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The puppet of Gilbert Park runs at the end of invisible strings. He foolishly traps himself in an alcove painted with flowers. He’s played this role the last several dozen times they’ve staged this scene. Before, he was on the other side of the square. Only this time, Willow is in the audience.
Half of Willow’s brain wants to squeeze her stomach empty. They would be dry heaves. She hasn’t had the appetite for anything since human Halloween the previous day. It would still serve her right to spit up acid. The moment calls for it.
Everything is wrong about Gilbert’s jerky movements, the cuts segmenting his body into pieces, even his new gel-stiff hair. He would never style it like that, didn’t need to. It always stood neatly back. Willow is watching someone else’s caricature of her dad at play. It’s the little misses that grate the greatest.
The other half of Willow’s brain sees her dad for the first time in months and needs to touch him. After so long in another world, she needs to remind herself that she has roots in somewhere. She longs for the bodies that always knew her, and here one is.
Out of sight, out of mind collapses when she can see him in front of her. It is a function of distance. For the first time in months, she is a distraught daughter. After learning how to miss him casually, she doesn’t know what to do when he is found. The feelings smother her like all of winter all at once. If she doesn’t run to him, she will be buried.
Hunter’s hand at her waist isn’t enough to hold her back, not just because the father-daughter bond is like gravity. She hasn’t lifted her usual weights for a while, but in the human realm she could wrestle Hunter into saying uncle every time, although for him they picked another word. On a good day, he can do one pull-up. She overpowers him easily.
There’s a lull in the action. The Collector halts Terra’s dismal performance of Eda.
Willow bolts to Gilbert.
Tugged into motion by a different pull inside his chest, Hunter chases after.
As King and the Collector soar away on their shooting star, Willow hugs what’s become of her dad. His skin is cold, hard, and strangely smooth. His eyes are blank, their only sheen from one-note lacquer. She bends his hand strangely at the wrist trying to hold it. It frightens her, so she stops trying.
Hunter reaches her. His hands hesitate over where he can touch. He holds Gilbert instead, shivering at the stickiness of the Collector’s sealing varnish.
One moment they’re standing in an over-glittered parody of Bonesborough Square. The next, they’re falling towards a polished marble floor. The Collector floats over a staircase, uninterested in something Odalia Blight is saying.
They both understand, even upon impact with the floor at harsh angles, they must pretend to feel nothing to survive the next moments. Hunter gets the worst of it, all the air leaving his lungs as he hits the floor first. Willow lands on top of him, and Gilbert on top of her. The other puppets lie around them, scattered as if tossed.
Hunter wheezes, breathing labored. With a frantic look, Willow conveys she knows the double-bind. He needs to breathe somehow, but if he gasps or groans, they will certainly be noticed and collected.
After belittling Odalia, the Collector leaves with King in tow.
Willow sets her dad on the floor beside herself and rolls off Hunter. The tile is cold beneath her after Hunter’s warmth. His chest quickly rises.
Odalia redoes her bun and hurls profanities that would make Boscha blush.
Willow isn’t shocked to see Amity’s mom here. This is the woman who wrenched her daughter from her best friend for business purposes. She was probably first in line to grovel at the floating feet of the new overlord of the Isles. It’s hard to feel pity, easy to feel disgust.
Walking through the puppets she’s been forced to drag and dispose of scores of scores of times, Odalia is quick to notice them. They’re the only ones that breathe, after all.
“Well if it isn’t Willow Park,” Odalia spits. “You can stand up, you know. He’s not going to collect you just for a little trespassing. Oh little Willow, I remember you.”
“I wish you didn’t,” Willow groans.
“I used to scrub your half-digested throw-up out of my Mittens' jumpers. How could I ever forget the awful stench?” She scrunches her nose. “So, is that any way to greet me after all these years?”
Willow looks at the ground and scowls beneath her bangs. When she looks up again, her smile is cloying. “Hi Mrs. Blight, or is it Ms. something else now? Nice to see you.”
“Blight is my maiden name. Alador did not take that from me.” Odalia snaps before recomposing herself. “No manners, as expected from one of your humble, earthy upbringing. What would I expect? Nothing more.”
“Willow.” Hunter touches her shoulder. “She’s awful, but she’s not the enemy here.”
