There was a list on the fridge in the Cabin of the Wind. It was tacked up loosely, like even the gentlest breeze might tear it down. It had been there a long time. It read:
To do:
- Blow out stars
- Bird calls
- Sun up
- Draw clouds
- Rain today?
- Otherwise bees
- Open flowers
- Dandelion seeds
- Rustle grass
- Whistle crags
- Tumble weeds
- Tousle trees
The last item on the list was a spider. At least, it was now; it used to be something else, before the spider had slung down against it to weave its home. The spider was one of the last of its kind, and it had also been there, unmoving, for a very long time.
Perhaps it would have been more fitting if the spider were number 8. Spiders, it is said, have 8 legs. There was a time when you could make a list from zero to a thousand and there’d be a creature with legs for each number on the list. Garden snake, sea snail, ostrich, kangaroo, antelope, brittle star, ladybug, septopod, spider. And on, and on.
Now, there was no use for legs. Nothing moved. There was the spider, and the list, and dust on every surface of the Cabin of the Wind. It was the dust of centuries.
The Cabin of the Wind was a single room, split by a thin half-wall. To one side was the kitchen, with a wood stove, an icebox, and pans piled up in the washbasin. The windows were open, but the air was stale. The door, too, hung at an improbable angle, neither open nor shut. The sky outside was black, cloudless. The prairie beyond the threshold was lit only by stars, like holes in the curtain of night.
On the other side of the thin divider was a small chamber. There was a knobbly writing desk, covered with papers, caked with dust. In one window sat a flowerpot, filled with soil. In another, a lantern, run dry. And, in the corner, there was a bed, sheets a mess, spilling pillows and linens out onto the floor.
It was in this bed that the Wind awoke.
She groaned the Groan of the Wind. It had been the kind of sleep that leaves one ragged and fogged, yearning for a do-over. The kind of waking that illuminates why babies cry, when they are born.
The Wind turned over to face the wall. Surely, it was almost dawn. She had always risen before the sun. That was the nature of the job, of course. But it was so hard to get out of bed. Her eyes slowly shut.
She dreamt of cherry blossoms blowing like flocks of white warblers across the sky above the trees. The cherry blossoms turned black, like ash from a great fire, the mass of them filling the sky until the blue was blotted out. The Wind was afraid, until she saw that the ash was like soil, that the sky was filled with soil, and she watched seedlings wriggle and reach their nascent stems down from the sky, a garden growing down to meet her.
When the Wind awoke again, she was hungry. She rose from the Bed of the Wind, shrugging off blankets, and wafted into the kitchen, kicking up dust. There was food in the fridge. It was all gone to mold.
Fridge was a word she had picked up from humans. It was an icebox, really. When she closed it, her list detached, drifting slowly to the floor. She picked it up and looked at the spider.
What a peculiar creature. It gazed up at her for a moment, and then skittered around to the underside of the list. Its web was empty. No flies in the jet-black night.
There were not too many insects, anymore. Not too many birds, or flowers. How long had the spider been here? The Memory of the Wind was not known for its attention to detail, but surely the Wind would remember if she had seen the spider yesterday.
She blew outside, and the door banged shut. She swept around her cabin to the little coop of the Rooster of the Wind. He was awake, and he stared up at her through the chicken wire with marbled eyes, expectant.
“Is it almost morning?” she asked.
The Rooster of the Wind gave a paleolithic gulp.
No water. Right.
She went to the rain barrel which fed the rooster’s trough. But of course it was empty, and the pipe which led down from the gutters was filled with crisp, brittle leaves.
Some of the pans in the washbasin had water in them, but she knew it was foul and oily. If she tried to give that to the Rooster of the Wind, she would never hear the end of it.
She took a bucket from beside the rain barrel and rushed out across the dark prairie to a nearby lake. Or, it had been a lake. Now it was rocks, just rocks instead of grass, otherwise indistinguishable from the rest of the landscape.
The rocks were fine enough that she could dig through them herself, and soon she had made a small hole. Were the rocks darker, cooler, a few layers down? Or was it a trick of the night?
