am not here.”
“That’s crazy talk,” says Gloranda. “You are here.”
Pomp is silent, unable to explain what she means, how she has been elsewhere and has returned after an absence. The words “been” and “after” will not come to mind, and even if they do, Gloranda will not understand.
“And the twins are there,” Gloranda continues. “And that bat is squeaky!”
Gloranda darts off, flying low to the ground. Then she is under the bat’s shadow, flying up. She sees the strap holding the saddle to the bat and unbuckles it.
The twins start falling off the saddle. They kick and grope, each one clawing at the bat, latching on to its sensitive face. Their weight is too much, and the bat’s neck snaps broken. It falls from the sky and hits the ground underneath Doribell’s and Ilsie’s combined crushing weight. Something pops and the bat is still.
“I do my trick!” Gloranda shouts with glee.
Pomp, from behind the tree, can’t help but giggle at the prank. And yet . . . and yet . . .
What is “yet”?
One , two , three , and four are now, but ten is yet. And yet—there it is again—it is more than just numbers. It is how things happen now . . . and yet. Her mind spins, and in the midst of the swirling nausea, she cannot help but think that she would never understand, except that she had almost become not yet . . . almost, what is the word? Dead ?
And there lays the bat. Not moving. Not breathing. Dead.
“It’s broken,” says Ilsie. She is bored, Pomp sees. Ilsie joins hands with Doribell and Gloranda, and the fairies fly off, leaving the broken bat behind.
Pomp is very, very confused. She walks over to the bat and tries petting it, but it does not respond.
“Get up, bat,” she says. “Fly away!”
She thinks she should be happy about Gloranda’s brilliant trick, but she is not happy at all.
“Wake up!” she jostles the bat, lifting a wing only to have it drop back to the ground, limp.
Her eyes are getting wet when she feels the hole open up inside her heart. She looks for the X on her chest, like Heraclix’s scar, but there is nothing there.
“Why does it hurt without hurting?” she asks herself. “Why am I . . . sad?”
She has seen sad before, in the human world. But now she is sad. It is a new feeling, and she does not like it. She does not like it so much that it makes her angry! Angry!
“Sisters!” she screams. “You have made it . . . dead!”
But no one responds to her shouting and crying. She is all alone.
She is sad and angry and scared because this, this “dead” almost happens to her.
The hole inside her feels like it is growing. She has to do something, or it will swallow her up.
“Think, Pomp, think!” she says, trying to bring a word into her mind, a word she hears Heraclix say when he is sad and empty. She thinks, walks around in circles around the dead bat, then thinks some more.
“What is it, Pomp? What is it he does when he is sad and empty?”
And then she remembers.
She remembers .
“Purpose!”
Yes, “purpose” is the word Heraclix says before they go back to Mowler’s apartment to get the documents.
As her mind catches hold of this, the hole inside her gets a little smaller.
She realizes that she has changed. Things are different.
Her life isn’t now about playing pranks all day every day. It isn’t about not caring. All this playing pranks and not caring isn’t fun any more. If she goes on like this, her life stays immortally, eternally . . . boring. Death is sad, but death makes life more worth living.
Life is precious , she thinks as she looks down at the dead bat again. Bugs have begun to crawl over the bat, just like bugs had crawled all over Heraclix.
But she won’t let Heraclix become like the bat. Pomp will not let Heraclix die. She will help him.
Heraclix turned to face east, then west, then east again, standing atop the stone pillar above the tops of the trees. Bozsok, his desired destination, lay to the east.
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