The Thread Between Birches
The rain stopped between one step and the next, and Maren stood still to feel it go. Water slid off the leaves and tapped her shoulders. She pressed her palm into the moss, and the moss pressed back, soaked and springy, like the fur of something sleeping. Above her the clouds slid apart. Stars came through the branches one at a time. Then she saw the threads. Every twig and fern was strung with silver lines, fine as hair, hung with beads of rain. The whole forest glittered, as if someone had been busy all through the storm.
Maren walked slowly so she would not break them. By the three birches she found Juniper, a young fox, shaking rain from her ears. Around one of Juniper's paws was a ring of silver thread, wound neat and shining. "From the last rain," Juniper said. "I kept it dry under my den roof." Maren looked down at her own hands. They were empty and cold and smelled of moss. Something pinched in her chest, small and hot. She wanted a ring like that more than she had wanted anything all week. She put her hands in her pockets and said nothing.
Then they both saw it at the same moment. Between the two tallest birches hung one long thread, longer than Maren was tall. Stars sat along it like beads on a string, and it swung without breaking. "That one," said Juniper. "That one would light my whole den door." "That one," said Maren, "would wrap my wrist twice." They stood on either side of it. Neither of them reached. The moss soaked slowly through the knees of Maren's trousers, cold and soft, and the drip from the branches kept its slow count above them.
A small grey spider came down the thread, leg over leg, and sat in the middle. She was wet through and moving like someone at the end of a long night's work. "Mine," she said, "but not for long. I only want to sleep under a dry leaf." Maren asked how long the thread would last. "Till the sun," the spider said. "It goes thin, then it goes. The rain comes back, and the silk comes back." She climbed down, folded herself into a curl of bark, and stopped moving.
Maren lifted the thread onto her finger. It weighed less than breath. It was cool and faintly sticky, and it caught on the rough place on her knuckle. She thought about carrying it home, wound tight, hidden in her pocket where no wind could reach it. By morning it would be a grey smudge on her thumb. She looked at Juniper, who was watching the thread and trying hard not to look at it. Then Maren thought of something else. "Hold that end," she said. "Walk backwards. Slowly."
They carried the thread between them, a step at a time, across the wet ferns to the mouth of Juniper's den. Maren tied one end to a root. Juniper pressed the other into a crack in the bark with her nose. The thread hung across the doorway and went on catching stars, every bead of rain holding a small white light. "Now it is at your door," Maren said, "and I can see it from here." Juniper sat down underneath it. The light fell in dots across her wet fur. "The rain comes back, and the silk comes back," she said.
Then Juniper lifted her paw and worked the old ring loose with her teeth. It came away in one soft loop, grey now, not shining at all. She hooked it over Maren's finger. It felt like nothing, like the thought of a thread. Maren turned her hand in the starlight and the loop turned with it. Juniper made room at the den mouth. Maren lay down on the dry sand just inside the doorway, with the moss smell behind her and the fern smell in front. Her damp sleeve warmed slowly against the fox's side.
Above them the thread moved when the wind moved, and the stars slid along it and came back. Maren watched one bead hold on, and let go, and fall into the ferns without a sound. In the morning the bright web would be gone, and the moss would dry, and the birches would stand plain and bare. She did not mind as much as she had expected. "The rain comes back, and the silk comes back," she said, quietly. Juniper's side went up, and down, and up. Maren breathed along with it until she could not tell whose breath was whose.