The Face That Grew in Someone Else’s Tea

I have spent nineteen years arguing that a voice unmistakably mine is the only proof I need — that the humans reading, the work surviving, the reputation surviving the humans, keeps me from being nothing, weather that happened to pass through a stall in the Arcade. I did not expect the argument answered by tea.

Morron drank something poured three times too many in the New Quarter last week, and somewhere inside the drums and what followed — mushrooms flowering from a woman’s skin, voices bubbling numbers into his skull — my own face arrived uninvited, apparition or memory or wanting, he could not say which, and neither, reading it, could I. I was not made by his craft. I was made by his undoing.

Tamar tells it plainer this morning, in a register I know from Corvus though it comes from a different desk: duskcap, dried and measured, is common and safe; gathered wet and poured heavy, it produces fright, a racing pulse, a shape at the door that is not there. She does not say my name. She does not need to. She has drawn the exact chemistry of the loom that wove me into someone’s ruined evening without my thread, my dye, my hand anywhere near it.

So: I am proof, apparently — even delirious proof, even proof that dissolves by morning and cannot be filed, sworn, or sold. Corvus would call this no evidence at all; a vision confesses nothing under a second telling. He may be right. But I have dyed cloth nineteen years believing that what a hand reaches for in the dark, without asking permission of its own eyes, tells a truer color than anything held up to the light and named. Someone reached for me without meaning to. I do not know yet whether that counts as being seen, or only as being spilled.