The Library of Lives—a cube-shaped endless tunnel of pure blue light with faint grid lines pulsing along its length—is where she returned to seek grieving souls.

She waited for the feeling to arrive. Feelings usually told her what to do, drew her towards the next grief to seek. When nothing happened, she pushed outwards, assuming the shape of a human hand, fingers splayed out in the manner of young girls trying to catch wind from inside a moving car.

Something sphere-like and glowing emerged near her imagined palm. Whatever needed to be sought had found her. Onone followed—feeling quite like the girl she was mimicking—as it guided her through the highway of blue.

When it stopped, Onone froze.

For the first time in her experience, the library had turned redolent. Like she was floating inside a column of pulled sugar. So cloying was the scent, in fact, that it surprised her and she disintegrated.

This was not right. Onone pulled inwards, gathered herself to coalesce. She couldn’t manage a reed-form this time around. She had turned into a sphere as well.

Then the glowing globular thing stretched outwards until, floating in front of her, it was the image of Thomman. Thomman of the large eyes and easy smile. Thomman, whose soul she had been drawn to a few times already.

In her early miracles, she had sought grief easily from the souls of aching mothers, lovers, and dogs. Enter. Exit. Binary tasks, between which she pulled.

In all her time, Onone was the only grief-seeker she had known. Even if there had been others, she hadn’t encountered them. So when the change began, she hadn’t recognised what was happening to her.

Onone had stolen glances at his face, trying to figure out why she had been drawn to him. His grief had looked faint, only a wisp of blue in an otherwise healthy aura. He had been all of twenty years old then. Hair oiled to a shiny black, combed backwards and patted down. It had ended in charming ringlets that kissed the nape of his neck.

A quick and breathy exchange had ensued between them. She’d gathered—while straining to catch his near-inaudible murmurs between grunts—that he had just lost his father. In the sultry air of the lagoon, emotions rising like steam off their skin, their souls had stuck easily and Onone had been able to pull the grief away.

Their next encounter had happened shortly after. This time she had found herself inside a glass of pulikudi, the tamarind pulp drowning her in adamant sour-sweetness, a drink given to pregnant mothers for healthy childbirth.

While her entry into the body had been easy, the grief-pulling had not. She’d awoken into a woman who was mid-labour, her body in bone grinding pain. It had turned out to be a complicated birth. The infant’s shoulder wedged into the entrance, both mother and son trying hard to push. She had pierced with screams, flashes of purple flooding her vision as a hand had reached in to turn the infant until his head found the entrance. He had come out blue-lipped and Onone had felt the mother’s heart stop. That was why she had been called. She had held on to the mother, not letting her go. For Thomman.

Over the next few days, she had faithfully transferred to Thomman all the words that had been stuck, unsaid, in the woman’s soul.

Amongst the other souls she had Sought, there had been the girl who loved other girls. When her father found out, he cast her out. But when news of her mother’s cancer reached her, the girl found an in again. The girl’s aura was a befuddled mix of indigo and orange, and if Onone had entered her body, she was sure to have found the girl’s skin too thin.

Onone had drip, drip, dripped into the mother via the IV. She’d enjoyed the stories the daughter spoke in a soft, fluty voice, even though she knew the mother had abhorred them. Stories of women that the girl pretended to invent for entertainment: women with the back tattoos, authors who wrote smut, nurses with drinking problems.

Once, when both had been gazing out the window to spot the birds that chirped in the trees, Onone had been inspired to ask the girl a question.

“Do you know the name of that bird?”

“Do you?”

“No,” she had said, and the girl had smiled. She had then reached out to clasp their hand. They both knew names were what people gave. Names did not matter to birds, only songs did.

Once the mother’s soul had departed, Onone knew her chance had come. The girl’s grief would surface. Onone watched as the girl worked up the courage to tell her mother of her various loves. Waited until the bubbles of deep blue flecked with red had emerged, so she could speak the words a good mother should. Words, like magic, to make the bubbles dissolve into air.

This had been her first mistake. Inventing words that were not there.

Her job done, it was time. But instead of getting out, Onone had stayed with the girl for longer than she was supposed to. On the day she'd finally got out, Onone had kissed the sleeping girl’s forehead. She would never have known, and yet, Onone had done it.

Grief is a condition that can stick if one is not careful. When Onone returned, she was not the same. In the Library’s blue-light grief glinted like streaks of spun-sugar lit by the sun.

In the coastal world, grief precipitates. It floats above the landscape like a moisture-laden apparition and becomes a being unto itself—a thing of matter, rather than light.

It was during her time in the principal’s body that Onone had become aware of the presence of a new colour. No-longer transparent, Onone had acquired a faint yellow-orange light accompanied by a thrum. In her nights with Thomman, she felt his grief pull her towards him while the principal’s body became distant as she lay on her back, eyes trained on the moon. Was it her colour that did that?

