What Pours Out

The place where nothing comes back is a throat in the rock, and past it the walls are too far to answer. Your chirp goes out and touches nothing. Somewhere below, water is dripping.

Then a voice comes up from the dark: four low notes, the second the highest and the last the lowest. It is not an echo.

You chirp again, short, and the ring lights the rock of the throat around you for a moment. At the height of your eye someone has scratched a name into it: V. QUAN. You keep it.

Above you the roof stirs. It is seven again up there. The colony lets go of the stone and begins to pour toward the mouth, and you go with it, out from under the bridge and into the last of the light.

Below, on the path along the water, a person is running under you, a paper lantern held out at arm's length.