Closer To The Sun [Poly] [Bi]

3 - Nora

Q.O.T.D – Do you generally prefer shorter or longer chapters?

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Nora's mother was named Maria. She was forty-three when she died. She was forty-two when she disappeared.

The disappearing happened gradually, like a sun-faded photo.

Nora could recall holding her mother's hand in the supermarket, letting herself be tugged through the aisles as her mother filled their cart with candies and creams and teas and other things a person shouldn't be able to subsist on. Maria did fine in supermarkets and bus queues and school hallways. The straight lines were easy to follow.

It was on the curves where her mother got lost. It happened slowly, by inches – first by accident, and then faster, on purpose.

After all, when Maria had started exploring the woods with her young daughter, the "getting lost" part was the whole point of it all.

Nora and Maria spent hours each day getting lost. They visited places that didn't exist through doors that weren't actually there. They walked through eternal autumn woods, red star leaves drifting from trees that never emptied of color. They let voices whisper in their ears on phantom breaths of air. They built stacks of shale and limestone and granite in surprising hues of blue, purple, seafoam. They stacked them high so that they would remember where they'd been. They let memories of their past travels guide them to other worlds; they let themselves be guided by sweet memories that weren't theirs at all.

Nora saw the whole world through her mother. She saw so much of it that sometimes she dreamt frightening dreams that her mother was transparent, the autumn-tinted light filtering straight through her skin. Nora's mother was a vase that was twenty percent full, and draining slowly. She had sprung a leak and became emptier every day.

Years before her mother's death, when Nora was nine years old, Maria disappeared completely. She was still visible, Nora could still hold her hands and tug her through the straight lines of the supermarket. Sometimes she would even talk, or laugh. But Nora suspected that all the important parts had been left behind, scattered through the bends and loops of other worlds.

The straight lines were easy to follow. It was on the curves where she got lost. One autumn day, it was on the sweeping bow of a highway overpass where Nora lost Maria for good.

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