An Episode of Remnants.

Episode Content Warnings

Please bear in mind that this work has content some listeners may find distressing, including themes of war, violence, and grief. This episode contains:

Characters surviving poverty

Living under an oppressive regime

References to execution by guns

References to becoming a refugee

Mentions of sex and sexual encounters

Descriptions of the experience of a stroke

Transcript

SIR
Apprentice?

THE APPRENTICE GASPS, PANIC BREATHING

APPRENTICE
What?! Where– how–?!

SIR
No need to worry. Interesting that I should find you here.

APPRENTICE
Wh–? What is this place?

SIR
It is the First and Last Place, you have taken– well. You’ve certainly taken. Look at me. What do you see?

APPRENTICE
Some– some guy?

SIR
Very good. Yes. Very good. That is how I appear, then? Yes? Corporeal?

APPRENTICE
I– what?

SIR
Never mind. It is something I have been trying, since– no matter. No matter. No doubt you are confused. I am here to help.

APPRENTICE
You are?

SIR
Yes. Now. Let me see, how ought I… begin. Yes. Not a job. That places too much emphasis on the judgement. Ask for help, the pressure upon you is great enough that you begin to reach beyond what you’ve seen. It is getting trickier. In ways, I long for those days where it felt I could wake you and hand you a remnant and force you to read it with no consequence beyond the reading iself.

APPRENTICE
Sorry, am I… missing something?

SIR
Yes. Not you, as you are. Necessarily. Yes, imagine it best that there were others in your place, before you. Yes, that is the best way to think of it. I will talk of them, so. From your perspective it may as well be separate from you.

APPRENTICE
Okay?

SIR
No. But do not dwell upon it.

APPRENTICE
Okay.

SIR
Let’s see, then. You are here to read remnants. That’s all there is, in this place. Remnants, what happens to them, as you imagine it playing out.

That’s not important, what’s important is that there are Remnants and you are going to read them.

APPRENTICE
Okay?

SIR
Yes, yes it is. Now, come with me.

THE APPRENTICE GETS UP AND FOLLOWS SIR AWAY FROM THE FURNACES

SIR
Oh, look. The door to your room. We can go in there to do it, if you like.

APPRENTICE
I– no. Thank you. You were saying, about remnants?

SIR
Ah, yes. I think I have a good idea for where to start.

THEY WALK FURTHER

SIR
Here.

APPRENTICE
Oh, they’re. Shoes. Ballet shoes.

SIR
Yes. Very good. Pick them up.

APPRENTICE
They’re so beat up. Well danced in. They’re soft, not pointe shoes, and they’re— oh, they’re– ah, uh!

WHOOSH

Andriy is too small to see the stage over the rest of the crowd, even when he stands on his tiptoes. There’s barely any room in the small events hall where the dancers are performing. It feels like half the town have crowded in to watch. Many of them still have on their thick winter coats because there is not enough room to take them off. There’s a damp, stuffy heat. Snow is melting on the wool and the floor, dripping into puddles around everyone’s boots.

Andriy’s mother catches his attention by clicking her teeth. Without speaking, she gestures across the room. A small contingent of children have clambered atop the haphazardly stacked chairs at the edge of the room. Their eyes catch the spotlights on the stage like catseyes.

Andriy squeezes through the crowd as the piano music shifts in tone, turning from contemplative to something exciting, fast-paced. He reaches the chairs. Piotr and Gregor from school hoist him up between them with their sweat damp palms. Andriy finds footing on the back of one of the chairs, gripping the front of another to steady himself. Gregor holds onto to him, one foot hanging off his own chair so he can fit Andriy in beside him. The feel of Gregor’s fist on the back of Andriy’s coat is oddly comforting.

Before he looks at the stage, Andriy scours the crowd for his mother. He finds her in an instant, the only face turned to him and not the stage. He waves a little too enthusiastically.

‘Calm down, you’ll send us toppling!’ Gregor hisses, wavering in his foothold.

‘Sorry,’ Andriy hisses back. He feeds his arm around Gregor’s waist.

