This story takes place after the end of “Orphans,”

and is dedicated to Tweetie,

whose loving nature and smiling face will be missed

 

“The Universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception …” – Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

 

 

Falling.

Catherine was falling out of a tree.

A long split-second—fluttering hands, scraping against bark, finding no limb to grip, gravity taking hold­­­­—while an impossible number of thoughts ran through her head

What was a punk girl doing, with leather, mohawk, spikes and everything, sitting in the tree she’d climbed?

Out of the hundreds of trees in Central Park, why this sycamore?

And who were the other women at the base shouting incomprehensible things at her?

 

Moments before …

Proud to the point of smug, Catherine had proven herself—she could still climb, still dare.

Her father understood why.

So did Vincent.

That was why she was back Above. She had things to prove, to do, before …

“It doesn’t mean our dream will never be…”

They had time to live, to dream. Unlike her father.

The rising tide of grief had chased her from her perch. Twisted branches morphed into tubes, the wind bringing clouds and the hiss of a breathing machine.

Before more memories found her, before more regrets, she needed to return to earth.

But the descent aspect of tree climbing had seemed a lot less intimidating when she was ten.

Hugging the trunk, lowering slowly, branch to branch, finally reaching just above the first major split of the boughs.

An indignant bleat from just below her, “Hey!”

Catherine startled and slipped, her foot searching for a branch that was no longer there.

She was falling.

 

Her final thought before she hit the ground, this is the ultimate irony.

She’d promised her dad she wouldn’t fall. She’d sworn it, scaling this beautiful tree that seemed to beg to be climbed.

And now here she was, headed to Earth a whole lot faster than she planned.

“Don’t worry, dziubku[i], I have you.”

The blur of descent, and then someone’s powerful arms wrapped her in … a shawl? A cape?

From overhead, probably where the punk girl perched, a voice exclaimed, “That was a bitchin’ catch, maa.”

Layers and layers of fabric surrounded Catherine, reminding her a little too much of when she first woke battered and blind in the tunnels.

“Thank you,” she stammered, attempting to free herself from the material. “I can’t believe … I can’t believe you caught me…”

The woman before her, dressed in jeans and a puffy navy vest, with black curly hair and glasses, nodded and began twirling Catherine out of the long shawl, winding the extra cloth around her bare forearms.

Catherine spun and glanced above.

“I easily fell twelve feet. You must be stronger than you look.”

“We mothers often are,” the woman answered with a smile, her accent Eastern European, Polish maybe, and kept gathering her weaving.

Catherine shook off the cryptic answer. “I’m sorry, I just don’t know what happened.”

“You should be sorry!” came a rough Nordic burr. An old woman descended on her, ragged clothes and white hair flying. “You’re interrupting important goings-on!”

“I’m sorry, but the branch… One moment it was there, but the next…” Exasperation sneaking into Catherine’s words, she rushed on. “… and I didn’t expect anyone to climb the same tree I was in.”

A guffaw came from the brown-skinned punk girl in black leather pants, large graffitied boots, studded belt, white tank top and spiked choker, who would have looked more at home in the Village than nestled in a tree, yet she didn’t look up from her occupation. Her graceful hand dangled a twirling top while the other pinched fluff into its spinning path, slowly creating a delicate strand.

“It’s our tree, lady,” said the brutally beautiful girl, of … Indian heritage? Greek maybe? With her California accent and electric-blue locks rippling over her mostly buzzed skull, it was hard to tell.

“Yes, ours,” agreed the old woman, her icy blue eyes boring into Catherine. “And it doesn’t like to stay the same. Limbs move, leaves change, roots grow where they want. No wonder you fell. It’s strange it let you climb it at all,” she said, staring at Catherine suspiciously.

“No one owns the trees in Central Park,” Catherine replied while wiping her scraped palms down her jacket. “There is no law saying you can’t climb them.”

“Only the law of good sense, bytting[ii],” the old lady retorted.

“Matko,[iii] please,” the motherly woman pleaded with the hag. “She was only trying to say goodbye to her father.

Wait.

How did she know that?

Were they underneath me the whole time?

Had they heard her talking? Shouldn’t the wind have carried her words away?

Catherine spied her roost, looking relatively the same … and at least 25 feet up.

The old woman glanced to the tree’s canopy, also. A few of last year’s leaves floated down, finally making way in an early spring gust.

“Her papa had longer than many, shorter than some,” she mused, then barked. “But it’s time to work! Where are my scissors?”

She patted her coat, a drab, shapeless, woolen affair that hid a gaudy red housecoat beneath. Catherine could see it sneaking out above stick legs the same color as the tree’s inner trunk and leading to heavy Wellington boots the old lady stomped while searching the ground.

