The rondel of purpled toothmarks pressed into the glossily tautened heel of his hand, and jagged red lines like rays from an angry sun stitch the palm across to the meat of the thumb, the base of the fingers, the bit of leather about his wrist. His puffy hand laid gingerly on his lap of brown corduroy, by the untucked tail of his yellow chamois shirt, dimly pale in this dark room. Curtains have been drawn across a window there, daylight leaking along the edges, but otherwise unlit. Wide bed neatly made, color uncertain in the shadows. The armchair that he’s sat in, generically dark. Low mass of the dresser there, obscure against the wall. Under his boots a rug of some white stuff, too loosely soft to be any actual fur, and set on it before him a wide round porcelain basin, and a plain white saucer, and on that a slim little knife, all of a silvery piece. His other hand he runs through his neat black cap of hair, strands of it falling back into place as his fingers pass. He jumps a little as the door to the room opens just enough to admit her, whisking shut behind. Her sweeping gown, so richly dark, still manages a glimmer in the shadows, and the sudden contrast with the pale scarf wrapped about her head, framing her face, cooly composed, a hint of concern.

“Highness,” he says, struggling to his feet.

“My lord the Mason,” and she hastens toward him, “do not stand on my account,” and nodding, he sits himself again, wincing as his hand is once more laid upon his lap. Chime of the knife as she kneels before him to peer at that bite, slop of something, water, from the jostled basin, “Highness,” he says, “you’ve wet your hem.”

“Hush, my lord,” she murmurs, lightly brushing the tight-stretched skin with her fingertips. “It’s quite hot.”

“My lady.” He swallows. “Why have you come.”

“It would seem,” she says, touching the tip of his thumb, the yellow rumple of his rolled-up sleeve, the knot in the bit of leather about his wrist, “the Viscount has finally dropped the dice into his cup.” Sitting back, her hand now hesitant over the saucer, the knife.

“Highness?” he says, and then hisses as she shifts his hand, making room to set the saucer on his lap. “Hold still,” she says, and presses the point of that slim knife to the angry heel of his hand.

His teeth clench. He strangles a yelp. What oozes up and out of the heel of his hand to bulge a weighty droplet dangling to slowly, slowly fall, thick as tar, or treacle, a dollop settling melting slowly into a purple slick on the saucer.

“Oh,” she says, lowering the knife, the tip of it daintily stained. “I do not think that this will do.”

“Lady,” he groans, shifting in the chair, “I’ve, what’s left of, my portion,” digging in a pocket with his other hand, a shivering shake of his head, he’s come up with a slender glass tube, and within, a fragment, of a filament, of gold, but “Oh,” she says, “I do not think that will nearly be enough.”

He closes his hand a fist about the tube, lowering his black-capped head. “There’s more, about the house. There must be more.”

“That’s not why I am here.” She untucks the impromptu cuff of his sleeve. “Are you especially fond of this shirt?”

“Not, especially – Princess – why?”

“They’ve given us a knife,” tugging the sleeve down to blot the fresh wound, gently, but determinedly. “A dish of water,” one last press, then carefully peeling the chamois away, eyeing the smeary mess that’s left. “But nothing to serve as diapering.” A shake of her swaddled head. “Can you unbutton yourself?”

“Your pardon, highness?”

“The shirt,” she says, bending down to start picking at the knot in the laces of his boot. “It will need to come off. It will all need to come off.”

“Highness?” he says, perplexed, even as his unwounded hand begins to work the buttons free, one by fumbled one.

“Âna,” she says, widening the mouth of the boot, “Annisa,” tugging it from his foot, “hight,” she says, setting it aside. “And here, my lord the Mason, it’s your pardon I must seek.” She sets to untying the other boot. “I know your office, but not, I fear, your name.”

“Luys,” he says, his shirt unbuttoned, lopped open over his bare chest.

“Luys,” she says, removing his other boot.

“Annisa,” he says. “What happens next.”

