piercing beyond the shell of skin to the pain beneath.
    “Now, you must give birth to life,” Ariel said.
    Outside, the moon was a sliver of silver fire, and he saw the Wordeaters dancing on the pillows.
    “No need for fear,” Ariel said.
    He looked up at his son.
    And the Wordeaters were around him. They surrounded him with their smell of lilies and wild roses. They filled him with the scent of rich loam, the wild growing of trees and the harvesting of rice.
    Images burst to life on the back of his eyelids. Warriors sprouted wings and flew away like eagles, the earth split apart into a thousand splintered reflections of itself, and the stars floated down to earth to speak with the remnants of a lost generation.
    He lay there for a long time and when he opened his eyes he saw Ariel floating upward on the beams of the moon.
    “No,” he cried. He stood up, and tried to catch hold of his son. “Stay,” he pleaded.
    And he wept because his arms were not strong enough, and he felt his son slip away from his grasp until there was nothing left but a ray of moonlight across the cover of their bed.
    “He was never ours to keep,” his wife said.
    In the darkness, her pale skin shone like ivory, and her body was soft and yielding under the bedcovers.
    She turned her face away and he saw the glimmer of tears on her cheeks, and when he reached out his hand to touch her shoulder, he felt her shudder with grief.
    “I'm sorry,” he said.
    And he thought of how he had shut her out, of the days turned into weeks and months of not speaking.
    He looked at her and saw how sorrow had hollowed out her cheeks, and etched lines upon her face, and for the first time in a long time, he reached out his arms to her. “We could have another child.”
    They were walking together on the beach, squinting against the glare of sun shining on white- topped waves.
    “No,” she whispered.
    She looked out and thought of her son whom she had lost to the waves and to the moonlight, and of her husband who stood beside her.
    “There are so many stories in the world,” she said. “So many stories packed into books. So many words packed into libraries waiting to be tasted, and swallowed up by people like me.”
    “We'll make another child, if you want.”
    She looked at him and saw the sadness and the longing and the aching shyness that transformed him from the boy she'd fell in love with into this man with whom she had chosen to share her life.
    “Tell