suffering. I kept repeating myself. Tree voices dropped away, until I was standing, cold, in the forest, talking to myself.
I quieted. I waited. I wondered whether I should go back to the car and tell Mama there wasn’t going to be a tree this Christmas. Then I noticed a small voice saying, “For tradition’s sake?”
I walked toward it, and discovered the speaker was a small oak sapling.
“Speak to me,” it said.
“If you come with me, I will cherish you. I will try to keep the life in you as long as it can be kept without soil. I and all my family will worship you, make offerings to you of things that look beautiful to us, and stare at you, each time reminding ourselves that you are a wonderful lifeform and you and your seedmates share the Earth with us and we love you. And you will die. And we will love you even as you die and lose your chance to scatter seed.” I murmured the words over and over, and somewhere deep inside I wondered what Flint had said to his trees the two years he did this, before I went through transition. The first year he brought home a pine, a small one with two tops. The second year, a eucalyptus sapling. I said, “We will celebrate your death with fire, the great transformer, and keep the image of you in our memories forever.”
At last the little tree said, “I will come. I give up my seeds to you.”
I felt stabbed to the heart. What did any of the things I said mean to a little tree? Why should it care if humans remembered it, or decorated it? What did that have to do with the perpetuation of its seedline? I opened my pouch, already murmuring the ritual thanks to the Lady and to the Lord, to the Elements and to the Spirits, to the falling of the fates. I took out my packet of tobacco and offered some to the tree and to the Earth that raised it. I got out my bottle of water and poured it at the base of the little tree, then dug with my hands and with my trowel to loosen the earth binding the roots. I was just going to add the unrooting powder that would let the roots become slippery and muscular enough so the tree could follow me back to the van when I stopped.
“Why?” I said. “Why do you say yes to me?”
“Trees have traditions. Every cold time, someone goes to live as humans, always the ones who are most curious. I grew knowing it might be me, thinking I might not mind choosing a known death instead of waiting for an unknown one, realizing that at least my curiosity would be satisfied, and that this is a piece of the great Greenwork I can do.”
“Thank you,” I said, and loosed the unrooting powder, and the words to give the tree mobility. All the way back to the van, as I walked with one hand clasped to one of my tree’s branches and the tree shuffled and rustled beside me, I pictured two peoples having traditional ceremonies that intersected at their heights, each achieving something mysterious, each not understanding what the other was accomplishing. Just before my tree and I climbed up to the road where the van waited, some other tree dropped an acorn on me. I put it in my pocket, and wondered: was this too a part of the ritual of the trees? What part did I play?
“A beautiful tree, Beryl,” Mama said. She opened the back door of the van. I helped the tree up into the van and bound wet earth around its roots and sat beside it all the way home, one hand around a branch, the other cupping the acorn, wondering who answered whose prayers.
FLINT’S LIGHTS
I always thought, when I hit eighteen, bam, out of the house, away from the family, GOOD-BYE. It’s much harder than that, though. I’m going to be eighteen two days after Christmas, and I’m having second thoughts. Now I understand why none of the others have left. Opal’s the oldest, twenty-four already, and I never heard one movin’-on word come out of her mouth, before she turned eighteen or since. Jasper acts restless, but he doesn’t leave, either; sometimes he goes off for a while, but he always comes back. And what could Gypsum do if she went out in the wide world, among the ungifted? Ungifted herself, but raised in the expectation of gifts. The world must look even scarier to her than it does to me, and my gifts are strong.
I always thought, gifts after transition. Stick around long enough to have Great-Uncle Tobias train me in them. Then go out and wreak havoc. Toe-to-toe with the wide world, and I planned to cheat, win, grin, and start over. But that’s another broken dream. Used to be, when all my world was what could balance on a skateboard, my only dream was thrashing with the guys. I couldn’t wait to gift so I could zoom up walls and across ceilings, maybe over water, maybe underwater! Crash, tinkle. Gifts don’t work like that. All mine did was make me scared of everything, because when I address my gifts, I never know what they’ll give me.
Mama told me I was in charge of the lights this year, since Beryl’s doing the tree now. “Strike some sparks, Flint,” she said.
I went upstairs to try making lights, in case it was a skill that needed practice. I didn’t want to ask Great-Uncle Tobias about it because he always tells me more than I want to know about things. Jasper wasn’t home, and even if he had been, he might have been in a mean mood. He might withhold information just to spite me. Opal was concentrating on her own Christmas project, a special ornament, and she was sneery anyway. So I went to my room, turned on the goosenecked lamp by my bed, and sat on the rug between piles of dirty laundry, pieces of driftwood I’d been studying for the shapes inside, and pieces of driftwood I’d carved to let the shapes out. I stared at my hands in my lap.
Lights. We needed lights to put on the tree, and last year Jasper summoned up enough lights to festoon my tree and dot the front of the house, making it look like a fairy palace after nightfall. He’d even placed lights on the ceiling of the living room. Was Mama expecting me to do all that? Jasper was always better at everything than I was, which was why I got interested in things I knew he wouldn’t like, like wood carving.
How the hell did you make a light?
I thought about Jasper’s gifts. He seemed so much more in control of his than I was of mine. If he wanted to turn Gypsum green or make it rain on me, he did it, no hesitations, no problems. He probably just said “Lights, appear,” and his gifts obliged. No, he probably said something that rhymed. He was good at that stuff, what Great-Uncle Tobias called a power lubricant, something that made the interaction with gifts work better and easier.
I held my hands up. “Lights, appear before me here,” I said, and felt the stirring under my skin that meant something gifted was happening. Then a small purple rip shimmered in the air in front of me. It widened into a floating curtain about a foot high and two feet wide, strings of purple and lavender beads made of light that shifted as if a wind were blowing them. It was beautiful and strange. The rustling in my hands went on, and tiredness stole over me. Great-Uncle Tobias said my main problem was learning when to stop supplying power and let what I had reached for exist by itself. I closed my hands into fists, cutting off the flow of power. The lights shivered and slipped away, a bead string at a time.
“This won’t work,” I said as the last strand of lightpearls winked out. Why wasn’t the curtain there enough to stay, when I had put so much power into it? Jasper hadn’t played battery for his lights last year. He just set them up and left them.
I went down to the kitchen. It smelled like warmth and butter and fresh cookies. Gypsum was there, dropping spoonfuls of batter on cookie sheets, looking wild and frizzy and contented. She had dough in her hair, a streak of chocolate across her nose, and a dusting of flour on her shirt. I grabbed a cookie off a cooling rack and bit into it, then said, “How do you make light?”
She shoved one tray in the oven and pulled another one out. “It’s an emission in the electromagnetic spectrum somewhere between heat and X-rays,” she said. “I can’t remember if everything makes it or if reflections count. I mean....” She held up her hand, staring at the outstretched fingers. “If the light is coming from the
