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The boat had been docked for far too long. Not that time was a metric Gustav used to measure the world anymore, but he was certain the sun had risen at least twice since they’d pulled into Oxbury port, and his rumbling stomach informed him that his last meal had been very long ago indeed. When the sun began to set again, Gustav took matters into his own hands and began to patrol the deck in search of Stella.
The gardens were lush and overgrown, in apparent need of a harvest, but empty. The loom was dark, the smithy cold, and the kitchen quiet. He poked his head into both the sawmill and the foundry, even though he couldn’t recall hearing either of them fired up recently, and found them predictably deserted. Even the windmill sat dark and motionless. The Beluga sat in the water, as still as a painting and eerily silent as the first stars winked into view.
It was in the fading light that he saw the soft Everlight glow shining through the kitchen window. No smoke came from the chimney, and he couldn’t recall hearing any recent activity from the kitchen, but the presence of Everlight was undeniable. He clambered up the ladder and pushed the door open.
“Skipper, I’m afraid I must protest this new meal schedule you’ve adhered to. I may be wonderfully strong-willed, but I’m not—” he paused in the doorway and took in the scene in front of him.
There was a mountain of breakfast foods and sweets jockeying for space on the worktop. A bottle of milk laid on its side, neck extending over the edge of the counter, its contents spilled onto the floor below where a tremendously pleased Daffodil hunched over the puddle. And Stella sat cross-legged on the floor, her back against the fridge and her hand resting palm-up beside her, the Everlight globe held loosely in the cage of her fingers. She wore a thousand yard stare, pointed in the general direction of a cake in her lap.
“Skipper, what on earth…”
When she didn’t acknowledge him, Daffodil stood, stretched, and wound his way through Gustav’s ankles on his way to Stella. He sat in front of his human for a moment, then mewed and headbutted her hand.
Stella gave her head a small shake and blinked at the cake. Lifted her eyes to blink at her cat. Then looked up at Gustav and cocked her head to one side.
“It’s night,” she said. “Aren’t you sleepy?”
“I very likely am,” he replied, eyes still scanning the chaos of the room, “but sleepy is currently somewhere above hungry on my hierarchy of needs.”
She stared for a long moment, confusion creasing her forehead, before her mind caught up to the moment. “Oh. Oh. Oh, Gustav— oh, crickets, I am so sorry.” She closed her fingers around the Everlight globe and lifted her hand, the light spreading and solidifying into a large serving platter. “What are you in the mood for? Wonton soup? Paella? Curry?” Each dish appeared on the platter, steaming and fragrant, as she listed it off. “I think… We could pop down to the cellar if you’re feeling surströmming? I think there’s a batch ready.”
It did all sound delicious — a literal smorgasbord of temptations waved under his nose — but Daffodil chose that moment to trot over and weave figure eights around his ankles, and as he looked down at Stella’s stricken, apologetic eyes, he felt some other force tug at his edges. Something endlessly gentle, yet somehow stronger than hunger.
Gustav stepped into the kitchen and shut the door behind him. “Care to enlighten me on… all this?” he said, gesturing vaguely at the counter.
“Um. Just… experimenting.”
“I see. Any exciting revelations?” He folded his wings behind his back and leaned over the crowded counter. “Quite a lot of pancakes, it would seem.”
There was a quiet snort of almost-laughter from the floor. “Yeah.” Then, softer, “Yeah. Stanley— He liked pancakes.”
And there was that pull at his edges again, a delicate rustle, like he was an origami creature and something was trying to unfold and flatten one of his pleats. “Stanley went through the door, did he not?”
“He did.”
Gustav hummed thoughtfully. “I do hope you’ll pardon the callousness of the inquiry,” he said, drifting over to Stella’s corner of the kitchen, “but who, then, are you making pancakes for?”
“I don’t know! It’s so— Ergh, it’s so stupid. I’d say they’re Francis fodder, but it’s not like we need the glims. I don’t eat and nobody else even likes pancakes.”
