In the dusty evening fog, a gaggle of men stumble from the alehouse, pink-cheeked and dizzy as they shoulder each other toward home.
“Doe tells me the blight is a curse from night itself,” Pollock says, pulling his peg leg from between the cobblestones. “Punishment for our drinking.”
Shelduck, who has a face like a rotting tree stump, laughs. “And what about the dandelion wine she ferments under her bed?”
“I suppose night gave her special permission,” snickers Pinworm, who looks like a mopey dog. “As long as the blight doesn’t touch our hops—”
The three men round a corner and stop short. A small white face hovers in front of them—a girl in a tattered black nightgown.
“Slug,” Shelduck starts, “you should be in bed. Don’t you still have a fever?”
“There’s a man up the road. His wagon is stuck in a ditch,” Slug says in a thin voice. Pollock squints into the distance, but there is only fog and more fog.
In all their years, they have only seen three outsiders come to Cleaver: a lost tax collector, a wandering soothsayer, and the kind old cannibal who set up camp on the cliff's edge.
Pinworm kneels to tuck a lock of hair behind Slug’s ear. “Are you sure the fever isn’t making you see things?”
The girl just shakes her head and extends her finger into the dark. The men trundle on. In all their years, they have only seen three outsiders come to Cleaver: a lost tax collector, a wandering soothsayer, and the kind old cannibal who set up camp on the cliff’s edge. He only eats their dead when invited.
The man up the road is not like the other outsiders. He is blank-faced and strangely colorless in his seat. He holds reins attached to nothing at all as he stares down at the rut that chews his wagon wheel.
“But where are your horses?” Shelduck asks. The man finally looks up at them, and his face seems to split open. Pinworm flinches, expecting a scream, but the man only laughs and laughs and laughs.
—
By morning, all of Cleaver has heard of the strange man, who was finally carried to a cot in the temple attic. The field workers, who woke early to uproot and burn the blighted rye, watch the man and several children push the wagon from the small ditch.
“Should we let the children help him?” Mouse asks, swiping the sweat from her brow.
“He seems harmless enough,” Doe says, bending to tug a stubborn stalk.
Mouse turns to Pollock, who fidgets with a black stem and stares at the wagon. “What was it he told you? When you finally got him to lie down?”
"I will make everything right," Pinworm says. "Those were his words."
“He got all serious for a moment,” Pollock mumbles, and the other workers pause to listen. “He grabbed my arm, and he thanked us. And he made some promise about helping us or the town or—”
“I will make everything right,” Pinworm says. “Those were his words.”
The field workers are quiet for a moment before Mouse exclaims, “Look!” The man has lifted the canvas cover to reveal a smear of deepest blue. “I’ve never seen that color before.”
The townsfolk have no word for the flowers that fill the wagon bed. The man only calls them “blue” as he hands them out to the children. They trade him quartz pebbles and lark feathers, buckwheat biscuits and stick puppets, dead beetles and chicken bones. He takes pocketfuls of catmint, yarrow, cowslip, and aster in exchange for the impossible flowers. Skeptical, the adults keep their distance from the wagon.
The strange vendor shows the children how to weave the blue into crowns and tells them exactly how long to soak the petals for tea. He teaches them to crush the flowers into pigment and streak their faces. Some children bring home whole wreaths, and others dry the blue over flames for sachets to hang around their necks. They chew the petals and stew them into murky soups that their parents politely decline to taste. All day, the children run through the streets with fistfuls of blue, twisting the flowers around lantern posts and skinny juniper trees.
By evening, the entire town is smudged with blue. Slug watches from her window as she drifts in and out of fevered visions, crowded by the indigo flowers. She waits until Aunt Doe and Cousin Squirrel curl up on their cots for the night, and then she slips out the window. Slug slinks across the cobblestone, dodging the chicken-soup glow of the alehouse on her way to the wagon.
She squints and realizes the man is planting little, squirming... fingers.
She is startled to see the old cannibal standing on the horizon, pale against the bruised sky. Slug follows his gaze to the blight field, where the flower seller kneels in the dirt. Something gray wriggles in the loam beside him. She squints and realizes the man is planting little, squirming…fingers.
She inhales sharply and looks up to see that the old cannibal is watching her now. He shakes his head once, slowly. Slug holds her breath the entire run home.
—
The next day, the children start dreaming. Their families find them wandering the town with empty eyes and slack jaws. Pipistrelle tries to climb onto the thatch roof of the granary before her mother ties her to the bed. Squirrel gets tangled in a loom in the weaver’s hut, and Woodlouse tumbles into the pigpen, where it takes two men to pull him from the mud.
Mouse catches and tackles her brother before he can walk to the cliff’s edge. She finds a two-headed gosling limp in his hands. After swaddling her brother tightly in his bedsheets, she brings the bird to the gathering around the old well.
“But it’s not gosling season,” Doe says. “Where could he have…”
“He always dreams of geese,” Mouse says. “What if—”
The blacksmith pulls a short knife from her belt and cuts the bird’s breast. Crumpled flowers spill out until the gosling dissolves into blue. “Just a dream.”
Strange objects begin to appear around the other children. Squirrel covers his cot in apple seeds and broken marionettes. Muskrat fills the old gristmill with soap bubbles that burst into petals, and Pipistrelle spawns twenty-three wagon wheels with spindles that twist together. Woodlouse produces a giant water clock with holes in the wrong places. A midday drizzle collects and drips uselessly through.
Slug is awake, but Doe ties her down all the same. “I’m not dreaming, Auntie,” she keeps insisting, but Doe only strokes her hair and looks out the window.
All day, the town wrangles the children to order, cuffing their wrists and peeling their dreams from their outstretched hands. The townsfolk search and search for the strange flower seller, but he and the wagon are gone.