She clawed at the rocks until she felt one that was wet. After a few minutes the hole was bigger, and she cupped her hands and ladled a few drops of water into the bucket. That would have to do, for now.
Back at her cabin, she set the bucket down and the Rooster of the Wind drank greedily. When he was done, he looked up at her.
“Cock-a-doodle-do,” he said, wearily.
“Am I late?” asked the Wind, a question to which she already knew the answer.
“I’ve been sitting here for something like a hundred years,” he said, “trying to call, parched half to death.” He gulped and began to strut along the perimeter of his pen.
“A hundred years?” The Wind had thought she might have missed a few days.
“Yeah. One hundred. I counted,” said the rooster. “Coming up on one hundred and one. One hundred and one sunless, windless, rainless years.”
“You kept count?”
“One hundred years, eleven months, sixteen days, and four hours. It’s three in the afternoon, right now.”
The ticking of his little rooster mind always impressed her. He was an incredible timekeeper. The Wind tried to remember yesterday morning. Or, rather, the yesterday that was one hundred years ago.
She had been tired, she knew that much. The life of the Wind was so much running-around, so much fuss, endless toil for a ragged world. Blowing bees between wilted flowers. Carrying birdsong, when dropping one melody meant you’d lost half the orchestra. Rolling the Sun up into the sky each morning, just to watch it roll back down again at dusk.
It was enough to make the Wind want to go back to bed.
“Bed?” said the rooster, incredulous. “What am I supposed to do, sit around and die of thirst?”
She hurt at the thought of starting again. Even just taking the first step felt impossible; the sunrise had implications that the Wind did not like.
Because if she went to fetch the Sun, everything would be bright, and she would have to squint and face the state of the world. Everything that needed to be done. It was easier to stay in the dark. If she went back to the Bed of the Wind, the night would last forever.
“When I die, I want to die screaming,” grumbled the rooster, strutting back and forth, shaking his little prehistoric head. “Not withered away, like lavender taped up on some grandma’s wall.”
The Wind sighed.
“You have a list, don’t you?”
The Wind swept back into the cabin and sat on her bed. The papers on her desk scattered when she passed, and as they drifted down to the floor, she saw her list in the kitchen. It had landed in a pot in the washbasin. It was slowly sinking.
She rushed into the kitchen and papers and dust went everywhere again—it was hard being the wind—and she pulled the List of the Wind from the oily pot-water.
It was ruined.
It did not matter, of course. She could just write the list again. She knew her jobs by heart; she had been doing this since the world was young. But the Memory of the Wind was a muscle memory, a memory of habit. Not a memory of details and pedantry. Not a memory of lists. She worried that she had forgotten. That habits had been lost in her hundred-year sleep. That the Memory of the Wind, like everything else, was not what it used to be.
She grabbed at the papers on the floor and found a letter from her great uncles, the old Westerlies. She had never understood the appeal of that life, so far away from the forests and rivers and living things. But she had been jealous, towards the end, of the big sea-winds. They did not have to deal with humans.
She turned the letter over and scrawled the List of the Wind at the top of the page.
The first item was the Sun. As much as she wished someone else would do it, she had to fetch the Sun. She wrote that down: 1. sunrise.
Next was surely the clouds. Who knew where they’d wandered off to.
Third was the stars? No, they had to be put out before the Sun. The Sun was already item number one, so the stars would have to be number one-half. She wedged the word stars under the title.
And then? Was it birdsong? Flowers? She would have a hard time with those. She thought about the rooster and the empty lake and wrote: rain.
She knew there were a lot more items on the list, but she couldn’t remember the order, and that felt important.
She went outside. “My list is ruined,” she said to the Rooster of the Wind, who was busy pecking at the dirt between his toes.
He looked up at her like roosters couldn’t talk.
“You’d just tell me to get on with it,” said the Wind.
He nodded, that forwards-and-backwards rooster nod. “Yeah, duh. You’re the Wind. Go figure it out.” He turned around and went back to pecking the dirt.
