Poné stands on the walkway between the old bakery and Lucien’s house. Except it’s not Lucien’s house anymore—he and his family were transferred two months ago. They were one of the first families to leave. When the tilting incidents occurred, whispers had started to scurry through the narrow passages of the Claire-Ship.
It’s falling, they said. The Ship is falling.
Poné used to play with Lucien and Elaine—Lucien’s sister—often. Elaine would stand on the Starsender balcony overlooking the main square, grabbing onto the metal edge with humid hands and getting rust on her fingers. She’d rub them off on her brother’s tweed jacket, which was stitched with small animals to cover up holes bitten through by web moths. Poné had helped Lucien’s mother sew those in, hand shaking from how tensely she gripped the needle in the watery Claire-Light. These memories should feel foggy now—like the way the cobblestone streets get in the early hours of the morning, painted blue and silent—but they’re not. Elaine’s giggles when Lucien would pull her away from the edge of the balcony are still clear in the cold. The sound would catch the attention of the Shipspeople, who would look up from the rickety stalls below and grin at the sight of Elaine’s blonde braids. She used to loop them around her head like a crown. Perched on that balcony she looked like a princess. Poné had wanted to make a flower crown for her once, like in the leather-bound books Mother had, but flowers were hard to come by: Claire-Ship 11 was made up of scraps and bolts, oil smears of bronze and gray. A body stitched together with metal wires by the scraped hands of Claire-Miners decades ago.
She misses Elaine; her heart bruises her ribcage with it. Poné hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye. They went into the fog one day, pulled along by men in sunwashed suits clasped by buttons that shone in the morning light, and she never saw them again. She doesn’t even know which ship they were transferred to.
This alley used to smell buttery with bread; that’s gone too. If it weren’t so clear in her mind now, like seeds stuck between her teeth, it would be like there was nothing here to begin with. Poné doesn’t know how long she’s been standing here, knuckles white against the walkway’s railing. Loneliness gnaws at her heart with neglected hunger.
Another creak groans in the air, simmers beneath her nail beds and sings a long-out-of-tune song. They used to be louder, these creaks. They had always existed, like the calls of the birds nesting in the drainpipes: ordinary and certainly no cause for concern. They sang her to sleep when Mother was too ill to do it. When Poné whispered her fears in the darkness, alone in the Shallows of the Ship, the gears would respond with their slow rumble, purring through her. They echoed down hallways and rippled through pipes, clanged in the morning and twinkled at night. They stood as a reminder that she wasn’t alone. Eventually, the calls got louder, and they would scream back at her. They were tinted copper from a shredded throat, and Poné would rush down the long winding steps that circled like a storm drain, down to the Shallows. The whispers of the Claire-Children, those sweet guardian spirits of the Claire-Water, would follow her. Pitter-patter, like dancers’ toes twirling in the hold.
The steps past the forecastle into the depths were the only part of the Ship made of solid stone, and the lack of hollow thumps beneath her feet would make Poné stumble, boots tumbling into each other like dominoes. She would reach the bottom of the Shallows, and the creaks would scream louder, the Claire-Children’s whispers growing in sorrow and intensity.
Eventually, the Ship’s song had reached the ears of the other Shipspeople. It burned in Poné’s chest, silent and everlasting, unflickering and solitary. In the humid depths, she would whisper to the Ship that her heart was like a true Claire-Light now: a flame with no substance, yet always, always burning.
The Ship had not responded. Perhaps it knew it would be a lie to agree, especially now. The water that powered it had gone dull. It was beginning to fade in the same way Mother had, a prolonged moan that made Poné’s hair stand on end, a beast heaving for air as the clouds suffocated it. Mother had gone with a wheeze, the altitude pressing all of the air from her lungs, hand limply hitting Poné’s thighs where Poné had been kneeling over her. I will survive, the Ship’s bells tinkled in the biting North wind, only to cough and retch next to Poné on the railing, metal everywhere slowly turning burnt orange with rust and sadness.
When Poné was 9 years old, one of the Meatloader’s cats had kittens. Small white things, fuzzy, and the talk of all the Ship’s children, Poné included. The litter came with a runt, and Poné held the small creature and felt a certain kinship with it. It lived in a lean-to made of extra metal scraps where it was ignored by its own mother. I will protect you, Poné had whispered into its fur. I will sing you to sleep. She washed the sinew off its back and fed it milk from Old Mira’s shop, wrapped it in old dish towels still warm from where they were hanging in the sun. She brought it down to the Shallows and tip-tapped her fingers along the thick pipes that ran down the metal walls, letting the hum of the engines lull the small thing to sleep. The kitten died two days later. She had cried and cried in Mother’s bed that night. It feels wrong to remember this, somehow. Mother and the Ship were the only two who had known about it. It was a secret that had existed only between the three of them.
