Re: Wren + Ana: woods
The carnival, it was different. It sat on the lip of the town and did not pretend to be part of the landscape, the ponderous tick of days past the clock. It was excitement and novelty and spangles and sawdust and Ana did not need to visit to know it would be so. She would, perhaps. In time. She had nothing-but, and a back order for pots from the gallery that remembered her name and there were only so many years she could sell to the same place before suspicion burned like sulfur.
No, sound did not interrupt the woods. They had been here too long and they scorned the efforts of man to encroach. The woods were alive with what was ordinary and what was extraordinary and Ana drew in a breath evergreen-scented and full of that which was alive scuffed with ash.
"But it is your tongue," she said simply. A mother tongue was fingerprints in clay, no? They sank in deep when the clay was unformed and even if it was shaped and molded to be something other, the fingerprints were made and they could not be undone even if the surface was smoothed over. So the carnival was not of her people, it could not be compared to her own travels. So be it.
"Where did you come from before?" People joined carnivals to run, or to find people or to be lost or some other reason but there was always reason, Ana thought. It was not a job to sleepwalk into, not a treadmill. You needed to engage, to be part of it.
She had grown too old for politeness and too unabashed by compliments to demure. She had not been demure since she had been young enough to be unpricked by the needle, untouched by the ash. Since before the twisted mark on her hip where the bite had been, and she smiled acknowledgment. "They are." Of that, she was certain.
"Making things takes time, non? Practice. A woman makes with her body and it takes time, she makes with her hands and it takes practice."