He really knew how to make encouragement sound like an insult. But she knew that he meant it. He was a good alarm clock, but he was also a good companion. Grumpy and blunt, yes, but honest.
She looked at the incomplete list.
Nothing to do but start at the top.
The Wind had forgotten how high the stars were. The air up there was cold and thin, and she struggled to keep herself up. She’d seen humans treading water, before. It felt like that.
She had also forgotten how many there were. More in this winter sky; it would be a while before she could get to the Sun. She blew each of them out in turn, except for the constellations, which she could rush through all at once, like candles on a cake.
After minutes, or hours, or what felt like days—the Rooster of the Wind would know—all the stars were out. She drifted for a while, high above the world. There were no stars, no sun, no moon. Everything above and below was black. It was almost like being in bed.
But what comes up must come down. The Wind plummeted back through the stratosphere. She had forgotten how good that felt. She swooped up before she hit the ground and ran fast along the prairie, over hills and across the sea, until she arrived at the Island of the Canyon of the Sun.
Sure enough, there was the Sun. She squinted down at the big yellow ball, smoldering away. The sandstone walls around it had started to melt. They were exhausted, no doubt, by the Sun’s presence. The Sun was just as bright as always, and he was pacing up and down the canyon on his stubby, naked, little legs.
He greeted her as he always did.
“Well hey! If it isn’t my number one, my right hand force of nature. Why, I thought the winds of change were coming. And you were!”
If he had lips, he’d give her a peck on the cheek, just to tell her she looked sun-kissed.
“Yes, I’m here,” said the Wind.
“You bet you are! I thought there was something in the Wind: a smile!”
The Wind forced herself to smile. It was obligatory. The Sun was exhausting, but he was more exhausting if he thought you weren’t in a good mood.
“It feels like it’s been an awful long time!” said the Sun, chipper as ever.
The Wind blew to the canyon floor and looked up at the Sun. He tried to look down at her, but he was too big, and his legs were too short, and his face was too high on the ball of his body. He was so much bigger than her, and it seemed impossible, this morning and every morning, the thought of rolling him up out of the canyon and into the sky.
“I’m about as excited as an apple on pie-making day! I thought you were gone with the wind! Or I thought the Wind was gone. I thought you were gone. Funny, huh?”
The Wind braced herself against a rock and pressed her shoulders against that squatting ball of fire. Every day, too close to the Sun.
“Here we go!” he said.
She grunted, and pushed, and grunted, and slowly, surely, the sun started to roll.
“Well, hip, hip, hooray, is what I say. Time to go where the sun don’t shine!”
The Wind wished, as she did every morning that his legs were just a little longer, that he could climb out of the canyon himself, without help. But, no, it fell to her. She had to get him up the steep bit of the sky, as far as the dawn, and then he could walk the rest of the way and roll down the other side. If his aim was good, he’d fall right back into his canyon.
She was glad he hadn’t landed somewhere else, after the last sunset. He was hard to get out of the sea, when he missed his island. And he always ended up boiling the fish.
“Oh, man. I’m really excited for today,” said the Sun. He said that every day. As he rolled, his face rotated, facing up, then forward, then down at the ground, and then back at the Wind as she labored.
Every time his face came around, the Wind had to push against his cheek or his nose, and he smiled wide.
“I just love this, you know? Rolling up, shooting the breeze with my best friend. Who also happens to be the breeze.”
“Yes, I know,” said the Wind.
“So, how have you been?” he said, when his face came around again. “I’ve been good. Today I looked at the north side of the canyon, and then I looked at the south side of the canyon, and then I looked at the north side of the canyon.”
The Wind grunted.
“I found a beetle on the canyon wall a few hours ago! It was so small! It was trying to get to the top of the canyon. If I had arms I would have picked it up and put it there. But I don’t, so I tried to use my tongue.”
The Wind grunted again. The Sun was so loud.
“That didn’t go too well. Anyway, I ended up eating it. By accident. Have you ever eaten a bug?”
The Wind’s head was throbbing. The Sun was way too bright, and way too heavy, and his voice was way too cheery.