“And you.” Odalia squints derisively. “Getting a bit shaggy, Golden Guard? No, you disloyal, deserting, spoiled-rotten, piss-poor prodigal nephew. More like Pyrite Protector.” She chuckles far too long at her own wordplay. “And the new skincare routine? Ditch it, you look— different. Worse.”
Hunter reddens. His face stings. Willow touches him back, fingertips tracing lifelines on his palm. His fingers close around hers.
“You’re right,” Willow whispers, “She’s not worth it. Even if I want to clobber her.”
“I would cheer you on,” Hunter pouts.
“I presume you’re here to meddle, just like on the Day of Unity. I’m trying to get promoted here, so just don’t get in my way.” Odalia grunts as she lines up puppets to drag to the collection room. “Or fine, I haven’t talked to real people for— longer than I’d care to admit. Tell me, just what are you doing here?”
Willow looks to Gilbert. Her face contorts with grief. Odalia is among the last people she would want to see her cry, but Hunter is near and safe. It almost cancels out.
Odalia tilts her head, finding something familiar in the puppet. Gilbert wasn’t a client or otherwise important to her, but she ought to put two and two together. Hair color, ear angle, skin tone, sturdy build. Odalia’s eyes dart back and forth between him and Willow. She blinks impatiently.
Willow understands what wheels are turning, but she doesn’t have the patience for this. It’s frustrating to mourn a connection in front of someone who can barely tell it exists.
Odalia had met Gilbert before, years ago. It was when their daughters played together, when Amity’s hair was still brown. She hadn’t bothered to remember him once she learned that he was irrelevant to her aspirations.
“Oh, poor Willow.” Odalia’s sympathy slides like galdorstone crystal jewelry down an abomination’s face. With magic she ropes the larger puppet pile together. “Is this your father?”
Willow sees where Amity learned the same uncaring emptiness, a paper mâché facade of feeling over the maw of a frigid void. There’s nothing to win here, so she bites her lip and squeezes Hunter’s hand.
“Help me drag these and I don’t care what you do. Get those ones over there.” Odalia waves broadly in the direction of Amelia and Cat.
“I’ll get them.” Hunter says. “You have yours.” He nods to Gilbert.
Willow lifts Gilbert, arms under his back and legs, and paces behind Hunter. It’s all wrong. An image accosts her, unavoidable in the front of her mind.
On a wall in the Park kitchen, if it’s still standing, there’s a picture of Willow at six months old. In it, she wears an uncomfortable looking lace bonnet. It’s pink with white frills. Anyone could tell Harvey had dressed her, but in the photo it’s Gilbert who cradles her. Young Willow’s head barely reaches the crook of his elbow. That small, she knows it’s a suggested memory, but she’s often thought about the scratchiness of that lace and wanting to squirm out of it.
A “hey,” from Hunter pulls her from her thoughts. He catches her fixated on Gilbert’s face and not on the slippery floor in front of her, the vivid paintings on the wall, or the echoless vastness beneath the vaulted ceilings. “Let me know if you want to switch.”
“I’m good,” Willow lies, shaking her head. This is what she has to do.
She watches Hunter regard the grudgby girls with sympathy as he drags them behind him, one ankle in each hand. He has an even poutier expression, a further droop to his eyes. They are strangers to him. He can carry them.
Willow believes with her whole heart that even they didn’t deserve this. Not for all the half-a-witch-calling, apple blood-spilling, hairpin-splitting torment they subjected her to should someone be frozen stiff and still. She’s grateful to Hunter for what he doesn’t even know he’s doing. She couldn’t hold them like that, even just dragging their feet, not when forgiveness is still a speck on the horizon. She wonders if Amelia and Cat would have bullied him too, if Boscha had egged it on, or even if not.
“At the end of this hall,” Odalia directs. “There’s a big room. Even you can’t miss it. Just don’t make a mess, because cleaning it up will come back to me.”
They make it to the archive room. Mountains and mountains of innumerable puppets stretch on. Hunter drops the grudgby girls at the edge of a great pile. Their ankles hit the floor with twin clacks.
Willow sits Gilbert against the wall. He slouches like he’s fallen asleep watching Bleeding Hearts reruns. She misses the slow rise of his shoulders, the soft sound of his snoring as the blue light from the crystal ball flickered on his face. Her fingers miss the texture of his plaid blanket, at home on the couch.