It has been years since the ballet has come to their little town. Andriy barely remembers the last time, but as soon as his attention settles on the dancers, it’s as though the rest of the world has been suspended.

They move with absolute control of their bodies, subtle and beautiful. He can hear the thud as their shoes meet the stage and yet they still seem weightless as they move. Andriy watches the Prince lift his swan aloft, her crown of dirty white feathers quivering as she rises. She reclines in his hands, her ribs moving fast in his palms.

Andriy thinks of the starling that fell from its nest in the spring, how he’d cupped it in its hands, felt the magical trill of its heart, too fast to be real, and the quiver of its ribs thinner than matchsticks under his fingertips.

At the end of the performance, there is uproarious applause. People shout and cheer and throw their hats. Afterwards, the dancers drink with the townspeople for a while. They’re city folk, though; they think less of people from the outskirts of the empire. A comrade is a comrade, of course, and all are equal under the law, but even Andriy knows that city folk think that country folk are simpler in the mind.

Andriy’s mother walks him home in the dark. Snow is falling, huge, fluffy pompoms of it drifting through the windless dark, glowing in the lights of the streetlamps. Andriy twirls through them. ‘I am meant to be a dancer,’ he tells his mother.

She smiles at him, oddly. ‘Yes. I know.’

WHOOSH

It is four hours on the bus to the town where Andriy’s father works. He watches the hills pass by the windows and tries not to feel sick about leaving his mother and his sisters behind. There’s nothing for it; his grandmother is ill so mother must stay to care for her, and Vesna and Zoryana are too young to be without her.

Andriy is almost nine, now, and the only person who knows about dancing in their little down says that if he does not learn from a proper teacher soon, he will never dance ballet. His father and uncle have space for him, and so long as he can take charge of his own meals, they’re happy to for him to stay with them so he can learn to dance.

Before he even takes his bag to his father’s place, Andriy follows the directions his mother’s friend wrote out for him on where to find the dancing school.

The front door of the school is not locked, so Andriy walks right in. He hears piano music, the rhythmic drum of feet on wooden floors, the beat marked out by the rap of a can against a hand. A woman’s voice barks instructions on shape and form. Some of them Andriy knows – first position, plie, fifth – others are meaningless to him.

Finally he reaches the door which leads to the dancing hall. The room is vast. The floor is made of pale pine, scuffed and worn with use. A line of fifty children stand in front of vast mirrors, facing themselves as a tall, severe looking woman paces up and down behind them.

She holds her hand aloft, in a fist.

The line of children freezes. Andriy holds his breath. Even the pianist stops playing.

The teacher walks back down the line. She touches the small of a young girl’s back. ‘You’re holding your weight here. That’s why you’re shaking,’ she says. She takes the girl’s upended leg in her hand and twists her body slightly. ‘You should feel the tension in your stomach, not your back. Otherwise you will hurt yourself.’

The girl nods vigorously.

‘Can you hold this position, where I’ve moved you?’

The girl nods again.

‘Show me,’ says the teacher.

The girl wavers on her foot a moment, then minutely adjusts her weight. She glances in her reflection at the teacher, still standing behind her.

The teacher smiles. ‘Very good.’

Andriy is filled with a kind of fizzing excitement he has never felt before in his life. This is where he is meant to be.

WHOOSH

Andriy’s uncle wakes him in the middle of the night, hand over his mouth to stop him crying out.

Andriy tries to fight him, but his uncle shakes his head, his eyes wide and desperate. With his free hand, he holds a finger to Andriy’s lips. Andriy nods as best he can with his uncle’s hand on his face, and gasps silently when he sets him free.

Uncle Jan has Andriy’s coat under his arm. He helps Andriy into it, then shoves open his bedroom window. He slips over the sill and lands with a crunch on the low roof of the outbuilding. He raises his hands to help Andriy down.

Andriy freezes still. He darts across his room, grabs his ballet shoes in their bag from the back of his door. Through the crack between the door and the frame, he sees blood on the ground.

