-18 - Q -desire- -

She had desired things once. A child, though her womb stayed barren. A voyage to the southern isles, though her husband’s anchor chain tethered her to Llowen. A single night of silence without the creak of someone else’s need. All of those desires had shriveled into small, dry things—seeds that never broke soil.

She desired to not want.

Her name was Elara, and for seventy-three years she had lived in the gray village of Llowen, where the sky was always the color of wet slate and the sea below gnashed its teeth against the rocks. The villagers called her “Q” because she had been the question master in the schoolhouse for four decades. She had answered every why, how, and when until her voice grew thin as thread. But she had never once answered the only question that mattered to her. -18 - Q -Desire-

Elara’s fingers, gnarled as driftwood, took the paper. The girl’s handwriting was clumsy, the letters leaning like tired fence posts:

She sat on a flat stone and waited. For what, she didn’t know. Perhaps for the tide to rise high enough to kiss her boots. Perhaps for the answer she’d never found in books. She had desired things once

Just a hand to hold, a hill to climb down, a question to carry home.

Elara stared at the question. The wind snatched at the paper’s edges. She felt her desire to be hollow flicker, then gutter like a candle in a draft. A single night of silence without the creak

Elara looked past the girl, past the cliff, past the gray sea to the place where the sky touched nothing at all. She thought of her desire for emptiness. She thought of the boy’s question, still warm in her hand. She thought of seventy-three years of why.