“To be fair, they are rather cloying, especially for a breakfast food,” he said, tucking his feet under himself to sit facing her. Daffodil loafed in the space between them and began to purr. The platter of delicacies sat on the floor beside Stella, seemingly forgotten.
“Right? Makes my teeth itch just thinking about them.”
“And yet, they’re somehow not the sweetest culinary endeavor you’ve taken on today.”
“Ah.” Stella bit her lip and let her eyes land briefly on the cake in her lap. “An accident.”
“How does one accidentally make a cake?”
“The Everlight does the heavy lifting, y’know? I just suggest new combinations to it, and it decides that yes, obviously, flour and eggs make pancakes, flour and milk are destined to become crepes, but flour and sugar? That’s cake. Everlogic.”
“Ferryperson for souls on the way to the afterlife, but also ingredients on their way to becoming food.”
“Heh. One way to look at it.” She let her head thump back against the fridge. “You know what I really don’t get about this place though? Everything feels so much here, right? Emotions are bigger and stronger and carry so much more of you than they did in the before-world, but I don’t…” She pushed a sigh through pursed lips, using the breath to blow a strand of hair out of her eyes. “I don’t think I can cry anymore. I accidentally made a cake, and the very first thing I thought when I pulled it out of the oven was how much Stanley was going to love it and how excited I was to share it with him, and then I remembered that he just left. He missed the chance to eat Evercake, but only barely, and if I had thought to put flour and sugar in the oven one day earlier, he would have gotten to try a new dessert, and did I send him away too soon? Did he leave before he was complete? Stars, Gustav, he was only eight years old, how can anyone be complete at eight? And why can’t I cry about it? Before-Stella cried buckets for him, he broke my heart in ways I didn’t know it could break, but now… am I really so different now? I want to have a big cry about it, I want to so bad, it makes no sense, I should—”
“Skipper,” interrupted Gustav. “I’d like to interject with an alternate point of view, if you’d hear me out. Then you can carry on with that train of thought if you still feel the need.”
She nodded.
“‘Should’ doesn’t mean a damn thing here,” he said. “It’s a concept that relies on logical thinking to even exist, and you said it yourself — emotions supersede logic. Ideas like linear time and the physical limitations of our bodies and fairness are things we have passed through and left behind us. There’s no ‘should’ attached to anything you say or do anymore, if there ever was at all.”
“Then what’s the point? Why not step straight from life through the Everdoor? Why are we hovering here, feeling everything this much but not being able to cry about it?”
“That, my dear, is an impossible question. You’ll find as many answers as you will people asking it. I won’t pretend I have the slightest clue, but I do have some musings, if you’d care to hear them.”
She nodded again, then looked down at the serving platter as though seeing it for the first time. “Arg, you’re hungry though! Let’s get you some dinner first. Did any of these sound good?” She selected a dish and held it out to him. “Curry?”
Gustav considered the question. He thought about the way time existed here without really mattering. How his body still longed for food and sleep without needing either. His origami heart and their absent young friend. Then, he smiled and said, “Actually, I think I’d like to try that cake.”
“You— Wha— You hate sweets.”
“I do. I liked Stanley though, and right now, I think it might be nice to try and see things how he might have.”
“He had a ‘dessert dance’ he’d do,” Stella said, leaning over to pull open a drawer and retrieve a fork. “I could walk you through it if you wanted to try and—”
“Absolutely not, this sentimentality only stretches so far. Two forks, if you please. I’d have you suffer this confectionery with me.”
“I don’t eat, remember?”
“Have you tried? Just because you don’t need to doesn’t mean you can’t.”
She paused with her hand above the drawer, then huffed a laugh and fished out a second fork. Daffodil, as though on cue, flopped out of his loaf and onto his side, making room for the cake plate to sit on the floor between them.
“When’s the last time you even had cake?” she asked, passing him a fork.
“I can’t recall a single instance.”
“Oh come on, not even as a kid?”