‘Andruska!’ Uncle Jan whispers, desperate but barely audible.

Andriy darts back over to the window, his heart pounding. His uncle helps him down onto the outbuilding roof and they run along it, hand in hand. Uncle Jan jumps down onto the bins, pauses and helps Andriy down again.

They cross the street, keeping out of the glow of the sporadic streetlights. They run and run, until Andriy’s shins feel like they’re buckling and his lungs are burning from the cold night air. They stop at the bridge on the way out of town, but they don’t start across it, like Andriy expects. Instead, his uncle shimmies down the slope at the bridge’s side, beckons Andriy to follow him.

Andriy hesitates a moment. He looks over his shoulder. He can see the dancing school from the side of the bridge, all the lights out so late at night. Despite his heaving chest and frozen nose, he feels his eyes stinging, prickling as he looks at it. It feels as though a pit has opened up in his chest. He had found where he belonged and standing there in the frigid night he knew, at once, that he was never going to step inside again.

Uncle Jan calls his name, and he follows.

WHOOSH

For the first two weeks after arriving in Amsterdam, Andriy shows up every single day at the dancing school, and simply watches. He does not do anything but watch, barely shares a word with anyone, does not even sit down, even on the floor.

In the months since he and Uncle Jan fled the Soviet Union after his father was shot by the KGB, Andrei has done all he can to keep dancing without instruction, without the proper space, as they traveld. They had crossed out of the USSR through Poland, then they were smuggled across Germany, and finally delivered to the Netherlands. It’s taken months for them to finally make their way to Amsterdam, where Uncle Jan’s sister lives.

Aunt Oksanna let Andriy and Uncle Jan stay, but she did so begrudgingly. She was alone with two growing children. She had no space for refugees. Uncle Jan and Andriy shared one of the little beds in Oksanna’s children’s room, and the two girls crammed into the other. Nobody was particularly happy about this situation.

And so here was Andriy, going to the dancing school every day, and just watching, watching, watching, and nothing else.

‘What do you want, boy?’ one of the instructors asks, at the beginning of Andriy’s third week of watching.

‘To dance,’ says Andriy.

The tutor looks him up and down. ‘You’re too old to start.’

‘I’m very good,’ says Andriy. ‘I trained at one of the best dancing schools in the USSR. I have practised every day I can manage since I fled,’ he says. He takes his bag from his shoulder and takes out the remains of his dancing slippers. They are now barely recognisable, so many times they have been repaired, so often has their size been increased to accommodate his growing feet.

The tutor takes the shoes and stares at Andriy in disbelief. ‘Come with me,’ he says.

Andrei holds his breath as he follows the tutor down the halls of the school. He takes Andriy to a back office, makes him stand by the desk whilst he rummages in a cupboard. A moment later, he sets a pair of new satin slippers into Andriy’s hands.

‘Show me,’ says the tutor.

WHOOSH

The lights go down and the audience roars with cheers and applause. Andriy lets go of the hands of the dancers beside him and heads off the stage.

As he makes his way back to the chaos of their changing space, people are clapping him on the back. ‘You’re a shoe-in for principal next season,’ says one dancer from the corps. ‘You’ll be the Prince in the next Swan Lake, guarantee it,’ says another.

Andriy is not quite eighteen, and if they’re right, he’ll be the youngest principal dancer the company has ever had. He finds himself shrugging and blushing and saying things he doesn’t mean, like ‘I’d be happy to just land Spanish again’ and ‘a solo part is an honour’.

As he changes into his street clothes and heads out into the dark streets of whatever city they’re in that month, he lights a cigarette.

‘Andy!’ one of the soloists, Doutzen, calls. This is what all of his fellow dancers call him, now. ‘There’s a party,’ says Doutzen. ‘Would you like to go?’

Andriy considers for a moment, then nods and allows Doutzen to lead him by the hand. Doutzen is a good few years older than Andriy, in her mid-twenties, pushing into the upper-limits of how old a performing dancer can be. She has been to this city before, though and she has friends she writes to in the area.

