Chapter Text
Wynn died in the city hospital on a cold November morning, three years after the wedding, half an hour away from her house and fifty minutes away from the cabin, the slivered whites of her eyes yellow, her wool matted and loose from the follicle, trembling beside a window she insisted be kept open.
Seff sat beside her and couldn't bear to look. She felt her eyes bore into her, nearly one hundred and eighty degrees of vision, developed for an instinctual fear that Seff hoped wasn't the last thing to slip away. She couldn't tell what emotion was behind the words; she could barely hear them at all.
"Take me to the beach," Wynn said, barely audible above the constant beep of machines and alarms one after another that the doctors, Seff knew, had already stopped paying attention to because no matter what they did Wynn was going to die. "Let me see it before I go."
Seff's ears had always been sharp. "I'll try," she said. Her voice was just as faint. She coughed and cleared her throat. Nothing came of it. "I'll try."
Her liver failed sometime soon after, with another alarm, one that sent doctors rushing into the room despite themselves. Her body gave up the ghost. Quit. Ceased. What had once been a person became in an instant a body to be carried away.
It occurred abruptly to Seff that one person hadn't died, but a thousand, a million, an infinite ocean of potential people, as many as there were possible memories yet to be made. There were three Wynns beside her in the park, looking at birds and gesturing vaguely at clouds and sleeping on her shoulder. There was one at the museum with her, pointing out post-impressionist brush techniques in between sneaky attempts at makeouts. There were so many in her bed that Seff hardly had space to move and pull the covers over them all, without any room in the blanket to tuck herself in at the leftmost edge. Instead, she froze each night, her fur bristling in the empty air.
It oddly diminished the tragedy, in that numbing way an incomprehensible amount of death does; it was easier to focus on the thousands of Future-Wynns Seff didn't yet know, rather than the one she really did, until she remembered all of them were the same woman and always had been, diffracted into a thousand different places, and the lead weight settled back in her stomach.
Wynn's parents had insisted the funeral be held in a church; they had demanded Wynn be buried in the cemetery of her grandparents on a hill by the city, in the shade of a hundred year old oak tree, and Seff had acquiesced because she couldn't stand the pain in their eyes and she had no one else to back her up and no way to tell them the wishes of a dead woman. They had been married, sure, and so Seff's requests should have taken precedent, but all the legal recourse in the world couldn't keep her from feeling very small suddenly in their eyes, warm and brown and lighter than their daughter's had been, and from being struck speechless by the shape of their mouths creased into flat, disapproving lines. Instead, she sat awkwardly cramped in a pew, next to rows of sheep, all of them smaller than her, all of them staring at her with their side-swivel eyes but who all refused to acknowledge her presence, who read eulogies she wasn't invited to give. She tried to tell herself she was lucky to have been invited at all.
She prayed when the time came to pray, and craned her head awkwardly and strangely. She didn't cry; it was customary for Wynn's family, Seff learned, to bleat, an odd and high and mournful and faintly musical sound that came around in echoes through the church and then, when they lowered the casket in a haze, dropped once more down the hill and into the streets and forests below, reverberating in ancient glens thick and laden with bones.
Seff called her own parents that week.
They didn't pick up.
In the cabin—Wynn's house had really been her parents' property, but the cabin Seff properly owned, and the will decreed it so, had there been any doubt—she took two nights of restless sleep on the half a world that had been left for her. She buried her muzzle in the hollows of her bed. She dug a claw into the headboard and left a little tally mark in the wood. She looked at the dim ticking clocks as they counted her to sleep. She drove to the beach that weekend, took the car and the jewelry Wynn had left her: eighteen-karat gold, heavy with emeralds that looked better on Wynn than on her, sterling silver that sat atop wool but always blended into fur and buried itself in it. Seff didn't like to wear it; she kept it in a balsa wood box with a latched lid. She had carved the box herself; she had felt its light sandy corners dig into her heavy hands as she smoothed it down and screwed in the hinges, and now she put it in the passenger seat of the car and secured it with its own belt. She joked to herself that she could take the carpool lane. She bit her lip and choked down the blood.
The drive to the beach was thick with traffic, though it was lighter, she knew, than it would be in the summer, when the roads would be clogged with cars like grease in an artery, like hair in a drain, nails on flesh tearing out fur and all clawing against each other trying to escape the heat when their lake houses weren't enough. It was a long drive, and she had little to do but look at the road before her and try not to cry and occasionally brake sharply for deer. When she arrived, the sun had nearly finished setting, and the moon, round and stark and white and full, like a pupil in the center of an inverted eye, rested in the middle of a ring of clouds and shone down on her. Her boots met sand; their treads filled with it. She stepped on a sand dollar. It crunched with a sound like breaking fragile bones. The waves sounded like glass shattering as they reached the shore. She clutched the box close to her chest and felt her heart beating through it as she ran. The water glittered blood red in the last sliver of sunlight; most of the people on the beach had packed up for the night and it was far too cold and not yet late enough for the restless teenagers. A stray kite landed on the surface of the water and was dragged under by a breaking wave; it had been tangled in a distant tree and then carried back to the beach when the wind picked up.
The moon glittered white on the ocean as the red of sunset faded to black and left no sign it had been there at all. Seff wished there was more fanfare. The water was painfully loud but distinctly unmusical. It was barely a soundtrack at all, and it felt both far too abrasive and far too mundane. She had hoped for warm strings or contemplative piano, maybe, or more realistically some nice-sounding distant birds; something to tell her the universe was listening and knew how she felt. Instead the universe was deaf, or perhaps had heard and simply didn't care. The opening bars of Mahler's fifth symphony played in her head, just repeating and never advancing until it became more noise. She heard cracking windows. The wind bit her ears and whipped up grains of sand that slashed at her boots. She fumbled for her phone to play something through its tinny speaker and blot out the sound of the waves and the wind; it clicked against her claws in her pocket, and she stopped and thought better of it.
She knelt down at the edge of the water and set the box down in the break between waves; another came and crashed over it and pulled it back in, and moment-by-moment it was ratcheted back, barely floating. Someone, she understood, would find it eventually, and (probably letting themself be convinced the stones were fake) pawn its contents off to God-knows-where for maybe two hundred dollars or so all together, and she hoped they'd appreciate the easy money and not be too upset at the tarnish. She hoped for another outcome; she hoped it would drift along forever, or be caught by some wide-eyed dreamer looking for a new string of only mildly drenched pearls and finding salvation in a barnacle-encrusted moldering wooden box. She was practical, though, and only hoped until she could find an opportunity to shoot herself down.
She looked at the shuddering ripples of light on the water as the box disappeared, then up at the sky, black clouds weaving through the gaps left by the muted stars in a sea of staticky eigengrau, all framing the moon, white and full like a pearl or a shed tooth.
She howled.