“Ah, but I was never a child,” Gustav said, his poker face impenetrable. He honed in on an edge of the cake that had a particularly golden Maillard crust to it, then broke through its craggy surface. “I, like Athena, sprung into existence fully formed and impeccably dressed.”
Stella rolled her eyes and stabbed her fork into the middle of the cake. “Pfft, yeah okay, and I was polished into being inside an oyster shell. My pearly siblings and I were collected and brought to the surface by mermaids.”
“And Stanley was grown in your garden, from a seed you fished out of the Stygian Sea.”
A peal of laughter rang through the room, followed by Stella clamping her free hand over her mouth as though she hadn’t expected the sound to form, much less escape. “Gosh, it’s so wonderful and weird here,” she said, lowering her hand and raising her fork. “To Stanley?”
He clinked the side of his fork against hers. “To Stanley.”
Evercake, as it turned out, while a bit plain, wasn’t terrible. It was simply fleeting; an experience defined by generalizations rather than any distinct or memorable flavor. A food for the present. Something to be enjoyed in the moment and only the moment. It was sweet and simple. Warm and fluffy. In a word: comforting.
“Huh…” Stella said, staring down at the plate. She helped herself to another bite, her eyes glazing over as she chewed and swallowed. “It’s… Huh…”
“Indeed.”
“He liked you too, you know.”
“I… beg your pardon?”
“Stanley. He was always… here, look.” She reached for the Everlight platter, the dishes disappearing in a puff of steam as the light swirled and shrunk back into a globe. With a flash of gold, it stretched and flattened itself into a rectangular shape. She opened it like a book and pulled out a stack of papers. “He was always drawing. A lot of me and my hat, but I was definitely not his favorite subject,” she said, passing him the pages.
It was a stack of drawings, all of them simple and crude, drawn in crayon with lines seemingly put down for the sole purpose of coloring outside of them — and all of them very clear depictions of Gustav. The top drawing was of him and his violin, somehow absolutely recognizable in spite of being barely more than a few red and brown scribbles. The next was of Gustav perched on top of what appeared to be a sofa-sized sushi roll. Gustav in flight above the boat. A tiny Gustav at the center of an enormous red poppy.
He was aware of Stella’s presence in the room, the spiritfarer munching cake and watching him as he took in each picture, but she suddenly seemed very far away. When he reached the final drawing in the stack — a familiar wide-brimmed hat with a red poppy and a fly agaric mushroom tucked into its band — the rustling in his center swelled, fluttered one last time, and settled. He felt the stubborn edge finally uncrumple and smooth itself out.
“I’ve changed my answer,” he said, setting the drawings in his lap and picking his fork back up.
“Uh… which one? The Athena thing, or—”
“You asked what the point of this place is. I still don’t think we’ll ever find the answer, at least not on this side of the door, but I don’t think there are as many answers as there are spirits asking the question.” He picked at the cake again, filling his fork with a bite that contained soft yellow crumb, a crunchy golden edge, and a dusting of powdered sugar.
“You think there’s one definite answer then?”
“Surely not, I assure you, there are millions. But sometimes, I think our questions can align with each other, and perhaps that is the point.” He put the bite of cake in his mouth, then pointed at Stella with the empty fork. “The answer isn’t the important part. Oftentimes, there is no answer at all, and if we do manage to find one, it simply means that something is over. The question, however, and the way you go about considering it — that’s the interesting part. All this?” he said with a sweeping gesture around the kitchen. “This boat and these waters and this strange view of the stars, the existence yet utter irrelevance of time, this magnification of heart but an inability to cry — I think these are the tools we need to be able to consider the question in peace.”
“So you think it’s a gift.”
“Could be.”
“From who?”
“I imagine many would say a god of some flavor,” Gustav said, waving the fork like a conductor’s baton as he spoke. “Or a pantheon of deities working together. Some greater plan or purpose.”
“Okay, but what do you think it is?”
“None of those things. Definitely not a gift.”