“Well.” She sits back with a rustle of gown. “There’s medhu enough in your other hand.” Looking away, reaching up, she undoes a fold of her scarf, and another. “We’ll clean the knife,” she says. “Make the cut. Let it fall direct into the water.” Deftly gathering up the scarf as she unwinds it until she can set it aside on the rug, neatly bundled. “But after that?” Looking up at him, now, dark eyes meeting his, her face in the shadows so much larger, somehow, framed only by the smooth close underscarf, beigely grey.

“After?” he says.

“My mother,” she says, “is the Dearborn Queen, and her majesty, my sister, High Queen of all the Court of Engines, but even so,” both her hands take hold of that scarf just there, beneath her delicate chin, “what happens next’s a mystery.” Peeling it up and back and away, to let fall unbound the softly mass of her long black hair. “Shall we find out together, my good sir knight?”

•

“Cora,” he says, those long dark hands of his lifting from the top of her desk, “Bunch. Bee You Enn Cee Aitch.” Frowning. “I think.”

She sits forward, an elbow on the edge of her desk, “And who was she to you? Great-grandmother? Elder auntie?” Her hair a darkly afro loosely wafted with the breeze of her movement. “Go on,” she says. “Sit.”

“No,” he says, “nothing like that,” and he does, in one of the two narrow wooden chairs in that tight space, his oversized shirt of orange plaid still sharply creased from its factory folds. “I’m just curious.”

“And you are?”

“Chris,” he says. “Beaumont.” Pointing back, over his shoulder, the half-open door, illuminated by a pane of frosted glass. “You got, office hours. I just,” and he sighs.

“You’re not in any of my classes.”

The scrape of the chair abruptly loud as he pushes back, “I can go,” he says, but she lays a hand on her desk, and he doesn’t get to his feet. “Curious is fine,” she says. “I don’t mind satisfying a little curiosity. But I’m curious, myself. This doesn’t happen too often, somebody coming in off the street.”

“Duckie,” he says. “Told me you were the person to talk to.”

“Duckie,” she says. “You mean, Howard Chiles?”

Christian’s scowling, “I don’t know about that,” he says. “Duckie. Plays poker most afternoons with, with Mr. Mills, and Mr. Ford, back of, uh, George Honeycutt’s old shop.”

“Mr. Ford,” she says. “Kent Ford.”

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

He shrugs, somewhere in that shirt. “All I know is, Duckie says, you got a question about Black history in Oregon? Then you talk to Professor Yadira Dini, Portland State.”

A cushion sighs as she sits back, both hands on black plastic arms, a judicious nod, a small smile, briefly pleased. “The thing about Vanport,” she says, “it was the second-largest city by far in the state, but only for six years: built up from nothing in about three and a half months, in 1942; washed away in the Memorial Day flood of 1948. Maybe fifty thousand people lived there, at one point or another, over those six years, all for the war effort – Henry J. Kaiser needed labor to build cargo ships for the British, and then warships for the Americans, and all the white men were being drafted, so,” her own shrug’s more of a definite thing, the wildly patterned reds and blues of her blouse rising as her hands lift, spread rhetorically, “Vanport trebled, quadrupled the state’s Black population in the course of a year or so. What’s arguably the first racially integrated housing development in these United States, and all of it only due to an accident of capital and war, but: enough of the canned lecture.” She shifts a couple-three books on the cluttered desk to reveal a trimly silver laptop. “What all that means, is,” lifting the screen of it, “there’s seven or eight thousand people, coming and going over the course of those six years,” typing something, soft clack of keys, the hard drive chuckling to itself, “any one of whom could be your Cora Bunch. And you ought to notice, how specifically imprecise I’m being, with these numbers,” swipe at the laptop’s trackpad, click, a quick burst of typing, another. “Vanport,” she says, “might’ve had a post office, and a library, a movie theater, a shopping center, a hospital and a high school – PSU?” She taps her crowded desk. “Founded as the Vanport Extension Center. Post-war high education for returning vets. The U by the Slough.”

