myth for delicate peatmoss

When Sweetie dreamed of her grandmother, thick dark water dripped from her long fleshy arms. Everything was grey above. The earth bulged, swollen at the woman’s thighs. She settled into the place where she sat, where, indeed, she would sit for a long time.

The old lady was covered in moss. Sweetie could feel the cold water seep through the fabric of her dress as she knelt next to her grandmother. She had forgotten what it was like to be beside someone who she loved so deeply. The easy feeling. Her grandmother smiled that old way.

Moss had learned to surround the world of the dead. “How did you get here?” Sweetie asked. “No one was allowed to die. Every ghost could not find their way.”

“I cut my way through. I will stay right here. Everyone who has broken a rule stays in the peatland. I can’t tell you how I know this. We all break rules, and many of us will find ourselves in the peatland one day. It’s no punishment. I did this a rule because you will need a special kind of knife for what you are about to do. The moon is a funny place, you can’t trust it as far as you can throw it. Though it won’t ever lie to you, it’s hard to tell exactly what it means.”

Sweetie’s grandmother looked at her kin. It would be the last time, before her eyes learned to see like moss, and her arms learned to exude acids and her body, to eat sun. Her thoughts would leave this storyline and move into perspectives she could not imagine. While she could hold her granddaughter in her mind, she did, and It made her smile.

She gave the knife to her Sweetie, who always had many hands in her dreams.

“You will use this knife when you go to feed the beast. I do not know what you should do with it. But the white cranes brought me to this knife, and I knew I alone must find my way to you, even if it meant becoming a bog.”