Chapter Thirty-Eight. Daye
Daye
Summer was endless.
It unfolded past the lush green of June, vivid emeralds and cool viridians.
It spread past the plushness of July—soft grass straining upward, soft rabbits flopping in the sun, Rory’s hands soft on her skin.
It rolled past the wetness of August, hair plastered to necks from warm summer showers, Rory licking raindrops from her collarbone.
And then it kept rolling.
Unfurling into September as the days grew shorter, stubbier.
As the heat slowly leached out of the air.
Into October, as the leaves started changing all around her, brilliant vermilions and gamboge and carmine.
Into November, as trees started to disrobe.
And still, summer unrolled, endlessly, into the horizon.
“It’s working,” Rory said again and again, eyes growing wide with wonder. “The solution really is working this time.”
It was. Autumn blazed all around her, all the more vivid as it neared its end, and still summer blustered in her veins. Daye could feel the rot gathering, a great wave in the distance, ready to crash over her. But still her skin remained smooth, her hair lush, her step sure.
“How do you feel?” Rory would ask her, a golden sort of hope suffusing his face.
How did she feel?
Unmoored. Like time was slipping from sight.
Or maybe it was herself that was slipping away?
She couldn’t quite tell. The longer she strayed into the next season, the more wrong she felt.
Displaced. Like she’d forgotten herself in another room.
A couple of days were hardly noticeable.
Even a few weeks were okay. But after two months, Daye felt harried by the bleakness of the world around her, the solid chill in the air.
It wasn’t a falling-apart sort of cold, but something else, something that sank deep into her branch-bones and snaked through her veins.
But Rory was smiling brighter with each passing day. And she was okay—no stumbles, no faintness, no part of her turning brittle or fraying away.
What could Daye do but sign ‘The same’?
The storms started rolling in. One morning they woke to a brilliant carpet of frost. The next to rain, sending damp tendrils into Daye’s skin. Then came the snow. Powder white and thin in mid-November, as incongruous as her summer self.
Sometimes all Daye could hear was the roar of that wave of rot, growing ever nearer; she could almost see its shadow inching closer as it prepared to swallow her whole. But still summer continued, her skin under Rory’s hands golden and soft.
She was so, so cold.
It was almost a relief when she woke up to the feel of her skin cracking, her hair snapping quietly on the pillow; a tooth sliding loose and landing silently on her tongue, like a small overripe fruit.
For a long moment she watched the flakes sail past in the early morning light.
A relentless shh, shh against the windowpane, a deadening, an end.
The wave finally, finally, closing over her head.
I failed, she thought. But even that was dim, like a whisper from a different room.
Rory stirred beside her. She looked, as if from a great distance, as he reached—as he did every morning—to brush her hair away from his face.
As his fingers closed over a brittle mess of twigs.
As his eyes snapped open and took in the cracks, the jut of her clavicles, the dust collecting on her skin.
All the changes that usually spanned weeks and weeks, and somehow appeared in the span of a single nighttime.
She watched him swallow. Watched his lips tremble.
Watched despondency stealing into his eyes, disappointment settle in the crease of his lips.
She watched, unmoving, as her skin kept flaking and the snow kept falling and Rory’s hand hovered above her, too afraid to snap something to actually touch.
His voice came from far away. It sounded hoarse. “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “Just don’t move. I’ll start collecting everything right away.” A pause. “I love you.” His footsteps retreated without waiting for an answer. Leaving her.
If Daye could have, she would have cried. But all she could do was look out the window and shiver and breathe.