“I had them in my hand until this … pannenkoek[iv] decided to fall from our tree.”

“Nani[v],” whined the girl from the crook of said tree.  “Don’t switch countries for your insults. I like this body, and you’re going to confuse me right out of it again.”

The old woman continued to grumble. “She shouldn’t be able to see us.”

With years defying swiftness, the crone caught Catherine’s chin and pulled at the skin under Catherine’s eye with a gnarled finger.

“You sure you aren’t harboring a goddess in there?” she demanded, scrutinizing Catherine with green eyes.

Green eyes?

But they’d been blue before, right? Icy blue.

The hag jerked Cathy’s head back and forth. “Maybe you’re a frost giant in a stolen skin. A glamoured elf … or dwarf…”

Catherine fought, but the hag pulled her close.

“You smell of the Underworld.”

This had gone too far.

Cathy was freed from the crone’s fierce grip only after the old woman shouted, “There they are!” and hobbled away.

From under a large root, the crone pulled her scissors free.

“Przepraszam[vi], child,” the motherly woman said in an apologetic tone, her curls bouncing as she dusted off the last of tree bark and dirt from Catherine’s jacket. “My companion can be a bit … unpredictable. One day she is grandma, the next she is witch. But she won’t hurt you …  not today, I promise.”

“She’s insane,” Catherine declared, shifting further away from the hag.

“No, not insane. Weird, perhaps. Some people call us ‘weird’,” the woman replied, and Catherine could swear her accent switched from Polish to something like Irish or Scottish. “’Weird sisters.’”

“Now you’re doing it too,” accused the eye-rolling teen sitting cross-legged in the boughs. A spider tattoo along her knuckles danced as she spun the floss into thread.

Weird was an understatement.

New York brimmed with loonies. Most cities did.

But these three…

From a deep and ancient place within her …

… a warning shrilled.

Two individuals might share a delusion, but three?

Three women so different in age, manners, and dress.

This had to be a joke.

Was this some sort of joke?

Joe might play a prank, but this didn’t feel like his style of joke. Plus, he was still warily sympathetic, since she’d returned.

Someone from the Tunnels, then? Someone angry at her leaving? She’d only told Vincent she’d wanted to stay. Only he knew. Everyone else treated her as a guest on an extended visit.

Did he tell anyone?

“Did someone send you?” Catherine challenged the woman with the cloth.

“Did someone send us?” she repeated. “Well, the Universe, probably, she mused. “She must be curious about you, or else we wouldn’t have crossed paths … or crossed trees.” She patted the mottled gray and yellow trunk, her last words nearly a song. “This one’s roots go down, down, down all the way.”

“No one sent us, girl. Existence doesn’t care about you, nor should she. You disrupt things you cannot understand! You’re reckless with your thread,” the witch woman growled, gesticulating at Catherine with her scissors.

Catherine stumbled behind the black-haired mother to keep out of reach.

“It was just over there,” the crone pointed into the park with her shears. “I almost had to snip your thread.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t,” the punk girl interrupted with a sigh and added teasingly, “cause her bond mate found her first.”

“It was fate that they meet … and we meet,” the woman with the fabric said, then sat, her back against the trunk. “We know a bit about that,” she stated and pulled an elliptical-shaped wooden tool from her vest pocket.

These women were weird, and Catherine wasn’t about to join their little coven.

All the good feelings and blue skies from before had vanished.

She needed to get out of here before any more storms, metaphorical or not, blew in.

She poised to step away, when the girl in the tree proclaimed, “He bound you … with his soup and his words.”

 Catherine pivoted.

“He bound you, soul to soul, his world to yours,” the woman under her echoed.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Catherine faltered, backing away.

“So far down his world goes, so far.” The crone stroked the tree. “Only the roots of our tree knows and grows.”

“I have the new one for you, Lachesis,” the teen stated from the branches. “How long do you want it?”

Her brown eyes locked with Catherine’s. “Since you can see us anyway, can you take this end to my sister?”

Sister? Didn’t she say mother? Or was it grandmother? I wish these people would make up their minds.

“What is it?” Catherine inquired, reaching up, as if spellbound.

The punk girl bent over half and stretched to hand her the string.

“It’s a life thread but be careful. Some are blessed … or cursed, maybe … to be made of strong stuff, destined to outlast all the other threads around them, but others fray at the slightest tug, and my eldest sister doesn’t even need to use her shears.”