“Okay,” Odalia mutters, “Like he said, puppets in the archive room. Next is— pizza bagels to placate that sun-moon-faced runt. I swear, his stomach is a black hole. He always asks for like three hundred of those things. Do you know how many boxes that is?”
“No. I just know you’re very good at doing exactly what you’re told.” Hunter spits, sparring with memory.
Willow can’t tell who Hunter’s disappointment is for. She forgets, often, that the Golden Guard had a history with Blight Industries. That lies deep beneath sedimented layers, with gentler forms on the surface.
“Well of course,” Odalia flourishes her hand. “I deliver results to the client’s exacting specifications, even if the client is an omnipotent, skull-shattering, regicidal child.”
Willow despises her, but Hunter despises her more. He grinds his teeth to squeaking.
“Now, look, if you want some time with your puppet parent, there’s a little room over there.” Hands full of rope, she points with her lips. “You wouldn't be the first ones to use it.”
Willow has a hard time believing Odalia has anyone to spend time with. She couldn’t love anyone as much as she loves wielding power, the head high of its fumes. It must be King, slipping away on occasion.
“Thank you, Mrs. Blight.” Emotion rises like groundwater into Willow’s throat. She despises this woman, knows that one kindness ought to weigh less on the scale of her character than a mouthful of spit could dilute the Boiling Sea. Yet reasonable or not, this is an act Willow will remember.
“Don’t mock me with your gratitude.” At least Odalia understands herself too. She leaves without another word, only her heels on the tile growing distant.
Willow takes Gilbert around the corner by the shoulders. Hunter follows behind, lifting Gilbert’s legs. It feels like a fraction of a funeral march. The idea lingers, but Willow is unready for that possibility. She saw Terra get petrified— lignified?— puppeted, with a moon to her forehead. Did her dad go rigid like that too, his shock fading into a carved and painted smile?
Since she watched it happen, it’s easy for her to imagine how it could be undone. Just play the memory in reverse and they all spring to life. If the Collector can float and eat gravity, then surely he can scratch off the puppet seal with a fingernail and all will poof back to normal. Denial is a cooling balm on her raw heart.
The little room is dark around the edges, with a sourceless spotlight in the middle.
Willow sits in a cone of light, Gilbert’s head in her lap. She looks up, which throws shadows on her face. It’s cold enough to shiver in here. She supposes the Collector doesn't need temperature controls, doesn’t need to heat a cavernous castle that’s overwhelmingly empty.
Goosebumps rise on her arms and legs as she sits with Gilbert, with his memory. She traces the crescent on his forehead with her thumb. Only for the strength of her want does she think it could come off with the barest pressure. She wouldn’t dare try scratching it, for the damage it might do.
In her fantasy, the seal flakes off. Gilbert springs to life again. He stretches and yawns and says he feels wooden, laughs at himself and asks her if she’s eaten. In reality, his eyes don’t blink and his mouth hangs slightly open. The moveable piece that is his chin has nothing holding it in place.
At last Willow can cry, but her eyes refuse. All those times she’s wanted tears to stay away, all those times she’s been called a snot-faced crybaby and now that she needs them, they forsake her. Inside her head is dry, sterile thunder without rain. She shakes, mad at herself for not being able to even grieve correctly.
“You probably want some privacy,” Hunter near-whispers. “I’ll leave you two alone.”
“I need you to stay!” To Willow’s shock, a hyacinth cracks the tile and tugs at Hunter’s wrist. “I mean, please, stay. If you go, then I will be alone.”
It percolates through her, that she’s admitted Gilbert isn’t really here.
The plant she summoned prunes itself back to a small bloom, peeking out from a growing crack in the tidy grout. Underneath the veneer of this palace-mausoleum, there is still soil. Willow puts her finger in it. Here is hope in a handful of dirt. She considers sprinkling some on Gilbert’s forehead, but that would be too much, too soon.
“I’ll be here. I’m just going to— give you space.” Hunter turns and stands in the doorway, facing away as if keeping watch. Purple petals fall from between his fingers.
Clover had made her way to Willow’s shoulder. She curls up, ready to nestle down.
“No, no. Not you either.” Willow rubs Clover’s fuzzy abdomen, a wail cresting beneath her jaw. “I can’t do this alone.”
“When I said you two, I was talking about Clover.” Hunter touches his chest, then sits, still looking into the hallway. With his fingertips he sweeps the petals from the floor into his palm.