When they arrive at the apartment, it is clear right away that Doutzen’s friends are obscenely wealthy. Andriy tries at once to melt into the background. He finds himself some bits to eat, a glass of wine to sip on, and stalks around the edges of the rooms, avoiding eye contact and conversation.

After a while, he finds himself stood outside by the pool, on the opposite side of the water from almost everyone else. He’s looking at the party lights reflected in the pool’s still water, thinking seriously about kicking off his shoes and soaking his sore feet in it.

‘If you’re thinking about jumping in, I wouldn’t, if I were you,’ says a voice from nearby.

A young girl is sitting on a low stone bench, smoking. Her eyes are pale blue, electric, like the colour of the sky just around the sun.

‘Sorry,’ says the girl. ‘Didn’t mean to scare you.’

Andriy shakes his head. ‘Why shouldn’t I jump in?’

The girl cocks her head to the side. ‘It’s freezing,’ she says. She looks Andriy up and down. ‘You’re Russian?’

Andriy shakes his head. ‘From Ukraine. Part of the USSR.’

‘You’re a soviet defector?’ she whispers.

Andriy shrugs. ‘I was too young to defect, really. My uncle was the brave one.’

The girl chews her lip. ‘I’m Eliza,’ she says. ‘Eliza Grenville.’

‘Andriy,’ says Andriy. ‘Is this your party?’

Eliza considers for a moment. ‘Not really, no. I live here, but it’s not my house. I’m something of a defector too, though from less dire circumstances than you, I’m sure. Harry’s letting me stay with him.’

‘Is he your boyfriend?’

Eliza barks a startled laugh. ‘Goodness, no. You’re more to his tastes than I am,’ she says. Then she claps her hand over her mouth.

Andriy considers her for a moment before he speaks. ‘It is kind of him to let you stay,’ he says.

Eliza nods slowly. ‘Yes. It is.’

Eliza makes room for Andriy on her bench. She asks him who he is, what he does, but he can tell she’s not really listening to his answers. She’s looking at his mouth, his eyes, his hands. Experimentally, Andriy touches his thumb to the middle of Eliza’s lower lip. Her mouth opens just slightly.

‘Goodness,’ she whispers.

‘I’ve never kissed anyone, before,’ says Andriy. This is a white lie; he kissed Anya from his old village when they were six and playing hide and seek, but he is not sure that counts.

‘Goodness,’ says Eliza again. ‘It seems a great disservice, given the prettiness of your lips.’

Andriy feels his cheeks turn pink. ‘You think I’m pretty?’

Eliza blinks rapidly. ‘Every so pretty,’ she tells him.

She kisses him then, softly at first. She pauses to ask if he is alright, to remind him to breathe, and then she kisses him again. Andriy kisses back as best he can. He’s messy at first, but he’s a fast learner. It’s not so unlike dutch ballet, he thinks; all about precision and care over showmanship.

Eliza kisses Andriy to his feet, into the building, up the stairs. She kisses him as she peels off his clothes and sets her hands against his body, each movement accompanied by a tiny question and pause, only resumed when Andriy offers his enthusiastic agreement. Eliza takes off her dress and Andriy copies her, his hands against her soft skin, each stroke of his trembling fingers accompanied by a little question and a pause whilst he waits for her to answer.

‘Andriy,’ Eliza whispers, pulling him down into the bed on top of her. ‘I would like you to make love to me,’ she says.

Andriy nods. ‘Alright,’ he says. ‘You will have to show me how.’

WHOOSH

In the months after the second world war, Andriy massages his calves and finds himself thinking about Doutzen. He wondered what she’d think of him now. He’s not a principal dancer anymore. He’s a soloist again, like he has been those first years at the Dutch National Ballet.

At first, it had felt like a regression, but it has felt less and less so with every passing day. It’s less tiring to be a soloist. There is less pressure. And now he is not trying to impress directors and recruiters into giving him a better billing, he finds he enjoys it more.