“Well, it’s the first bug I’ve eaten! What do you want to do now? Maybe I can sing us a song?”
“Will you shut up?” said the Wind, suddenly, between breaths.
“Oh! Okay! Sorry! Just trying to bring a little joy to the world, here.”
The Wind kept pushing.
“Doot-dee-doo,” hummed the Sun. He was incapable of being quiet.
The Wind glared at him, but softened when he stopped humming. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m just not feeling great, today.”
“I did, ahem, catch wind of that, you know. You missed a few days!”
The Wind did not respond.
“Well, whatever you’re going through, whatever knocked the wind out of your sails—you’ll be shipshape in no time.”
“Sun,” said the Wind, “it’s been a hundred years.”
That shut him up. His face was scrunched in recollection as he rolled. “Well, I—I hadn’t the foggiest idea,” he said, when he rolled around to face her. He thought for a moment.
His face disappeared. When it came back into view, he said, “So I guess this is your second wind?”
The Wind chuckled. It wasn’t funny. Well, it was funny that he tried so hard.
They had long since left the Island of the Canyon of the Sun behind. Below them, the ocean was blue and calm. Or at least it looked calm, from the height of the sky. On the horizon, land was coming into view. The Wind’s land.
As the sky began to level, the Sun was easier to roll. Eventually, they reached the point where the Sun could go on by himself, and he stretched his squat, muscly legs. He stood up and looked out in wonderment at the land, bathed in golden light.
“Wow, would you look at that! Beautiful! Everything under the Sun: as it should be!”
It was not as it should be. It was horrible. A wretched desolation, a wrenching heartache. She had forgotten how neglected this land had become. And she could not have imagined how much worse it could be, after a century of darkness.
This land was a scab of its former self. The prairies were graveled and cracked. The forests were bony and lifeless. The lakes were empty vessels, the rivers deep-cut scars.
“Beautiful?” asked the Wind. “This land is ruined.”
“Maybe,” said the Sun, slowly, “it does not look like it once did. But it’s not all bad. Look at the light!” He was always talking about the light.
It was a force of nature, the ceaseless optimism of the Sun. Maybe it was optimism, or maybe it was infinite vanity, but it always impressed her. The light was beautiful, but if the Wind, who had just spent a hundred years in the dark, could not see that, how could the Sun, who had literally never seen a shadow?
“I do not think I can do my job, anymore,” said the Wind, as she looked down at the heaps of scree where once there were woodlands.
“What do you mean? You’re the Wind! You can do anything!”
“You saw them. What they did to this place.”
“I know, I know. Not everything is sunshine,” said the Sun.
“They destroyed everything. No birds to soar on my back, no tall grass to bend in the image of my dances. The peaks I used to whistle through were leveled. The lakes I used to ripple are all dried up. The plants whose seeds I carried have all gone extinct.”
The Sun was quiet.
“Coaxing the flowers up through the pavement. Blowing the bees, the rain, so far for a single seedling. “It is so hard,” she said, “to care for a world that so obviously does not care about you.”
They looked down at the world together.
“And then they started to die, and the land was just scars, lonesome scars. I was blowing down dead trees, rearranging the flies in the arid air, spinning windmill water pumps that had long been abandoned, above aquifers that were all dried up. Decade, after decade, after decade. What was the point?”
“Come with me,” said the Sun, after a while, and he started to walk across the sky. “The day must begin.”
The Wind blustered slowly behind him. She watched the hills, far below, as they seemed to warp and turn in the walking light.
“I think you can do your job. The things you love are hurting, but they are not gone. You can save them.”
The Wind was quiet.
“I am in love with a star, you know,” said the Sun, “and of course I never see him. We write to each other. Pen-pals. But you, you have the power to see the things that you love. Every day. You have the power to care for them.”
He stopped and turned back to the Wind, who was looking down.
“The sun also rises,” said the Sun. “It is a new day.”
She nodded, and the Sun beamed.
“Run like the wind, old friend. Until tomorrow!”
