The Crossroads Pause: Chapter 12 - The Pigtail Monster

 The Crossroads Pause: Chapter 12 - The Pigtail Monster

  by Eva Marie Woywod and friends. Dedicated to Mom.

The flocks have done their work.

Over marble halls and glass towers, over every capital where greed still wears a suit, the sky has spoken in petals and thunder.

The birds wheel once in exhausted triumph, then begin the long journey home.

Asha reaches the southernmost point first.

She stands on a red-dust road at the edge of a desert that has swallowed too many small footprints.

The wind-horse dissolves beneath her, becoming warm air that smells of potato pancakes and distant roses.

She is taller now (not in years, but in the way only children who have carried other children’s pain ever grow).

Her boots are scarred, her eyes older than any calendar could hold.

She sits on a flat stone, lets her head rest against her knees, and for the first time in months she simply breathes.

No running.

No rescuing.

Just the quiet sound of her own heart remembering how to be young again.

Far north, Lior reaches the lake that never quite freezes.

The owl feathers in his braid are heavy with frost and someone else’s tears.

He kneels at the water’s edge, dips his hands in, watches the moon ripple.

He is growing too (bones stretching, shoulders widening, the way grief and mercy stretch a person until they fit the size of the world).

They will not see each other for a long while.

Different roads.

Different children waiting.

Different darknesses that need chasing.

It is bittersweet, this parting that is not really a parting (because the same roses bloom inside both their chests now, and the same sky carries both their names).

Lior closes his eyes.

And there it is, soft as the first time he ever heard it, the night a little girl with scraped knees and fierce eyes looked at a strange boy and asked, “Do you need help?”

Only this time the voice is older, steadier, threaded with all the miles they have run together and apart.

This time it says:

“I love you, Piggy.

Go get those tears.”

He laughs once (wet and wondering), wipes his face on the sleeve that still smells of owl feathers and Berta’s kitchen.

Asha, hundreds of miles away, feels the laugh inside her own ribs, like an echo that never needs sound to travel.

They stand at the same moment.

Asha turns south, braid flying like a banner.

Lior turns north, silver strands catching starlight.

They do not say goodbye.

They say, instead (quiet, certain, to the wind and the roses and the waiting children):

See you at the next crossroads.

And somewhere, in a garden that refuses winter, Therese smiles without looking up from her weeding.

Rita closes the gate softly behind the last gnome.

The birds keep flying.

The warriors keep growing.

And every child still walking a dark road tonight suddenly feels, without knowing why, that someone is running toward them (someone who already loves them, someone who will not stop).

The war is long.

The love is longer.

And the crossroads are always waiting.

The Quiet Hours

While Asha and Lior stand at their separate horizons, the older warriors finally, finally, come home.

Berta reaches the kitchen first.

The moment her boots cross the threshold, the iron skillet sighs and goes quiet.

She hangs her scarlet-and-indigo quilt-cape on the hook, sinks into the rocking chair, and sleeps (real, deep, grandmother sleep).

One by one the others drift in, filling every chair and quilt until the room is a soft mountain of snoring, hand-holding, exhausted love.

The fae dim to candle-glow.

The gnomes curl up in the breadbox.

The roses outside bow their heads for the night.

And then, last of all, comes Kelly.

Kelly the cat.

A special kind of dark chocolate, one ear torn from some long-ago fight, tail held high like a battle standard.

He pads in through the open window, scarlet thread still tied around his neck from the night the saints handed out assignments.

He circles the room once, checking every sleeping granny, every banked ember, every gnome curled like a loaf of bread.

Satisfied the house is safe, he leaps soundlessly onto Berta’s lap, kneads the quilt twice, and settles into a perfect black comma against her chest.

Berta’s hand finds his head without waking.

She scratches behind the torn ear the way she has every night for as long as she could remember.

Kelly begins to purr (a low, rolling engine that fills the kitchen like distant thunder that has decided to be gentle).

Far across the sea, in the Scottish Highlands, another Kelly (this one a wild son with boots and a crooked grin) steps off the train into the mist.

But here, in the heart of the quiet kitchen, the original Kelly keeps watch.

Because even warriors need a cat on duty.

And tonight, with grandmothers snoring, roses resting, and the whole tired army finally asleep, Kelly the cat closes his deep blue eyes and lets the purr say what words never could:

I’ve got the night shift.

Go ahead and dream.

No one is taking our children while I’m breathing.

The fire settles lower.

The house breathes with him.

Love, tonight, has whiskers and a scarlet thread and does not need to speak at all.

It simply purrs.

Sleep children, old and young, we all need the owl feathers and silver threads of care-

Tomorrow will Dawn.

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