Christian draw back in his narrow chair, that scowl of his turning, cheekbones hunching quizzically.

“What I’m getting at,” she lifts a hand at once inviting, forestalling, placatory, “Vanport might’ve been the second-largest city in Oregon, but it was never incorporated. It never had the chance to develop the means of seeing, and counting, and remembering, that cities need in order to build up archives.” Her attention returned to the laptop, type, swipe, twiddle, click.

“So that’s it?” says Christian. “Nothing we can do? Nothing to look up?”

“Not,” she says, “nothing,” clack, tap, “necessarily.” Pointing to something, there on her screen. “March of 1947, the telephone exchanges were rearranged to give Vanport a switchboard of their own. Used to be they had a hotchpotch of exchanges, ah, Trinity, Tuxedo, University, Webster, but they all became Tyler. So: they printed a directory.” She moves some of the clutter out of the way, a couple-few file folders, a stack of books, making room to turn the laptop about to face him, “and there you go,” peering around to tap, there, a blotchily printed column of tight-packed names from some old sheet of typescript, he leans forward, cheekbones hunched in concentration, Bunch, A., TYler 4-5642, Bunch, Jos., TYler 4-0181, Burdell, Geo., TYler 2-1712. “That’s it?” he says, looking up.

“That’s,” she says, turning the laptop back around, “two possibilities. Which is two more than you had,” tap, tap, click, “when you came in. That ain’t nothing.”

“Yeah, but,” his scowl shifting from concentration to annoyance, “what do I do with that, I don’t,” shaking his head.

“I can only get you so far,” she says. “Talk to your elders. Talk to Duckie. See what they can make of those names.”

“Duckie wasn’t ever in Vanport.”

“True,” she says. “But I’m sure he knows folks who were.”

“How many died in,” he says, in a rush, and then, a breath, “the flood?”

“The official count,” she says, “is fifteen. And I can tell you the name Cora Bunch isn’t on that list. But that’s the official count. There’s no way to know for sure how many, or who, but there’s more. That flood came on awful fast.”

“Yeah,” says Christian. “I know.”

•

Up past the jumble of bicycles, parked along the edge of the overgrown yard, a cyclopean ziggurat of poured concrete steps leads up to a comically cramped front porch framed in peeling pink siding. An enormous figure takes up most of one corner of it, a crude suit of wicker armor, the warp and weft darkened in streaks and patches by old rain. He looks up at it, one foot on the concrete steps, stooped in a barn jacket made for a much wider man, and he shakes his head, crowned as it is by a mighty round of black curls.

“Will you knock?” she says, stood behind him, draped in a rough grey himation over an ivory chiton, her left arm sleeved in sleekly shimmering mail.

“You should get back,” he says. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your rehearsal.”

“It’s fine,” she says. Her face painted, the shapes of her lips and eyes theatrically elaborate on a whitely powdered ground. “Matty will appreciate some time to fix her Jupiter lights.” A nod, toward the front door the color of liver. “Well?”

It’s opened by a round little man in a cocktail dress, “Yeah?” he snarls, but as he peers up at them his ruddied scowl softens in vague disappointment. “Oh,” he says.

A brownish sofa at an angle before an unlit hearth in that dim, high-ceilinged room. Two women dressed in black are sat upon it, leaned back against either arm, outstretched legs entwined beneath a garish god’s eye afghan, the one of them her white hair tightly knotted in glossily ruthless braids, the other her white hair unbound, a-float in wisps about her head and shoulders. “Do we mistake our eyes?”

“Has Aphrodite stepped down from Olympus?”

“Look more closely, it’s but the landlady.”

“Fickle fashion does but wax nostalgic.”

“To what do we owe.”

