Meredith is a hot mess’s Reviews > Forests of the Night > Status Update

She presages not my finish, but rather those lands that my soul has travelled, those high mountains I have scaled, and never knew I did. Through her I see what is in me, and only death can liberate this plaintive, perfect thing. Forgive me then, O Lord, that I await him without dismay. Forgive me that I have seen, after all, where the stars burn through the fabric of Immensity.

-Rachel

If I dream again tonight, her hair against the candlebranch, the white moon faces that tilt together, the angry words, the shadow of the Shadow — let me not mind them, or my wasted life. I have formed Rachel, as if I had made her from the substance of the starry twilight.

There is but one road, journey where we will and how we may. If life is the revery of God, what will our awakening be? But for this day and night we are here. The world hangs like a mirror, reflecting not what we are but that which to ourselves we seem to be. Only when the mirror is broken, only then …

And considering too that other life, the incestuous pairing that, maybe, she had not wanted, the sin, the shame, the black forecast of the angel yet to come upon us, sensed in my dream — Now I could thank God that here she stood before me, flawless and free, unsullied by anything, undespoiled by me.

For I had given her the one pure gift to use as she would, and could. By fathering, in a season not of love, a son I despised, I had crafted the instigation of Rachel. His seed, without me she should not have lived, here in this second world where once before she had lost her chance, or had it ruined.

‘I am glad of it. She was dear to me, and you greatly resemble her.’

At that, as if I had asked it of her, she undid the cloth from her hair. Out rushed, like a river of silk, the raven storm with its polish of greenish lights. She stood before me, serene and motionless, to let me see that she was here, even she , and yet — should I not be aware of it — as though within a cage of glass.

‘Rachel,’ I said again, as if never in my whole life had I said the name. And found nothing else to say.

‘Rachel,’ I said, ‘this is how you are called?’

'Yes, lord.’

She spoke firmly, clearly. She knew the house and its ways, as it knew her. Looking up again, she smiled at me. Her smile was a woman’s smile, my mother’s, one who knew, also, me. She had no pretence, no lies. She was older far than I, yet she observed, with minutest tact, the forms, as do kings who need not.

In several of these short stories Tanith Lee plays with time. I enjoy TL's time fuckery (like in The Winter Players & I Bring You Forever, which are all time faves for me). I'm a bit confused here. This reads like a dreamy incestual time lapse of a wife, sister, and granddaughter? All Rachel connected to the MMC throughout time & different lives. Hmmm. This is strange, but beautifully written.

And I have hours now when it suggests itself to me that God, even He, passing in His enormous power and silence, mislays the places of our being, and because of it, does not remember us, for we are small and fleeting, and the wind that blows for ever, how can it know the chaff, the little seeds and grains, we are so slight and so soon over.