Pomegranate Seeds

She gave us a day.

She had no settled home, because she always had to travel, to Antarctica and the Himalayas and obscure tribes in the Amazon; any scrap of knowledge could save us. She had no friends, because friends could be killed, and she desired no weakness; besides, she had long ago lost the ability to speak of anything but the atrocities and secrets that good people preferred not to think about. She had no left index finger, because she had cut it off in a ritual, and she had no eyes, because a cultist had boiled them out of her head.

—with all of that, she bought us a day, one day after the stars aligned where the Old Ones didn’t rise from beneath the sea and shake the very foundations of the earth.

And on that day, a father watched his child take her first step. Two lovers shared a quiet kiss, snowflakes brushing their noses. A man finished the last page of a book and stared into space, dazzled by the sparking language. A woman put down her cards in triumph as her gambit paid off. Friends who hadn’t seen each other in years played soccer. A cat refused to leave her human’s lap for an hour and thirty-four minutes. Two thousand people saw the Statue of Liberty for the first time; for ten thousand, it was their first time visiting a Disney park. And I, I ate a pomegranate, and the sticky juices dripped down my fingers and my chin, and the sour-sweet taste filled my mouth, and I crunched every last one of the seeds.