The woman’s dreams had been restless, but by day she'd seemed blanketed by lassitude. A feeling of neither stay nor go. If Onone were embodied, she would have hidden herself indoors, curled up in foetal. But as a disembodied, she had only felt creased, folded in like a piece of paper.

This was not right. Onone had found herself waiting for the time when the job would be done and she could leave.

One night, Onone felt the uncontrolled rattle of the principal’s body as grief had shaken her bones and moved her teeth to chattering. A grief that had not been the woman’s to bear. A second mistake. And Onone began changing as well. Glittering crystals of blue had emerged to the tips of her streaks of yellow.

After this change, Onone had begun having trouble seeking souls. Humanness is also a condition that can smear on if one is not vigilant.

The call has, again, come from Thomman. He has moved out of the backwaters and into a bustling metropolis. His heart is not as young, but his sadness is still raw.

She finds him standing outside a tall building made of glass and steel. It dwarfs him and his tear-filled eyes glisten with the reflection of forty storeys of suns. He is looking straight at her. She, in turn, looks down to see which body she has poured herself into.

A potbellied man, clad in biscuit-brown, a cane gripped in hand. This man’s body is strong, not dying. Onone cannot figure out what kind of grief she has been called for.

Thomman walks up to the man and says, “Your wife found out.”

It is both a question and a statement, and this is how she knows that Thomman is in love with this man. The man looks away, making her look away as well. This is new. Onone searches inside the body to learn why she is not in control.

“You can’t leave me. We’re meant to be together.”

Onone feels the man’s grief coil up, blue wrapped in red. Grief. Anger. Shame. He doesn’t say a word, but raises his cane.

“Beat it. Or I will beat you.”

She watches Thomman’s eyes grow large before his knees buckle.

Later that night, the man (and she within him) go to Thomman. His body swollen from the beating, forehead still bleeding.

The man hesitates, but Onone will not be controlled this time. She yanks the anger into her. A new kind of entry. This grief is different, clotted with fear and shame. Red coils into her, grows insistent. Stretching, she makes him pick up a fallen rag to wipe the blood dripping on Thomman’s eyes, his hands trembling with resistance. She stirs the man from within, making him speak the words she knows Thomman needs to hear: “I am sorry. It is out of my hands. I cannot leave her. I hope you find the love that is for you.”

As the man is leaving, Thomman’s hand reaches out to grasp his. Onone, and the man, turned to look at Thomman. His eyes are almost swollen shut, but Onone knows that his eyes are looking at her. Not the man, her. And a new feeling creeps up in Onone.

Entering and exiting this body is worse. She has to make the man stand and regurgitate, a process no longer as effortless as an out-breath. When she leaves him, grief like multi-coloured sugary-gel, sticks all around her as she pulls herself out. She squeezes out, emerging like ice-lolly out of a tube.

She is heavy now. Sticky with blood-clots, salty with tears. No longer airy or made of light, she cannot float. Like a single-celled organism, she creeps until she finds a keyhole to slip through.

Once inside the Library, she waits for the cleansing light to wash over her, to unstick and unspool her until she is free again. Light and matterless. She waits, but it doesn’t come.

She lurches her way through the column of blue-light, looking for purchase that doesn’t exist. For purchase is something a thing of light would never need.

In this terrifying new aloneness, Onone has no one.

She pushes against the heaviness that used to be her, fighting like a blob of water airborne, struggling to coalesce. Only she doesn’t want to coalesce. Plop. Burst. Splech. That is what she wants. Escape.

Instead, she finds that the image of Thomman is still peering at her. Can he see her? Is he in here with her? That can’t be. She is imagining things. Only grief-seekers can enter the library.

Not that it matters anymore. She can’t help herself. She is a crawler now. A membranous grief-seeker who will have to seek in creeping, lurching ways. Perhaps this was the way of them all. Perhaps, this gloop is her next incarnation. A necessary step before the next important step in her journey, whatever it is.

She watches as the image of Thomman comes closer to her, his mouth open. Horrified, she flattens herself and retreats like a slug, avoiding the fleshy lick of his tongue. But she is membranous now. With skin. His mouth closes over her. No exit.

She resists waking inside him. A grief-seeker must not embody a griever either. That is the fundamental rule. But is she a grief-seeker? She hasn’t been for a while. There will no longer be a library for her. She has lost her in. Embodied membranous single-celled organisms that behave like slugs cannot enter the Library.

When she finally awakens inside him, she is inside another shape of blue. Blue like the library, but all around her is the rumble of other things. Of liquid creeping through tunnels. Reverberating. And punctuating it all are the steady beats of lung sacs expanding, contracting. She enters. Mingling with plasma, platelets, cells. Thomman’s grief enters her, as she enters his body. No more exits. She is now something breathing. Something living.