The clouds were nowhere to be found. The Wind sometimes had a hunch as to where they had drifted in the night, but she had no hunch now; they could be anywhere.
The jobs of the Wind could be split into two categories: custodial and classical. The custodial duties—namely, the Sun and stars—were the same every day, but the classical ones were more interpretive, more ephemeral.
Not every day, for example, was a rainy one. In more ordinary times, she might have skipped over the clouds. Let them drag their shadows across more distant pastures.
But the land was in dire need. Without clouds, no rain could fall.
She gusted high across the plains, but all horizons were blue and empty. The clouds were not in the bays and bights of the southern inland sea, or up the western steppe, or wrapped around the peaks of the dark, impassable mountains which split the world in twain. All she saw was barrenness.
The Wind was a shepherd, and she had lost her flock.
She returned to the Rooster of the Wind. “I cannot find the clouds,” she said.
The rooster swallowed hoarsely.
“Right.” The Wind set out to find more water.
This is not what I am meant to be doing, she thought, as she dug through lakebed gravel. Her fingernails hurt. Her fingernails had never hurt before; she was the Wind. What a Wind she was.
When she returned, with a few drops of water, the rooster drank eagerly. “They went north,” he croaked.
So, the Wind blustered north, across the flat and driftless reaches of snow, and over the winter woods, where all the dry, dead leaves were still on the trees. As she blew through the branches, the leaves began to fall. It was autumn in the dead of winter.
Eventually she found the clouds, huddled and scared, in a shallow, icy valley by the sea.
She greeted them warmly. The clouds clamored amongst themselves, avoiding her gaze, pressing like penguins, each one vying to be further from the edge of the flock.
“Who’s that?”
“Dunno.”
“Is she—”
“Don’t think so.”
“Why’s she—”
“So big?”
“Was gonna say wide.”
“Ow!”
“…same thing, stupid.”
“She gonna eat us?”
Why did none of them recognize the Wind? She swirled around them, peering down at the herd as they bumped and backed against each other, a chorus of anxious chittering. Eventually, one of the bigger clouds, a lanky altostratus, drifted towards her out of the flock.
“Excuse me, missus,” he said. “Hello. You gonna eat us?”
“What? Of course not,” said the Wind. “Don’t you recognize me?”
The clouds conferred, but nothing they said was intelligible. After a moment, the altostratus re-emerged.
“No,” he said, frankly. “Who?”
“Who am I?”
The altostratus nodded bravely.
“I am the Wind.”
The altostratus looked up at her, and back at the rest of the clouds. He seemed to think, for a while. Then, like he had realized something big, he said, “Who we?”
“You? You’re clouds.” And then it hit her. Of course they did not recognize her. “How old are you?” she asked him.
He held up a billowy hand, three billowy fingers.
They did not remember her. They did not remember anything. They were all too young; the lifespan of clouds was too short. It was a miracle there were any here at all. She was proud, in a way. Generations later, her flock had survived the long night.
She wrapped herself around them, these grandchildren of grandchildren of the clouds she used to know, and blew towards the sea. And the clouds scattered, flustered, and fled. They yelled to each other, like humans in lifeboats. Some tried as hard as they possibly could to cling to the landscape, to not be swept away by the Wind. Others rode the currents, shooting off in every direction.
She chased after a little nimbus who had escaped her gust, and by the time the Wind had blown her—“weee!”—back into the flock, ten more clouds had drifted astray.
Countless generations had made them almost feral. They had never learned how to be clouds.
She thought about the Bed of the Wind. So warm. So dark. But she would be herding clouds in her dreams, if not doing it here. She went to fetch the next straggler.
Over the course of the afternoon, she managed to coax the timid flock out over the sea. She watched them graze the humid air, content.
In the late afternoon, she sensed they were ready. It was time for a storm.
She swelled herself. This would be good, she thought. A cleansing rain. She swirled and howled, ran close to the water to whip more moisture into the air, and then rose through the clouds, a cold front the height of the sky. She inhaled.
