The Last Errand of Pocket-Wren

Wren had faded almost entirely. There was, in the corner of a back room behind a shop that sold tea, a small place where the air was a little warmer than it should have been, and that was all that remained of her.

She had been the oldest. She had been the one who said it will cost. She had given everything she had to a sewing basket and a kettle and a stoppered bottle of vanilla, and she had thought, when she gave the last of it, that she would simply go.

She had not gone. She had thinned, and thinned, and stopped at the smallest possible amount of being. And in this smallest amount, she had remembered one thing she had not put away.

She had remembered the name of her human.

Names were not small magics. Names were the big ones. Pocketkin did not, as a rule, keep them. But Wren had kept one — accidentally, the way one keeps a leaf pressed in a book one has not opened in years.

The name was Iris. And Iris, Wren remembered now, had a daughter. And the daughter, Wren remembered now, was about to have a daughter of her own.

So Wren — what was left of Wren — gathered herself, which took most of a night. And she went, slowly, through the warm spot in the air, and out into the kitchen where the tea was kept, and along the floorboards to the front room, and up the stair, one stair an hour, and into the room at the top where Iris was sitting in a chair by the window with a letter in her lap, weeping in the quiet way of old women who have been weeping a long time.

Wren climbed the chair. Wren put her small, almost-not-there hand on Iris's wrist.

And Wren gave her the name back.

Not the name Iris. Iris had not lost that. The other name. The one Iris had been carrying since the letter came, and could not bring herself to say, because saying it made it true. The name of the granddaughter who would not, now, be born.

Wren held the name for her. Wren said, with the last of herself: You can put this down. I will keep it. You can put this down now.

Iris did not see her. Iris never had. But Iris stopped weeping. She drew a long breath. She folded the letter. She set it on the table.

And in the warm spot in the air, in the room behind the tea shop, a small, almost-not-there Pocketkin held a name like a stone, and was glad of the weight of it, and did not, for the first time in a very long time, feel thin.