L'Enyorance

Fins la sedmaena proucaena."

With those words the Cucs ambled over to me, one after the other, in the order of their ages, as per custom. Each girl latched her forelegs onto my shoulders and hoisted herself eye-level. They took turns blowing on me, softly, on my head, my face, shoulders and neck; all the places where I should have had down, or at least barbules, had I been one of their kind. In turn, I ceremoniously buried my face in each child's chest and inhaled deeply. I began to cry, absent-mindedly, the velveteen ripple of under feathers swabbing the tears into my cheeks.

After the children left, L'Ausa Majaur sat hunched against the nettle tree, her black cap pulled low over her forehead, eyes closed. She dangled the scroll from the bridge of her beak, teething on its edges. Above the tree, in the southern sky, lesions of ash puddled around the sun, shredding shadows into tattered lace.

"Your father has died." L'Ausa did not bother to open her eyes as she spoke.

I fixed on the branches above me, then at the tangled wisps of sunlight strewn at my feet. L'Ausa yawned, somewhere in the shade, under the great lhedouner.

"There was a ... sadness on Fideus. And Fideus is not used to such nonsense. Perhaps the Chathalans were beginning to forget what death meant to -"

"How," I whispered. Somehow I was sitting on the grass now, stiff and crosslegged. L'Ausa stirred and scratched her back against the trunk of the nettle. Behind us, in the distance, Cucs bayed and bleated at the clouds.

"He died last year, just after the feast days of Sante Llucie." She was kneeling beside me now, trying to smile.

"I guess it won't matter when I get there," I began, kneading my knuckles into the grass. "The how, I mean."

"Did you want him to be dead? Maybe that would make it easier?" L'Ausa cocked her head back. I stood up.

"Then why should I go back now?" I leaned into her, brushing my cheeks across her stomach.

"Do you even care how old he was?" A spongy mat of villi buffeted the old girl’s voice. "I suppose that that doesn't matter, either. Yours live so much longer than ours."

With that she grabbed me under my armpits and lifted me up, fencing me inside the corrugated expanse of her breast. She smelled sour, L'Ausa. The muscles in her chest undulated slowly under my forehead, churning ribbons of burning felt against my cheeks, shackles of sinew clanging in my ears. I tried not to hyperventilate, suffocation fizzing at the back of my brain. My eyes began to water and swell shut simultaneously, long slivers of scurf slithering down my face and neck. My whole body tensed into a series of heaves, decompressing finally into a single sneeze. I groped under infinite folds of cape, and pawed at her ribs and latissimus, all the while trying to scream. L'Ausa was speaking, asking me something, clucking or stammering, I couldn't tell.

She relaxed her grip and held me slack against her. I inhaled deeply, and blew upon the wirey, ashen plumage of her face. "This is what you have wanted, for so long."

She was hugging me, at last, just as I had once taught her.

***

I spent the next month preparing myself for the trip back home. Or what used to be home, up until my twelfth year. It was to be a seven-month voyage, and in the course of those seven months, some forty years would have passed on the Chathalans' colony of Fideus.