“I would not,” says Linesse, lifting her bared hand, “lay claim to aught of yours today, no more than but an ounce of your attentions. It’s Gordon,” stepping aside, that hand swooping, a gesture, “who’d have a word with you,” but he looks away from both of them, and her as well, away down the length of a table littered with folded newspapers and stacks of magazines, “I should,” he says, “go,” taking a step away, and another, another, until, “George Honeycutt,” calls the one of them, there on the soda.

“Porter Foresworn,” the other.

He halts, a hand on the dusty tabletop. “Gordon,” he says, looking back over his shoulder. “The kids call me Gordon.”

“Called, they did.”

“And kids.”

“So long ago.”

“And we, you see, are not.”

“What would you have of us, Porter?”

“I,” he says, turning slowly, reluctantly, but about, “am not myself.”

“Why, and who else would you be?”

He straightens, “This,” he booms, and Linesse at the other end of the table starts at the force of his voice, “is not me,” his hands up about his exuberantly dark hair, his glaring, unlined face, his shoulders broad, up and back, his chest swelling with a great breath taken in, but deflating, sagging, slumping as he lets it out, shoulders stooped once more, chin drooping, hands lowered. “I was born,” he says, “in nineteen and forty-four. I can’t be looking like this. They don’t know me.”

“But they never did.”

“They knew George Honeycutt.”

“Son and namesake of George Honeycutt.”

“Nephew to Eddie Unthank.”

“Good friend of Kent Ford, and Oscar Johnson.”

“The children called him Gordon.”

“When he served them breakfast.”

Gordon, scoffing, looks away, but one of them lifts up a spindly finger, “George Honeycutt, who, in nineteen, was it, seventy-one?”

“It was.”

“At the corner of Vancouver and,” snap, snap.

“Was it Beech?”

“North Vancouver, anyway.”

“Three witnesses saw him – ”

“A third was never confirmed.”

“ – get manhandled into the back of a prowler.”

“By two uniformed Portland police officers.”

“But, to this day.”

“The Portland Police Bureau insists.”

“To this day!”

“No car was patrolling that neighborhood.”

“Not at that time.”

“He was never seen again, George Honeycutt.”

“But the protests?”

“Were spectacular.”

Not a clock ticks, not a board creaks, not a drop drips, not the faintest breath of a breeze, not until Linesse says, “Gordon?”

“Who you mourn never was,” says the one of them.

“I was,” he insists.

“You were,” says the other, “a young man.”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Twenty-six, he’s a Sagittarius.”

“And we will always have been who we are.”

“But I was,” he says, his words crumbling, hoarsely, “old, with them, for a time,” and then, barely vocalized at all, “why.”

“A mystery?”

“A gift.”

“A precious gift.”

“Too precious?”

“What is it you tell your hopeful charges?”

“As you usher them through the door?”

“I,” says Gordon, frowning, but the one of them calls out, “Heed thy own advice!”

“Heal thyself, Porter.”

“Howsomever foresworn.”

“I give no drop,” he says, fiercely quiet. “I take no pinch. That, would be how.”

“That would be how you serve your Queen?”

“That would be how you serve this Court?”

“Sacramento!” he shouts, and slaps the flat of his hand on the table, and Linesse jumps. The one of them there on the couch lifts her nose, and the other lowers her chin. “The Court of Camellias fell. Two months ago. The Queen deposed, without a Bride. The King, fled. Knights, torn to pieces in the street. This city,” he snarls, stomping toward them, one, two, three, “is on the verge of following after, am I wrong,” and he slaps the table again, and Linesse flinches. “Tell me I am wrong.”

The one of them lifts up her head judiciously. The other looks down, lips pointedly moued.

“Tell me how you would have me best serve my hopeful charges,” says Gordon, quietly, his hand a fist, knuckles down on the tabletop.

“There’s the work, to be done,” says the one of them, then.

“There’s always the work,” the other.

“The shoes.”

“The shoes.”

“They never.”

“Never.”

“Stop.”