“You just said—”
“I said it could be a gift. I think absolutely anything is possible, but attempting to assign intention to every facet of the universe does a great disservice to the wonder of chaos. If you need to think of this place as a gift from anyone, it’s from yourself. Something claimed rather than given. It’s a chance to slow down and take a deep breath instead of launching straight from the build of entropy into the great unknown.”
Stella paused with her fork halfway to her mouth, some unreadable emotion passing through her. “It’s order,” she said, then shook her head and focused on Gustav. “A localized moment of order in between the Before and the After.”
“That is the truth I’ve found, yes. Yours may be different. The truth belonging to our young friend most assuredly was,” he said, nudging the drawings.
“Yeah. It was,” Stella murmured. The wheels continued to turn behind her eyes as she took another bite of cake and rubbed a few circles on Daffodil’s belly. She sighed, smiled weakly, and said, again, “Yeah.”
The night wore on. Daffodil fidgeted his way through a series of complicated resting positions, conversation meandered out of its existential labyrinth and down a simpler garden path of pleasant memories, and the cake slowly disappeared.
“So,” Stella said when only crumbs remained. “Have you changed your tune on sweets?”
“Certainly not, I have no intention of making this a habit.”
“Oh, phew,” she said with a laugh. “I’d hate to lose my most reliable constant.”
Gustav dipped his head and hid his smile in Stanley’s drawings. He could feel more pleats at his center, more questions and worries that hadn’t unfolded and calmed themselves yet, but he wasn’t concerned with them just yet.
“Skipper, would you mind… would it be all right if I held onto these?”
“I can’t imagine a better home for them. And I think Stanley would have agreed.”
“Ah. Good.” He straightened the stack, aligning edges with edges and corners with corners, and tucked the drawings under his wing. “Good.”
Later, much later, several meteor showers, lightning storms, and new constellations later, Stella stood in Gustav’s gallery. The hands of his enormous clock moved in lazy and unpredictable ways, measuring something that, if it was anything at all, was not time. The desk was cluttered, the hearth was cold, and climbing the empty perch, was a burst of bright red poppies.
She sighed and plucked one of the flowers. “I’m not sure I agree about the no inherent meaning thing,” she said to the poppy, spinning it idly between her fingers, “but I’m not sure I disagree either. I suppose that was your point? At any rate, thanks for asking the question with me, friend.”
A mew came from behind her as she was tucking the flower into the Everlight. She turned to see Daffodil hunkered on top of the hearth, pawing the curios toward the edge.
“Sir is a harsh critic,” she said with a laugh, walking over to the hearth and leaning down so Daffodil could scarf himself around her shoulders. “Our esteemed curator isn’t even here to—”
She froze, suddenly at eye level with a framed picture she hadn’t noticed before. A familiar crayon drawing of a hat with a poppy and a toadstool on its brim. Her eyes dropped to the ornaments Daffodil had been pawing at. A menagerie of origami creatures — a deer, a frog, a hedgehog — a dozen in all, each one created using one of Stanley’s drawings, folded in such a way that the crayon scribbles were clearly visible. She picked up the tiny paper cat and held it gingerly in both hands.
Art will remain, Gustav had said, right before…
And there was that feeling again, a bright silver chime, ringing through her center in lieu of the tears that would have normally welled up and overwhelmed her. It was a sensation that had gotten louder the longer she remained in this place. It had been a tinkling wind chime when she first arrived, and a deep knell that night in the kitchen. Now, it echoed through her like a choir of bells as she stared down at Gustav and Stanley’s crew of little paper spirits.
Stella held the paper cat against her chest with one hand, reached up and scritched behind Daffodil’s ear with the other. “I think,” she said slowly, “maybe we’re being pulled into tune. I think it’s almost our turn.”
The boat was nearly empty, only a few of her companions still lingered on this side of the great unknown, but she left the door to the gallery open when she went back to work. Just in case anyone found themself with a final question or two.