Willow sits Gilbert up, then sits herself in the vee of his legs. She hasn’t done this since she was small, accompanied by pressure at her scalp as he braided her hair. She wraps his arms around herself. There is no love in the cold present, but there is warmth in the surety of the past.
“This isn’t my dad,” Willow tells Clover, knowing that it is. “This hair, these clothes, these eyes. But these glasses.” She chokes up. “At least the frames are right and not crescent moons or something.”
She tries to slide them off his face, but the wire is fused to the wood.
For a moment in time, long before Willow attended Hexside, around when she and Amity took swimming lessons, she and Gilbert had the same prescription. She would wear his glasses, although they slid to the point of her nose, balancing on the edge of her face. Mimicking Gilbert’s gait, she waddled over to Harvey. “Hello husband, I’m daddy, and I say Willow can have extra snakeosaur nuggets for dinner.”
Willow separates Gilbert’s fingers to hold his hand. Her stomach churns and her scalp tingles at the exposed joints of his knuckles. Touching abomination goo, carnivorous plant chyme, or even ladybugs could never raise a scalp-gripping tightness like this.
She floods with shame. No daughter with years of happy childhood behind her should recoil like this when touching her parent. She grips her wrist and holds her fingers in his until they no longer feel cold. They aren’t soft enough to imagine life into.
Clover lands on the back of her hand and buzzes.
“I wasn’t here when this happened to him,” Willow lowers her forehead to her elbow. She cries to Clover. “I don’t know where papa is. I don't know who’s watering our plants. I don’t remember what the last thing I said to dad was. I don’t remember if I kissed him goodbye.”
Her stomach is stuck too high below her ribs. Air lingers in her lungs, not enough but it never leaves. There is too much in her to contain. Her forehead tightens as it dews with sweat.
“Why is he wearing this apron? Was he at home? What if papa was sick and he was making rice porridge for him? I left them, I wasn’t there, I couldn’t—”
Willow loses words. Even her voice leaves her abandoned and alone. Gilbert’s embrace has closed around her, Clover crawls on her hand, Hunter sits in the doorway, but she has no one but herself. That’s what her brain says.
She counts on Gilbert’s fingers. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.
What had she been worrying about when he and Harvey taught her how to measure her breaths in and out? Whatever it was seems miniscule compared to this. Maybe their trick was only made for smaller troubles. It fails her now, but she keeps trying. This is what she knows, what they taught her.
With every bend of Gilbert’s wooden knuckles, she slides deeper beneath the swell of sadness, guilt, despair. Boscha and her bullies could never have fathomed a torment like this. Willow is her own best torturer. She knows where to press too hard, where to turn the knives. Only she can miss her father and hate herself for it.
The tempo of her four-count quickens until it becomes a prayer rhythm, then a trill of her fingers, restless as the sea.
Her panic is ceaseless. She draws deep breaths into overfull lungs, fitting the ocean into a hole on the beach.
Hunter runs to sit beside her, just outside Gilbert’s arms. “Willow. Willow!” He bites his lip. Recognition fills his eyes. Volume won’t reach her where she is, somewhere he’s been before. “Here.” He offers his hand instead.
Willow squeezes it desperately. It’s warm. It’s real. It’s present.
Hunter’s knuckles crack in her grip. He turns away from her and lets the pain out on his face.
Willow’s drifting finds a shore. She counts again on his fingers, curling and uncurling. He offers just enough resistance to space out her breaths.
Hunter waits until her head clears enough that her eyes can focus on him. She manages a “Thank you, Hunter” and even that takes the stubbornness of a succulent and leaves her winded. She keeps her grip tight, to hold onto all his heat and life.
For the first minutes he bears it. Then it overcomes him. He reaches for her other hand, fingers over the artery thrumming busily in her wrist.
“I realized,” Hunter’s voice already breaks. All the sobbing he listened to her do waits mirrored as storm clouds in his eyes. “When I drowned, or when I— died— after water in my nose, the next thing I felt was your finger on my neck, looking for my pulse. I woke up in your lap. You held me when I cried. I have to, no, I want to offer that to you, if you want me here.”
Willow’s voice shreds itself. She doesn’t have the breath for grand confessions. She has desperation. “I need you here,” she forces out.