When the storm hit the shore it fell like lightning, and the land seemed to come alive. Euphoric, rushing, purifying.
Her world was returning. This garden would bloom again. As she coursed across the continent, she could feel the dormant seeds beneath the rain-pounded soil. She watched water pool in old lakes, and rise in old riverbeds. Tree branches swung wildly, a mirror of the elation of the Wind. It was the first spring in one hundred years.
She hadn’t felt like this in a long time. Much, much longer than one hundred years. She felt like she had when the world was young. Hope swelled the streams. The Wind coursed across the land, bringing miles and miles and miles of rain. Everything was going to be ok.
The eye of the storm, she watched the ground as it passed below her. She watched the bending grass, the bending trees. She watched as one tree cracked, and another fell, ripping roots from the loose earth.
And then she heard it. Ping, ping, thin and inorganic. It was the sound of rain on iron.
The eye of the storm looked up.
Persephone. That’s what they had called it, their forest of wrought-iron towers, and unearthly light, and thick, black air.
She remembered the weight of the place, the murkiness, the feeling like molasses when she tried to blow through.
No.
The Memory of the Wind was a muscle memory. And here, in Persephone, she remembered having to fight.
She picked up speed.
The Wind remembered her. Photochemical smog, petrochemical rage, hot-gusting mass of soot and smoke. Fuliginous wind. Blowing through this city had been like blowing through sludge.
The Wind began to spin, trying to break free.
What had once been one of her clouds, a little black sheep, had thickened and grown, wrapped around these iron towers, never letting go.
The Wind, whirlwind, felt her storm twisting around her, the young, eager clouds, rushing, raging, rising, dwarfing the ruined city.
She could only think of the past. Sulfur in the stratosphere, particulate rain, choking her, long after the humans were gone. The once-green land, now blackened, oxide hills.
And then the Wind, a cloudy column of violent wrath, touched down.
Mud splashed up to meet the driving rain. Gravel flicked up like it had been kicked. Iron bent. Glass shattered. Chips of red rust swirled around the ruins like a plague of locusts.
The tempest tore through the thin air of ruined Persephone with the memory of slogging through smog. She glared at the ground down the vortex of the storm: tunnel vision like a bombsight. All she could see was a narrow patch of wind-whipped ground, whipping by.
The screaming tornado of the Wind rushed on. She reached the edge of the city and kept going, over hills, over plains that had not seen a storm in a hundred years.
She did not know where she was. She did not think. She scythed across the prairies, the remains of the forests, up and over the hills. Finally, she ran against the high western mountains, and the storm loosened, collapsed around her, and dissipated in the cold, sun-bright, lofty air.
The Wind felt horrible. She felt like she had been dragged through a swamp. She felt like she had blown through a field of a thousand windmills. She felt like she had been battered by another wind. Her heart was filled with dread as she fell from the mountains.
When she had looked out at her land this morning, faced its wretched desolation in the light of the Sun, she had thought it could never look worse.
But this? This was worse.
The land was nothing but mud. The prairies were mud pits. The lakes were all bogs. The forests were razed, root-ripped and splintered. Trees laid like toothpicks on the mud-slid slopes of once-proud hills. Whole cliffs had crumbled into the sea. It was destruction like strip mines and clear-cut and overgraze.
The Wind fell to the storm-trampled ground. Is this what the humans had felt like? How had they faced the world?
She dragged herself back across the land towards the Cabin of the Wind. As she passed over a forest of partially-flattened birches, something caught her eye. The forest was in a valley, and the sides of it rose in scattered granite outcrops. In the side of one outcrop was a cave, and in the mouth of the cave were humans.
They wore animal furs, and had skin the color of wilted flowers. They stood, looking out at the aftermath of the storm, speaking a language the Wind had never heard.
She hadn’t seen humans in centuries. They had died out long ago, and left their waste and ruin to the Wind.
Without thinking, she rushed down, ripped a tree out of the ground, and threw it, splintering, against the mouth of the cave.
The humans jumped back, flung by the gust, trapped. The Wind was tired. She blustered off to the Cabin of the Wind and crumbled into bed. Her head was pounding.