Andriy is heading home after rehearsals one day in the autumn. It’s a warm evening, like summer is clocking in for her final hours ahead of the advent of the cold winter. He decides not to head home right away, but to wander into the Central Park to see the browning leaves, and spend a quiet moment alone.

He’s doing just this when something strikes him hard on the back of the neck. Andriy yelps, his hand flying to the base of his skull. When he looks, his fingers come away bloody.

‘Oh my god, I’m so sorry!’ a woman is screaming. She’s running towards Andriy across one of Central Park’s many sweeping lawns. ‘Are you okay?’

Andriy is still looking at the blood on his fingers. ‘Did you shoot me?’ he asks, perplexed.

‘What?!’ the woman yelps. ‘God no! What the hell would I have shot you for?!’

Andriy shrugs. He wipes his blood on his trousers.

‘I was tossing a conker for my stupid dog,’ says the woman.

‘What dog?’ says Andriy.

The woman gasps and runs off away from Andriy, shouting ‘Penance! Penance!’

Finally, a tiny, golden spaniel bursts barking from a heap of leaves and bounds over to the woman.

‘Thank god!’ says the woman, scooping the dog up into her arms.

‘The dog is named Penance?’ says Andriy.

The woman freezes still for a moment. ‘Yes. It’s a long story.’

Andriy tips his head to the side. ‘I don’t need to be anywhere until six o’clock tomorrow morning.’

‘Six?!’ the woman says, aghast. ‘Do you work in a bakery or something?’

Andriy frowns. ‘Uh, no? I am a ballet dancer.’

The woman’s mouth drops open. ‘You’re joking, right?’

‘It wouldn’t be a very funny joke,’ says Andriy. He opens his satchel, pulls out one of his shoes.

‘You really aren’t joking.’

Andriy shrugs. ‘Do you like the ballet?’

The woman laughs. ‘Sorry, I’m not laughing at you, it’s just– no. No I do not like the ballet. I saw the Nutcracker when I was a kid and fell asleep out of boredom.’

Andriy splutters. ‘How charming,’ he says.

The woman’s cheeks have turned bright red. ‘Oh my god, what am I saying? You can’t take me anywhere. I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I nearly killed a ballerina.’

‘You didn’t nearly kill me, it’s not so dramatic,’ says Andriy with a shrug.

The woman bursts into laughter again. ‘Excuse me?! I’m dramatic?! You thought I’d shot you!’

‘What can I say?! A former Soviet in the USA? Some worries never fade entirely,’ says Andriy.

The woman’s dog is amicably chewing her plait. ‘I’m Jenny, by the way,’ she says, either unaware of the dog’s occupation or ignoring it.

‘Andriy,’ Andriy replies.

WHOOSH

Andriy throws back the covers and swings his legs over so he can plant his feet firmly on the ground.

‘I swear to god if you start doing plies again I’m going to murder you,’ Jenny grumbles, rolling over, rustling their blankets. She traces her fingers along Andriy’s back, just lines at first, then shapes, flowers. Finally letters. She spells out ‘what’s wrong’.

‘I am thinking about Nadia again,’ Andriy admits. Nadia is their youngest daughter, and so far the only one of their four children who has expressed even the slightest interest in Andriy’s profession. Though he’s long retired from dancing on stage, he directs at smaller companies, working on bold, avant garde pieces.

‘It frightens you that she wants to be a dancer,’ Jenny says. She sits up, winds her arms around Andriy’s chest, rests her chin on his shoulder.

‘For so long ballet was all I had,’ says Andriy. ‘It was my first thought when I woke up and my last when I went to sleep. When I ate, I thought of it as fuel for dancing, when I slept, recuperation to dance again. My body is an occupied territory, dance the invading army. It’s martial law still governs me now; when I don’t stretch out my body punishes me, even though it’s been years since I’ve been on stage. Dancing made me a machine.’

‘No, darling,’ says Jenny, planting a soft kiss to the back of Andriy’s shoulder. ‘Dancing made you a dancer. It is your first and greatest love.’

‘You are my greatest love,’ says Andriy.