Inside, her grip is slipping. Her emotions are another monster ripping and gnashing. Inner Willow is ablaze and she herself is holding the match and had set first flame. What good are strength and confidence when they don’t protect the ones she loves? They can all become smoke and dust.
“It’s so unfair, isn’t it? You died— then Flapjack saved you— we don’t all have someone to give themselves—”
Before she finishes the thought, Hunter twists away from her. It feels like ripping the scab from a wound, exposing the tentative flesh beneath. “How could you say that?”
In his absence, a damp gust brings rain. Her glasses cloud under droplets of saline, finally, tears as big as her feelings.
“It was yesterday.” She shouts her voice into a hoarse crackle. “I mourned you yesterday. You came back, but my dad? Not yet. And maybe not e—” Her sentence ends in her throat, comes out of her nose and her eyes and her mouth, lost in snot and tears and saliva.
Clover buzzes small sympathies at her neck.
Hunter compartmentalizes with a swiftness he hasn’t needed since he last wore the Golden Guard mask. “This isn’t about me. I’m sorry.” He rubs Willow’s back. “It’s not about you either. It’s about him.” He nods to Gilbert. “Everything makes you think of him. You would give anything to hold him again. Um, the real him. I know, I know.”
Willow shakes, her body a fault line splitting, the Titan’s head crumbling. She wasn’t there for her dad and now she’s clawed at someone else she holds dear. If she thinks about it, it felt satisfying, even good. Does a whip enjoy the crack? Does a blade enjoy the cut? Her soul is bilious and dripping and rotten.
The tilted crescent of her crying frown looks like the crescent on Gilbert’s forehead, but larger and turned. What if she too was frozen like this forever, held suspended in a resin of caustic grief and loathing?
Hunter isn’t as good at sealing off his feelings as he once was. Willow crying in warm shivers eats through his armor at the soft spot he has for her and her alone. It starts as a stuffy breath in his nose. He marks the precipice with “oh, blast it” as begins an endless current of tears down his cheeks, bending at his laugh lines and uniting at his chin.
Willow loosens her grip on Hunter’s hand, but doesn’t let go. Once she can almost breathe through her nose again, she asks, “Hunter, why are you crying? You didn't know him. But I appreciate it.”
“I’m, um, not sure.” Hunter’s laugh is nasal. “I wanted to hold it together.” He gives as addendum and answer, “For you.”
For the first time since seeing Gilbert again, Willow forces her cheeks into a smile, however slight, however sorrow-shined. It feels unpracticed, as if her face had forgotten anything in the direction of joy.
“He knew about you, actually.” She aches for her father and finds some comfort in truths about him.
“Oh. What kind of things?” Hunter wipes his nose. “That you were my first kiss?”
“Silly boy. Before all that, I told him all about the Emerald Entrails.” Willow turns towards Gilbert’s static mien. “He was so proud of me.” A thick tear rolls down her face. “He made a Penstagram just to look at the picture we took. And then he took a screenshot, printed it out and framed it.”
It feels better to talk about him, but also worse, to have him within reach but impossibly far. It’s like bloodletting, like trepanning, on bittersweet emotion.
“Oh my titan. He’s the ghoulbert125 with no profile picture who followed me on Pensta!”
“That’s him. Titan, it was so bad. The team picture is in our living room. He’d met Gus, of course, and knew of Skara and Viney. But it was always, Who’s the smiley one? Nice smile this, toothy grin that. When do we get to meet your friends? Ugh, dads.”
“And you said—”
“I said, Oh, Hunter? He does have a nice smile, but there’s more to him than you think.” She holds Hunter’s hand and plays with his fingers.
Hunter reddens. The shade of his cheeks changes like a drop of food coloring dancing through Camila’s mock apple blood.
“I wanted him to meet you, but.” Another sobbing fit wrenches her face into a frown again. She shakes her head. “It just never happened, and now he might not get to, ever.”
She reaches for Gilbert’s hand, laying hers flat on his open palm. The strange, smooth wood lacks texture, lacks lifelines.
Hunter shakes Gilbert’s other hand. “Nice to meet you, Willow’s dad, Mister Park, sir.”
“Oh, no no, never call him that. Sir is papa’s dad.” She whispers conspiratorially. “They didn’t get along because they were too alike.”
“Oh, okay.” Hunter shakes Gilbert’s hand again.