Poné looks out at the endless sea of clouds, calm and basking in their omniscience. She envies them, bites crescents into her hand from jealousy. When she was smaller, she wondered what it would be like to fly amongst those white ghosts, to push her hand through them and let the water run between her fingers like webs. The only webs she found now were the ones in the corners of the kitchen and the space between the engines. Her childhood is painted gold and gray, and she will remain the only one to ever remember it. A kitten limping towards the hand that feeds it.
The clock tower rings deep and heavy and the water coating the streets ripples like a second skin, homes shaking on their watery foundations. Poné’s legs tremble, her knees weak little things from her days jumping from roof to roof. Mother would always tell her she spoke like things had happened to someone else; a past life, an echo of her own experiences. She would pull Poné against her chest and whisper into her curly rust-red hair that she was much too young to talk like an “old lady”, that it was her job to speak the jadedness out of Poné. She was gone now, like the cat. The pain is dulled like a bruise, the clanking of the oars in her ears thumping steadily with her pulse.
The Ship knows. The Ship is dying too.
A sob hiccups in her chest. Her throat is so raw from crying, skin rubbed red beneath her eyes. The Claire-Children mutter in the corridors. Are they telling her to leave, or to go? She wants the Ship to keep her in stasis. She wants Mother back. She would cough up her heart and place it in the engine herself, watch it get crushed and grinded by the gears until the blood dripped into the Claire-Water below, webbing in its dissolution. A life for a life.
The Ship creaks and groans as nuts and bolts ricochet off the tiled rooftop of the bakery onto the cobblestone at her feet. The clock tower rings again, and it almost seems to sway in the sky, bleached white against a bright blue. Poné has to squint her eyes to see it. She is good at watching without looking, the way only someone who’s had to live with suppressed love knows how.
Poné tears herself away from the railing and walks in a daze down the street. The only sound is the creaking of the Ship—closer now, almost urgent. It will fall soon, crash into the earth where nothing lives or dies and be left to rot like a corpse. Her home will lay peeled, an open ribcage, and she will be asked to lie in it. She wants to. She wants to climb out of her body and become a bird, fly deep into the clouds and nest in the remains of her love. The Ship wouldn’t mind. It would let her keep all her tender things behind in its bones.
The water permanently ripples now, the vibrations coming from somewhere deep beneath the Ship, some place not even Poné can reach. Her Ship is in such a poor state. Tears burn at her esophagus again. It’s like a muscle in her back that she can’t stretch out, a hole she can’t fill.
Poné climbs up the rickety stairs to the Starsender balcony. It’s the second tallest point in Claire-Ship 11 besides the clock tower, but probably the oldest. The stairs are thin iron sheets melted into each other and strung on a pole like makeshift charms, and the railing trembles like a scared animal beneath her grip as she hoists herself upwards. It’s a habit from the days with Elaine to avoid the steps and climb up through only the railing. A game, their own small tradition. Poné has climbed these steps every day since Elaine’s departure and not once has she broken that habit. It’s like a balm, that some things stay the same. Like how she still hasn’t made Mother’s bed, as if her scent is still nestled in the pillows. As if Mother lives in more than just her memories. Elaine lives there too, holding the mug with a chip in it. Lucien had picked it up when it was too hot and had dropped it on the table out of surprise. Poné liked to run her tongue across the crack, feel the places where the clay texture was rougher and sharper. Elaine would scold her, tuck her hair behind her ear and tell her she would cut her tongue. Poné had kind of wanted to, just to see what Elaine would do.
The railing of the Starsender balcony is frigid beneath her hands. The morning frost hasn’t melted yet. It’s as if the Ship is sunken, like in the old books. The way ships were supposed to be, Mother would tell her. The sun barely peaks through the highest layer of clouds. The world is painted blue, cornflower and azur. The Claire-Children are dancing in the corridors. She hears them. She wonders if the other Claire-Ships have their own spirits too. If they whisper to the children there, point them in the direction of sweets and stars. Watch over them. Occasionally steal the laundry hanging between the buildings on copper wire.
The morning they came to collect Mother’s body, Poné had asked one of the men in yellow to let her leave in the last group. She had pressed a kiss to Mother’s cold knuckles and let them carry her body away. Her heart was in her throat; she almost threw it up at the man’s feet. The sun had glinted off his buttons the same way they had on the morning Elaine and Lucien left. The man, the taker, had stared at her, freckled face reflected in his blue eyes, and finally agreed. He had looked profoundly confused about it. As if it were that strange to be attached to her home, to this extension of herself.
Poné presses her lips against the balcony railing the same way Mother used to, the same way Elaine used to. Poné is used to loving her Ship. It is an easy, habitual love, the kind that you take for granted. She is the last to leave. She doesn’t know if she will stay or if she will go.
Please forgive me, she chokes out in the corners of her mind. I love you. It immortalizes me to be loved by you. I only exist through your love. Now that you’re gone, who am I?
For a blessed moment, there is silence. A gap in time where there is no answer to her questions. The Ship doesn’t know either. Together, they wait for a response.