Jenny chuckles. ‘No, my beautiful swan, I will always come second to ballet. I’m comfortable with that. You should be too.’

Andriy leans back to kiss Jenny’s cheek.

‘Do you think Nadia’s serious about it, then?’ asks Jenny.

Andriy sighs. The truth is he knew Nadia was serious about ballet before she’d even started asking for lessons. He saw the sparkle in her eyes when she watched other people dance, watched how she pulled herself to stand straighter when her gaze settled on them, noticed her counting their steps when they moved across the stage.

‘That silence is a yes, isn’t it,’ says Jenny.

‘I don’t want it to eat her alive.’

‘It didn’t eat you, did it?’ says Jenny.

Andriy squeezes his eyes shut. ‘No.’

‘Besides. If a world war and the murder of your father couldn’t keep you from dancing, I don’t know that there would be any way to stop Nadia, either. She is so very like you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ says Andriy.

Jenny squeezes him gently. ‘Shut it. That’s a good thing. I think you’re pretty great, actually. Can’t you tell from the fact I’m lying naked in your bed?’

Andriy chuckles. He turns himself around in Jenny’s arms. He runs his hand through her thick dark hair, strokes his thumb across the soft, downy hairs that cover the soft skin of her stomach, softer now with all the stretch marks that dance across it, like a delicate map of her past marked right into her skin.

Andriy is filled with such a deep and inexplicable feeling of love and terror that he cannot bear to look at Jenny any longer. He draws his hands to his chest and presses his face into the pillow. He feels himself shuddering.

‘Oh, little swan,’ Jenny whispers.

Andriy does not open his eyes as he shifts himself close to her. ‘I will be alright again in a moment,’ he promises her. ‘And I will make porridge for our breakfast. When we are all fed and dressed, I will take Nadia with me to the studio, and I will talk to Fernanda about finding her a teacher.’

‘Very good,’ says Jenny.

WHOOSH

Nadia’s dance partner leads her by the hand to the front of the stage. Her dress is made of over a thousand swan’s feathers, encrusted with crystals on the front of her chest. She told Andriy it was dreadfully uncomfortable, but worth every scratch and sore for how glorious she looked in it.

This is the third time Andriy has seen her dance as the White Swan. He came on her opening night, and again a few weeks into her run. And here he is, with Jenny and all of Nadia’s siblings, on the closing night of the show.

Andriy feels oddly breathless. His body is aching as though he had danced every step across the stage along with his daughter. He does not even have it within himself to feel self-conscious about the tears flooding down his cheeks, or the unsociably loud nature of his applause.

Jenny winds her arm around Andriy’s waist.

‘I would have loved to be the White Swan,’ he says.

Jenny kisses his cheek. ‘I know, my love,’ she tells him. ‘And you would have been beautiful.’

Andriy trembles as a real sob tears itself free of his chest. He stops clapping to hold Jenny tight for a moment. She traces letters onto his arm. ‘You okay?’

‘Fine,’ he says. ‘I need to pull myself together. I am so proud of her. Our Nadia. Aren’t you proud? Aren’t you so proud?”

Jenny pulls out of Andriy’s embrace to look up at him in bemusement. ‘Of course I’m proud.’

Andriy laughs. He shakes his head. ‘I think she might be a prima, one day.’

Jenny raises an eyebrow. ‘Darling, I have no idea what that means.’

Andriy sighs. ‘I still find it impressive that you were taking her to half her classes for the last sixteen years and you still don’t know what a prima is.’

Jenny rolls her eyes. ‘I was joking,’ she says.

Andriy laughs at himself. ‘Well then,’ he says.

‘Well then,’ Jenny agrees.

WHOOSH

Bella is a dot. She’s Nadia’s first, just over knee high, and looks exactly like a miniaturised version of her mother, who herself is a perfect replica of Jenny.

Bella is nervous when she walks onto the stage in her flower costume. She spots Andriy in the crowd and waves her chubby fingers at him. Andriy waves back, aching. She’ll lose that babyish roundness soon, will properly look like a child, no longer a toddler. It’s not come yet but the loss is already aching in Andriy’s chest.

