Page 39 of The Forest of Lost Souls

“Okay, but . . .”

“But what?”

“I mean . . .”

“You mean?”

“I thought there’d be ... details. Like—what strife? What joy? What loss? What love?”

The paperback is gone. Vida hasn’t seen the woman take the payment. Indeed, the seer’s hands have remained below the table. It’s as if the book has been washed away by the rippling waves of candlelight.

“It’s not for me,” the seer says, “to paint your future in fine detail. It’s yours to paint. If I revealed it, then you would have no life to live, only a role to play, a script to follow.”

This seems to be a nice lady, and Vida is loath to suggest that she is either a fraud or just plain silly. She can only say, “Well, I guess I see why you don’t take money for this.”

The enigmatic smile comes again, widens, and is accompanied by a soft laugh. Her hands appear and fold together on the table. “Do you know what a myth is, Vida?”

“Sure. An old, old story about something that never happened even though people once thought it did, or pretended to think so.”

“You’re a smart girl.”

“I read a lot. My uncle and me, we don’t do TV.”

“Myths are more than stories. They’re also lessons. Longer ago even than history knows, when our species was young, we acted far more on emotion than on reason. It’s still a dangerous tendency of our kind, of human beings, but back then we were even more childlike than now. We weren’t ready for higher knowledge. We wouldn’t have understood if directly instructed. Do you follow me?”

“Sort of, I guess. All right.”

“And so,” the seer continues, “myths were inspired, initially to instill in people the idea that this life has meaning, and over time to help that idea strengthen into a conviction. This took many centuries, but there was no reason to be in a hurry because time as humans perceive it is an illusion.”

Although she’s a girl who is interested in many strange things, Vida is overcome by a mild frustration. She curls her toes in her shoes, shifts in her chair, and sighs. “Then why do clocks work?”

“Past, present, and future exist all at once, but that’s too much for humankind to handle, too confusing. We need them to flow one into the other in an orderly fashion. So we perceive time as we need to perceive it to cope. Or the perception of time is a crutch we’ve been given, whichever you prefer to believe. And so—clocks.”

“Maybe I’ll understand when I’m like a hundred,” Vida says.

“Long before then, dear. Myths, as I was saying, were lessons by which we learned how to think about the world we can see and the world we can’t. For countless centuries, it wasn’t the truth of the myths that mattered, but the new ways of thinking that they subtly taught us. Over millennia, myths evolved to lead us ever so slowly to a deeper understanding of the world and our place in it, the reason for our being, slow enough for us to handle it all.”

“Like taking baby steps.”

“Exactly. We took baby steps as a species until eventually we arrived at the revelations, the truths, on which our civilization is built. But all the myths that instructed us are still relevant, in part because they made us what we are, and in part because we still need stories to teach us how to live, as we keep forgetting.”

“This is making me dizzy.”

“Not at all. You aren’t a dizzy girl.”

“So that’s all the future you’re going to tell me?”

The seer opens her clasped hands, revealing a white flower with thick, waxy petals. The bloom is so large that it couldn’t have been concealed in the small hands of the seer. The bloom is three times the size of the largest blossom from a magnolia tree, and the petals are thicker, as if it is carved from ivory.

Vida says, “Where didthatcome from?”

“Where all things come from. It is the amaranth. The undying flower of myth.”

The woman passes it across the table. Vida shakily receives it.

The flower is so beautiful, so radiant in the low light, that Vida feels a special responsibility not to damage it.

“We are,” the seer says, “made of all the myths that brought us through millennia to the truth, but there is one in particular that you will shape your life around.”

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