Chapter Nine. Daye
Daye
There was a narrowing, her own private effoliation.
First the meadow and forest, then the garden, and finally the kitchen and living room and stairs, all falling away from her. Until all that was left was the bed. The heap of blankets, mounding over her like years of leaf litter.
She was so cold.
Every time she shivered, Rory heaped another blanket over her.
They mounded so high that all that remained from the window was a sliver of reddening treetops and gray-tinged skies.
Under their weight her skin grew webbed and cracked, her ribs snapping like twigs underfoot, her inner thigh growing as soft as fallen fruit.
Still, the cold marched on under her skin, relentless.
She could taste leaf dust in her mouth all the time now. She guessed she, too, was narrowing. Whittling down layer by layer. Rory’s hand in hers was perpetually stained green-gray now. His mouth coated with it, except for the places he licked clean.
She closed her eyes. The last of her eyelashes disintegrated with the movement. She could feel pieces of them settling on her skin, dotting the bridge of her nose like Rory’s freckles.
Another part of her whittled away. Gone.
What would happen when the narrowing was complete? When all her skin flaked into green-gray dust, when there was nothing but the weight of blankets to hold her in place? By now, there was almost a relief in imagining that. Like exhaling a long-held breath.
A shiver racked through her, rattling things inside her loose.
“Daye? Are you okay? Do you want another blanket?”
Rory’s hand tightened around hers. She could feel something inside her palm snapping. The pain of it a bright flare, fast swallowed by the cold, the exhaustion, the relentless tug of the season chafing her raw.
“Daye?”
Her hands were too heavy, too fractured to answer.
Her eyelids too laden with the remains of her eyelashes to open.
She tried, but sleep was already washing over her, first haltingly, then in a single great wave.
Pulling her under. Leaving behind nothing but heavy stillness and the endless, incessant tread of chill.