Articles by Pagona Talbot

Leelu shared a room with Tac, as well as Willum, though no one mentioned this because Willum’s room was really somewhere deeper within the house. Leelu’s room simply provided the small door that would lead Willum to his nest, as Tac was fond of calling it. None of this really mattered at the moment, for Leelu’s room could no longer be considered a place of rest, a place to store her clothes, a place for privacy, and Tac was a bit afraid to go in there. Leelu’s room had become a place of winter.

Sun shone through the window, but it didn’t cut through dust particles or come to rest on some fat cat caught in its beam. At any given time white, pale shades of almond, or deeper tree greens or stabbed vein colors floated through the air in a blizzard of cut paper. Through this chill-less storm a paper-doll castle was fashioned in the east, with a fort to protect it just a step away. To the west a forest of razor curved snowflakes hung from twine and stolen shoelaces. To the south and north were makeshift villages and campsites. And everywhere underfoot were the paper-dolls themselves heaped in their cultural classes.

The warrior class stood their ground in the fort before their castle. Whether there was royalty inside or not didn’t seem to matter, the soldiers each were at the ready with sharp ended pencils, the sharp ends of compasses, broken scissors parceled off to two soldiers, and any other item remotely capable of undoing a paper born body. They’d even formed a unified look of uniform using bits of the dried blood paper shards and pennies for armor. They each wore small curved hats of the same deep red.

Beneath the winter forest of flat snowflakes a hungry crowd gathered of malcontents and those who would have the castle or those places better built in-between. They attached the lose crud of the floor to their paper bodies to give themselves more substance. Some had taken to yarn and floss to decorate their heads, or else to adorn their bodies. Tribes were forming from the lint that littered the ground. Some had taken to the trashcan to better equip their flat bodies. More adventurous types had found Willum’s secret door and were attempting to access it to see if better bounty lay there.

As this went on, the soldiers upped their attire with outfits of larger copper change breastplates and twisted paper clips to hold them in place. They banged their weapons onto their protected chests and egged on the attack. And all those who lived in the places in-between quietly wished everyone would just settle down.

Somewhere in the thickest of the flying flutter of cut paper, Leelu was continuing to build her dynasty of paper. There were red circles around the places the elaborately worked scissor handles had come to bite into the skin of her fingers. The sweat off her skin seemed to feed the insect like shapes at the tops of the snipping sheers. Her eyes were set upon nothing but the paper in her hand and the instrument that was cutting it into something new. Like energy, her mind raged, once created, never destroyed, just changed, and changed, and changed. The paper was energy the scissors were telling her, and they needed to change, to forever be changing. Even the fierce collection of paper-cuts dotting her skin and the long thin lines of drying blood could not raise her attention from her duties.

“The moon has different names?” Emily asked as she looked up into the night sky. Miss Emma nodded her head slowly and looked towards the full moon shining down on them. A smile slowly passed over her lips as she thought about the many, many full moons she’d seen in her days.

“Oh yes. A different name for every month of the year. This was how people in very old times kept track of their seasonal times. For those who lived here in those distant days they often called this the Milk Moon or the Full Flower Moon for this was the time when you’d see your spring flowers bringing color back into the world.” Miss Emma grew quiet for a moment as her thoughts traveled elsewhere. She looked towards the dense line of dark that was the start of the forest and a very old memory came to mind. “I once knew it by a different name though…”