The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [108]
Gwynn did not hold the orthodox view of his profession. For a moment he allowed himself to imagine that he had been an instrument of humour, sans the appellation of divinity. He mused, not for the first time, that if the putative divine claimed all territories of sense and significance for itself, it fell to comedy, with its bifurcations, reversals and annulments of sense, to destroy that claim. The existence of the comic viewpoint, even if it was only an interpretation placed upon the tragedy of a world where death was king of kings, might prove the absence of an absolute divine authority.
Mona did not die, and seemed embarrassed. She started taking her medicines again, claiming publicly to have grown bored with Death as a lover, but admitting privately to Vali that she felt a fresh enthusiasm for life.
"What made you change your mind?" Vali asked one morning. The slow pale arrows of the sun were passing through a vase of glass flowers on the windowsill, throwing faint coloured shadows onto their bed.
Equally colourful was the latest issue of Hearts and Blades, through which Vali was idly flicking. It featured the first installment of a serial in which Mona journeyed to the underworld to find a friend who was trapped there. The blurb for the next episode promised that "classic character" Vali Jardine would return. It was funny, Vali thought, to know that although one day you would die, your small-press avatars, your dolls and knick-knacks, would live on. You who had ceased to breathe and were extinguished would go on existing strangely, inflated by the sentience of readers and collectors, who would re-imagine you, re-create you, perhaps with less class and cleverness and fewer of your original qualities than you might have hoped for, but still, perhaps, with more energy, delight and imagination than you, when you lived, had put into the making of yourself.
Mona stretched her back and legs, luxuriating in the feeling of the mild sun and the linen sheets on her skin. Her malady was slowly but steadily going into remission. Her adventure in illness had been worth it, almost, for the pleasures of convalescence that were now hers ― those delicate, slightly abject pleasures of the reawakened senses. Milky tea and chicken soup, innocent aromas of bread and soap, the daily sounds of the street below fed like streams into the river of the sensual enjoyment she took in her recovery.
She hesitated over an answer. In fact, her recollection was hazy. She rather thought she had looked out into the night beyond the end of the Teleute Shelf and had feared it. Had refused its call ― had failed it, refusing in the end to go the final dance with the milkthistle ghost whose queer, scornful lullabies had burned her on the mouth in the cradle and made her a poet. And then, too, there was that kid, dying as if the hour had wanted a life and had taken the first one offered.
"I always was stubborn. I never took the right path."
"Gwynn said you were a runner."
Mona snorted. She smoothed the bedspread over her legs. "I don't know. Fashions change. I suppose I lost my nerve. Then again, sometimes the witless leaf keeps drifting, until it sees love coming to pick it up."
Vali smiled, entirely unfooled, and rang for their boy to bring breakfast.
On a clear day early in winter the two women took a picnic lunch to the necropolis. They sat inside the shrine of St. Anna Vermicula. Mona had been taking her various physicks like a model patient. She was less pale, and had begun training with her sword again.
"I'm feeling much better," she declared, chewing delicately on a sandwich. "Wanting to die was some strange summer madness that lingered on out of season, I think."
"Perhaps it was," Vali agreed vaguely.
She could not recapture the sense of timelessness she had felt here a month ago. The world was marching on. Coming out to the necropolis they had