Willow moves out of Gilbert’s arms so she can face both him and Hunter. All their linked hands form a bent ring.
“Well, now I would say, dad, this is Hunter. You know him from my flyer derby team. He used to be the Golden Guard and he, uh, kidnapped me once? But after all we’ve been through, I love him a lot.”
“Yeah,” Hunter squeezes her hand hard to avoid feeling the next wave of red crashing on his face like a foamy, rising tide. “I see why you wouldn’t have wanted to tell him about me right away. I was, uh—”
“Someone who got better.” Willow squeezes back. “But if all I had said was that you were the Golden Guard, he might have said, That’s a valuable connection to have! Golden, even.”
She moves Gilbert's arm to gesture as he would have and immediately feels wretched, revisited by the urge to vomit. All of this is frightening and weird and absurd, but piloting her dad’s puppet-corpse is too far.
She can only laugh, even as she retches. Death is about decomposition, decay, becoming overrun with bugs and mold and slime until worms and soil and tree roots take you. The slow drift of the body into nothing and everything else is the last closure. The Collector has brought death by asphyxiation, as a bug trapped in amber looks alive, but lives all of forever in a lonely moment.
She knows what funerals are supposed to look like: an austere yet flattering picture of the dead, great white flower displays, the family and friends all gathered, the bowing. Gilbert, if he is dead now, will get none of that.
Hunter knits his brow, concerned by her silence and the quivering lump in her throat.
Willow struggles to verbalize her ridiculous sadness. “What do you do when your dad turns into a puppet?” She asks the ceiling to ask Hunter but avoid his eyes. “You can’t bury him, you can’t— is he even dead? What if he’s in there?”
“Easy.” Hunter has an answer ready. “You remember him. You fight for him. And maybe— someday, but don’t you dare hope it too deeply, you get him back.”
They smile damp smiles at each other, which urges more tears. Hunter cries onto Willow’s shoulder. Willow cries onto Gilbert’s wooden chest. The gaudy apron with its suns and stars is not as soft as it looks.
They stay huddled, glad tears and bitter smiles, for a long time.
Later, Hunter speaks.
“In a different way, I was a puppet for years. I can't imagine being a puppet forever.” He talks so Willow doesn’t have to listen to her own thoughts, doesn’t have to watch her brain’s picture show of bygone times with her dad. “And you know, the main ingredient in grimwalkers is palistrom wood. So in a way—”
“Don’t even joke about it.” She laughs anyway, because Hunter is funny and because sometimes humor is the only answer to life’s slurry of nonsensical trials. “Um, I think I’m ready to bring him back to the others.”
“You want to put him back where the Collector can use him again?”
“Yes. That’s a possibility, a real risk, but I know he would want to be with other people.”
That settles it.
They carry Gilbert back to the archive room. Willow notices that Hunter holds him more gently than before. She tries not to think about what it would have been like for them to meet back when life was normal. She shrugs it off. She has to.
After some propping up, Gilbert sits near the edge of the great pile of puppets, attentively looking at nothing.
Willow springs a white orchid from the floor. One flower is for herself, the other for Hunter. She puts hers in Gilbert’s hand. Hunter follows with his in the other.
“He will always love you,” Hunter whispers to her. “I know it. He would be so proud of you.”
It’s obvious to Willow that Hunter’s he is Flapjack first. Maybe it has been the whole time. She can still smile at that. It’s okay. It’s sweet that he’s trying at all, sharing the lessons of his grief with her. He doesn’t have to share in hers. She wouldn’t want him to. This heartpain feels too big to breathe beneath, crushing, smothering. The initial avalanche is over, but despite her best efforts, she was buried anyway. It saps her every strand of strength.
Hunter stands between Willow and Gilbert and gives her the tightest hug he can manage. He’s not good at them, his grip is too tentative.
She pulls him close and keeps him there. “You could be wood, but it feels like witch to me.”
It might be minutes, might be hours. Time is kept only by their breaths, matched rises and falls together.
“I’m ready,” Willow says. “This isn’t goodbye, dad. I love you and I’ll see you soon.” She turns to Hunter. “Let’s go.”
After they walk away, the puppet of Gilbert curls his hands around the flowers. His fingers form a slow claw, like spider lily stamens trying futilely to grasp them. It doesn’t work perfectly. One blossom falls through to rest on the tile.