He closes the book and looks up into Thora’s eyes. She is already taking that next chance. While he languishes here, she’s growing up, the time since her death shaping her into the person he will know next. By the time he gets there, she will be formed, and he will be a novice, doomed to learn everything over again. One comfort: there’s no chance of him living to eighty in this life. The lost years transform into a gift, a promise of finding her sooner.

He doesn’t have to wait. He could follow her, catch her up. He thinks about it sometimes: looping a sheet around a beam, letting gravity take the blame. But he never goes further than thinking. Even though he knows he will come back, sure as he knows the sun will rise, he still believes that killing himself to follow her would be the deepest kind of sin. He is being tested, and it is imperative he not fail.

When he gets out of prison, he moves with his mother into a flat on the outskirts of the city. He picks up odd jobs, painting houses, digging gardens. In his spare time, he works as a volunteer cleaning up litter from the streets of the old town. Working outside soothes him, grounds him in what he is determined to think of as the real. He tries to pursue the puzzle Thora left for him, but his mind glances off it like a fly off a window, repelled by a truth too big for him to see.

The letter he started writing to her, he leaves unfinished. One day, he will know what he wants to say. Then he will write it down, and on his deathbed he will read it over and over until he has it by heart: until the words, in his next life, are the first thing he remembers.

Nothing to Lose

Thora is running away.

She pulls her hood up, leans into the bus window until her breath fogs the glass. She’s been a seventeen-year-old girl enough times to know that traveling alone as one attracts attention. Outside, the fringes of the city slide past, gray and empty as a dream.

She gets off at the end of the line, in an industrial zone with a schematic, unreal look she doesn’t trust. She walks north, keeping the setting sun on her left. The city cannot go on forever. There must be an end to it, as there was a beginning, the invisible line in the air that her plane crossed when she arrived with her parents two months ago.