At dusk, the bells call them to the square. Assemblyman Weasel reassures the parents, “We are working on burning all the blue we can find.”
Doe holds Squirrel firmly to her chest. “How can flowers make our children dream?”
“We don’t know,” Weasel says, “but we are looking for the man so we can—”
“But how could you have lost him?” Pollock asks, “A man can’t just disappear.”
“And until yesterday,” Assemblyman Sparrow sneers, “syrup jars and spinning tops didn’t just appear out of thin air.”
Later, none of the townsfolk will be able to say why they did not move to grab the children. They will look away and flush when Slug asks.
“So how will you make our children right? We—” Squirrel flails, kicking Doe’s chin and tumbling to the cobblestone. At once, the children erupt from the cottages—crashing from windows and thumping down front steps. The town is a blur of skinned knees and windmilling arms and vacant faces.
Later, none of the townsfolk will be able to say why they did not move to grab the children. They will look away and flush when Slug asks. But for now, they stand still and watch the fog eat their children. The kids sprint into the mist, toward the cliff, but there is no fall. The townsfolk will find no bodies, only clouds where their children should have been.
Doe is the first to scream. She lobs a stone at Sparrow’s head, and the Assembly scatters. The town has one throat, one raw wail against the dark.
And then there is the sound of wheels on stone. The town turns as one to see the colorless man pulling a strange metal thing behind him. It has a hammered copper face with lumpy, lopsided eyes and a slit mouth. It has seven wrought-iron arms, twisted at awful angles. Its rusty belly is distended and torn open, with jagged quartz as teeth lining the tear. The man picks up a tattered hobbyhorse and tosses it into the stomach-maw, which seems to shiver. One by one, the man feeds the children’s scattered dreams to the metal beast: a straw dove, a tin of pepper cookies, and a firepoker shaped like a calla lily. The machine hisses and spits curling smog.
Shelduck pounces and wrestles the man to the ground. The stranger groans slightly but does not resist. “What have you done with our children?”
“Nothing,” the man says, and Shelduck places a knee between the stranger’s shoulder blades. He only looks bored. “They wanted to be clouds.”
The town is very quiet before Doe asks, “What is that thing?” She cannot find a word to capture its wrongness.
“My life-giver,” the man says. “I told you. I will make everything right.”
That night, the town tosses and thrashes in its sleep. Slug cannot close her eyes. There is something tugging at her chest. She slips her bindings and tiptoes back to the rye fields, where she watches a metal creature harvest whole bodies from the earth. It pulls them up by their hands, letting their legs dangle like roots before dropping them onto the loam. The beast leaves neat lines of gray flesh in its wake.
—
For a heart clenching moment, the townsfolk think the children have come home. But when they look out their windows, they only see themselves.
At the first cock-crow, the town stirs and rubs sleep from its eyes. The people are keen to roll over and squeeze their eyes shut against memories of the cliff, but—something is wrong. They go stone-still when they hear it: distant clanging pails and pumping bellows and creaking plough wheels—the sounds of morning work.
For a heart-clenching moment, the townsfolk think the children have come home. But when they look out their windows, they only see themselves. They watch themselves burning rye stalks and tilling soil and repairing the mill.
Doe crumples back into Squirrel’s cot and dry heaves. Then, the door flies open, and—Doe walks in. Across the room, Slug startles awake and watches the other Doe cross to the basin and scrub her face pink.
That face, Doe realizes, It’s all twisted. The eyes are slightly too close, the line of the mouth is too sharp, and the left ear is only a nub, as if it ran out of time to bloom. Doe watches the wrong-Doe drag a horn-carved comb through the knots in her hair, ripping out tangled clumps.
“Who are you?” Doe asks, but the other woman just keeps yanking out her hair.
Pinworm finds his other self in the blight field and shakes him until the shears fly from his hands. The other Pinworm unhinges his jaw with the force of his laughter, which devolves into hacking coughs. His teeth and tongue are blue—blue-blue—and he spits up a wet lump of petals. Down the headland, Shelduck punches the wrong-Shelduck in his too-small nose, and it leaks a slow trail of blue. Everywhere, the townsfolk wrestle with themselves.
A man wearing Assemblyman Sparrow’s coat stands on the front steps of the great hall, facing the doors. He will not turn around, but the townsfolk are sure he will not have Assemblyman Sparrow’s face.
Slug searches every corner of the town for signs of herself or her missing friends, but she finds nothing. She ends up on the hill with the gentle cannibal, looking down on the valley below. “Did you see where the man went?”
“He crawled into the stomach of his metal creature and melted into the mist. I don’t expect you’ll find him again.”
“But where are the other kids? Why couldn’t he bring them back?”
“I s’pose he used their dreams all up, and there was nothing left.”
—
The townsfolk of Cleaver enter a foggy stupor, minds thick with grief. Morning and night blur into one. Every time they try to return to their lives, their throats hitch on the silence the children left behind. The blue-tongues perform the routines of the town like brutal clockwork. They cull the blight to black dirt and till a new field for oats and barley. They teach the old gristmill to spin again. The town shambles on—a skeleton caught in a stiff wind—and leaves its people behind. So, the townsfolk of Cleaver pack their paltry belongings into knapsacks and horse carts and prepare to journey into the fog.
"Bit of home for you."
Slug visits the old cannibal one last time. He promises to watch over the town, and he gives her a flower—dull green and prickly. It is a sea-holly, the kind that only grows at the bottom of the cliff. “Bit of home for you.”
At dusk, the blue-tongues crowd the edges of town and watch the townsfolk climb into their wagons. Dewy-eyed, Doe squeezes Slug’s shoulder once before the wagon lurches into motion. Slug clutches the sea-holly’s bristles as they disappear into the strange mist.