Once Bella knows her family is there, Bella gets back to dancing. Considering she’s barely four years old and has only been taking dancing lessons for three months, she does remarkably well. For a moment, Andriy thinks he sees that look of concentration cross her face that stirs something in his chest, something which still lives there, in side of him, and which he’d recognised in Nadia, too.

At the end of the routine, Bella and the four other little girls in her class come to the front of the stage for their bows. Bella’s head piece falls off and there’s a smattering of laughter in the crowd, but she just sticks it on her arm like an oversized bangle and gets straight back to bowing.

‘That’s my girl,’ says Andriy.

He goes to clap his hands with the rest of everyone, but only his right hand responds to him. He looks down at the left, sitting limp in his lap. He feels oddly disconnected from it.

‘So what do you think dad, do you reckon she’s one of us?’ says Nadia, her voice raised above the applause.

Andriy tries to answer her, but he can’t. A cold thrill of worry runs down his spine. He grabs Nadia’s sleeve with his still-working hand.

‘Dad?’ says Nadia. She’s confused at first, but as she turns to Andriy, her eyes go wide with horror.

The sounds of the crowd around them are blurring into one, homogenous noise. It beats like a drum. Andriy keels sideways.

He feels Nadia’s hands grasping his, but they’re getting further and further away.

Andriy is drifting somewhere. He’s a fluffy piece of snow falling slowly from the sky, twisting in the air, caught on the stream of someone’s breath.

He feels hands grasping his fingers. He feels his own breath, ragged in his chest. He feels kisses on his cheeks and forehead. Words wash over him, their shapes lost but their meanings strong. It is like bathing in a sea of love. It’s all so soft and quiet, like the morning after the first snow of winter.

Jenny draws words on the inside of his wrist. I love you, little swan, she writes.

I love you too, he thinks. He can’t say it but he knows if he thinks it hard enough it will reach her, the way snow falls from the sky and forms a drift upon the ground, little by little, tuft by tuft, until it swaddles everything.

Andriy can hear the rhythm of dancer’s shoes on the pale pinewood floors of the studio. Gregor’s hand is clutching the back of his coat. In the crowd, his mother is watching. Andriy is a swan raised towards the sky, Jenny’s hands carefully holding his trembling ribs. Any moment now, he will take flight.

WHOOSH

APPRENTICE
That was so. So. Soft. Like the shoes.

SIR
Yes. Soft is an appropriate word.

APPRENTICE
The things that stick. That are in here. It’s not a whole life.

SIR
No. It is the remnants of a life.

APPRENTICE
But why these remnants?

SIR
I do not see them as you do. But. I would imagine it is something to do with the things that meant the most to them, or which left the greatest marks. Or perhaps it is less organised than that. Perhaps it is whatever their mind spits out of them as it pulses out its final light show in the throes of death. I do not know.

APPRENTICE
But. How can you not know?

SIR
I am not a thing that knows.

APPRENTICE
But you’re meant to be showing me how this works, aren’t you? How can you do that if you don’t know anything?

SIR
That is certainly not what I am meant for, Apprentice.

APPRENTICE
Why do you call me that, then?

SIR
What?

APPRENTICE
Apprentice.

SIR
Oh. I– I do not know. I suppose it sort of stuck.

APPRENTICE
Why?

SIR
I am not a thing that knows.

APPRENTICE
Right.

SIR
Now. Another.

APPRENTICE
What?

SIR
Remnant.

APPRENTICE
Now?!

SIR
Yes, come with me.

APPRENTICE
But I–

SIR
There is no time!

APPRENTICE
That’s it, then?! I read them and that’s it?!

SIR
Yes. Should there be something else?

APPRENTICE
I— no. No. Or, yes? How the hell am I supposed to know?!

SIR
In many regards, you are also not a thing that knows.

APPRENTICE
Well. Yeah. I guess that’s fair.

SIR
It is. Now come with me.

APPRENTICE
Alright.

END

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