The string pulsed between Catherine’s fingertips, and she nearly dropped it on instinct, but she delivered the spiderweb-thin strand to the other woman who encircled her shuttle with it and shook her fabric open.

Colors and designs, too many to fathom, to see, only impressions, the tapestry caught the sunlight and wind. The material was both dense and delicate, the design too intricate to make out, but there was a pattern, coiling and twisting strands, and at the places where they touched, the threads glowed like stars.

A blinding headache lanced across Catherine’s eyes. Despite the beauty, she had to look away and found herself unexpectedly crying.

Swiping tears, Cathy glanced back at the girl nestled in the tree, still spinning the other end of the cord, but spun it from … what? The material she used appeared drawn from nothing, from air, and so fast, it looked as if she had more than two arms.

Oh God.

I did fall.

But some supermom didn’t catch me with an enchanted tapestry.

More like I bashed my head and I’m lying at the base of a tree, concussed out of my gourd.

“Your threads crossed, you and Vincent,” said the weaving woman, startling Catherine out of her thoughts. “He offered you safety, unselfishly, with no expectations. There is magic in that.”

“Old magic,” the crone chimed from right behind Catherine, the old woman’s twisted stick fingers holding be the shoulder.

“He isn’t stupid, that one. He knows any stranger in need could be a god in disguise.”

“Who we touch, touch us. We embrace, enjoin, and the tapestry is woven,” said the girl as if she were reciting an incantation. “Magic is created, especially when a love begins with no expectations.”

Catherine shook her head.

“No …  expectations?”

“Until he had expectations, great expectations,” said the mother, plaiting the new thread into her tapestry.

“Until he didn’t want to let you go…” the girl said with a sad smile. “But he did.”

“More magic!” laughed the old woman. “You both know how to play the ‘catch me’ game. That’s the oldest and most enchanted game of all.”

The mother looked up from her weaving.

“Do you believe in fate, child of mine?”

“I don’t know,” Catherine answered, dazed.

“You are smart to doubt it. Fate can be kind and cruel, a soft landing or a hard thud. But wasn’t your favorite fairytale Sleeping Beauty when you were a bairn[vii]?”

Catherine said nothing.

“You believed in fate then, in curses and gifts, and spinning and fated love. Now, my Bella, what do you believe in?”

“I believe in him,” Catherine blurted before she could stop herself.

And then she ran from them.

Ran as if her life depended on it.

Ran with the memory of the encounter fading with each footfall until she arrived at her apartment and fell into her bed and insensate sleep.

The Fates watched her go.

“Reckless with her thread,” Atropos repeated.

“Anyone who cares, who really cares, seems reckless to those who stay safe in their own houses,” the mother-weaver, Lachesis explained. “The ones who wish to prove the world can change must be reckless. They can’t help it.”

“She weaves into so many lives,” Clotho, the maiden-spinner, stated from her perch in the World Tree that now looked more like a vast ash than a stunted city sycamore. “As does her lover,” she added.

“Not yet lover. Soon, but not yet,” Lachesis clarified as she fiddled with the weave of fabric in her lap.

Atropos scrutinized her sister Fate.

“What are you doing there, you soft-hearted slattern?” the witch asked, her scissors at the ready.

“Nothing.”

“You cannot alter the web,” the eldest Norn[viii] stated, almost sadly.

“I’m not. But,” the mother-weaver nodded towards where Catherine ran, “a woman of the world has touched our tapestry, and it is different now. The threads have altered, just a tiny bit. See?”

The mother-sister Rozhanitsy[ix] nudged the loosened strands allowing her to weave them into a fresh pattern. “It must have needed a little help to get into the right alignment. That’s why we met.”

“So,” the youngest sister of the Moirai[x] beamed, “am I spinning a new thread for her and Vincent, do you think?”

“I’m certain of it, and soon,” Lachesis said as a slow smile warmed her features, then she looked to the eldest Fate. “So, spare your scissors a while for Catherine, will you, my mother?”

“Come on, Grandma.” The punk girl bounced and the World Tree shook with her pleading. “Give the chick a break.”

“Hmmpf,” the crone grumbled with a half-smirk, the kinder grandmother possibly returning, called back by her youngest companion.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

The Rodzanice by Marek Hapon

 

 

[i] Polish for, “sweetie,” a term of endearment

[ii] Norwegian for changeling, devil spawn

[iii] “Mother”, in Polish

[iv] Dutch for “pancake”, a mild insult.

[v] Maternal grandmother in Hindi

[vi] “Sorry”, in Polish

[vii] Scottish for baby

[viii] The Norse goddesses of Fate

[ix] Slavic Fate goddesses.

[x] The Greek Fate goddesses