She looked out the window. It was almost dusk. She watched the Sun waddle down to the westward edge of the sky. He turned back and waved to her: infinite optimism. She waved back, thin and meager.
Her land was destroyed, diminished to mud. What would he say to her now? Probably something about breaking a few eggs. That didn’t mean it felt good. She sighed, and watched the Sun step up to the edge of the sky, leap into a somersault, and roll down over the horizon.
The Wind awoke in her pitch-black room. She counted to herself: one, two, three—
“Cock-a-doodle-do,” howled the Rooster of the Wind. It was a new day.
She got up and checked the rain barrel; sure enough, it was full of water. The rooster’s coop was a mud bath, but he seemed to be enjoying the novelty.
The morning was cold. She closed the door of the Cabin of the Wind and flew east to find the Sun.
“Pretty brave of you to go and rip up the land like that!” said the Sun, unhelpfully, when he saw her. “Nice work!” But the land was not in as bad of a state as she had thought. And the Sun was right. It had needed the storm.
Day after day, the work became easier. The clouds learned what it meant to be clouds, and the tempests were tempered. The Wind found joy in her many jobs. When was the last time that had happened?
Spring had come. There were young leaves on what old trees had weathered the storm, and there was grass coming up through the cracks in the mud, and green onion sprouts on the forest floors. There were fish in the lakes, and ants in the dirt. The land was regrowing.
Each day, she looked forward to tending her rejuvenating world. She had purpose: to clear the gorse and bramble of yesterday’s spiderwebs; to slant the rain and wet the mouths of caves; to blow across the prairie, tousling the milkweed, brushing fluff from the seedheads of dandelions. To shake dew from the leaves of the trees, and make the underbrush think the rain hasn’t stopped. Everything she did, she added to the List of the Wind.
As the years passed, the world became something like what it had been. The jobs of the Wind only grew: to blow the flies off the backs of bison; to push lemmings back from the edges of cliffs; to give the kestrels something to glide on. The List of the Wind grew longer.
One day, she was coursing low across a scrubland, rolling tumbleweeds, when she tripped. She fell, watching the tumbleweeds roll to a halt as she tumbled and sprawled. She had stubbed her toe!
She looked back, annoyed. What had she tripped on? She kicked up the desert dirt and saw an iron rod, rust-red. It was the tip of a streetlight, buried by centuries.
However much progress she made, she could not escape. Could she ever be rid of these scars? What could a Wind do to the permanence of iron?
She knew what she could do. Preemptive measures. Preventative care. She left the tumbleweeds in dust and blew far and fast to the mouth of a cave, in a small, granite valley in the west.
There they were. She looked at their camp, the lean-to made of birch and cedar boughs, the spit over the open fire, roasting deer, pitching smoke into the sky. She thought of Persephone.
She swiftly snuffed out their fire. On top of the granite outcrop was a boulder. A high overhang. A crack.
If a tree fell on that overhang, the crack might give. The camp would be crushed.
She took aim at a dead-standing hornbeam, dry and ragged, above the outcrop.
What would the Sun say? Probably that the tree looked magnificent in the afternoon light, silhouetted against the sky, blue-grey, barkless and broken.
The Rooster of the Wind would tell her to get on with it. Kill ‘em, don’t kill ‘em, I don’t care, but pick a side.
What about the humans? Some of them would have wanted her to do it, she knew. They weren’t all despoilers. And none of them were blind to what they’d done.
But what about these humans? She wasn’t sure. She wanted to clobber them all, clobber them with rocks, crush them with the weight of the rekindled world.
She pictured them. Nascent humans, emerging from caves after centuries in the dark, wide-eyed in a brave new world. There was no way for them but forward.
She pictured them crushed. Nascent humans, innocent and blind, snuffed out like candles in the wind.
She looked at her list. She had almost reached the bottom of the page. There was room for one more item.
She took out her pen, and wrote: Crush humans.
Maybe tomorrow. She blew some mosquitoes at their camp and left them alone.