The Eight Winds

The parcel arrived on a Tuesday when the museum was closed and rain hammered the windows. Mara signed for it, carried it to the conservation lab, and cut the twine. Inside lay a polished wooden box, and in it, a silver pocket watch—heavy, two crowns, her name engraved on the back.

MARA

No middle initial, not even the tiny hyphen she insisted on, just the four letters she had learned to write on the back of receipts at the deli while her mum practiced English verbs under her breath.

Beneath the spring, a scrap of paper:

Eight winds only.

Counterclockwise to go back, clockwise to return.

Use them for what you can’t forget.

Pay the toll.

She should have told someone. Instead, she turned the crown.

The light tilted, shadows withdrew. She saw herself, ten minutes earlier, sitting on the stool.

‘Don’t waste them,’ she whispered—and her other self flinched. Then time slipped back, and she was alone with the watch.

First Wind

What she couldn’t forget was her mother’s hospital bed. Eleven years old, she hadn’t taken her hand. Now, she turned the crown back.

The apartment smelled of cumin and laundry soap. Her mother stood at the stove, alive, humming.

‘Eat,’ she said, smiling.

Mara’s throat closed. She managed, ‘Thank you—for the quince jam. For everything.’

Her mother laughed. ‘Next season it will be better.’

They ate from the same plate. The moment shone, and then dissolved.

Back in her apartment, the succulent on the windowsill was gone. Three books had vanished. A jar of quince jam sat glowing on the counter. When she tried to recall the plant, the memory dissolved. The toll had claimed it.

In her notebook, Mara wrote two columns: Kept / Toll.

Kept: Ate from the same plate.

Toll: Plant, books, a song she couldn’t remember.

Second Wind

Her brother Leo. The tram stop. The van that hadn’t stopped.

She landed two stops away, found him leaning at the shelter, shoelaces untied.

He looked up at her voice, smiled. ‘Mars bar! You’re not supposed to be on this side of the river.’

‘Not in those shoes,’ she teased. He bent to tie them, and the van rolled past. She lied: ‘Go to the bakery, green tiles—I want you to meet someone.’

He went, grinning. The tram passed; nothing happened.

Back in her present, Leo’s number was gone. The family group chat showed him alive, working in a mountain town, older, stranger. At New Year’s, her aunt’s dresser no longer bore his photo. He lived—but as someone she didn’t know.

Ledger:

Kept: He’s alive.

Toll: Familiarity. He’s a stranger.

Third Wind

Arjun. The night they’d fought in the bar. Originally she’d stayed silent; this time, she said what she had swallowed: I want everything from you and I’ll also be difficult.

On the tram he told her she was the bravest person he knew. In the present, her phone held photos of them as a couple. They had dated for six months, tender and ordinary, ending in another kind of sadness. Different shape; same ache. And three photographs from that year were missing.

Ledger:

Kept: Honesty with Arjun.

Toll: Photographs, songs, small years shaved away.

Experiments and Tolls

Ten minutes back cost her nothing. Two hours cost her a street name. A day cost her a joke. She wrote: No fast-forward. Only back, only return.

The toll grew sharper. She lost a project she’d once conserved—the medieval saddle no longer carried her name in the catalogue. Her supervisor insisted she’d worked on ceramics instead. It was the first time her identity had been trimmed away. She created a third column: Cost to self.

Fourth Wind

The dream of the nursing home door drew her back. The night before her mother’s death, she sat in the chair she hadn’t dared to sit in the first time. She held her mother’s hand. Her mother smiled, called her little moon, spoke of rice pudding and mint. When the breathing shifted, Mara pressed the call button and stayed.

Back in her apartment, her father’s Australian vowels slipped from memory; she could only recall his old language. His photograph had moved into an envelope she didn’t remember mailing herself. The toll was sharp, but she could carry it.

Fifth & Sixth Winds

She used one wind lightly, writing under a stairwell: you can carry this. A gift to her past self.

Another carried her to a market with Arjun. They grew close, then apart, arguing honestly, careful with each other like knives. This time she didn’t twist the crown to fix endings. She let them stand. She put the watch away for months.

Seventh Wind

She chose presence, not change. She went back to her mother’s kitchen, eleven years old again, rice pudding on the stove. She didn’t alter a thing, only memorized the smell of boiling milk, the tap of the spoon, her mother’s faded pencil notes. She found the recipe card: Eight winds only. She copied it onto her palm, left it behind, and returned.

The toll: a rain-spill stone in her alley she could no longer remember. She laughed when she stepped into it.

Ledger:

Kept: Presence.

Toll: Small losses only she would notice.

The Last Wind

The final wind was not to travel but to deliver. She sat at the same stainless sink where it began, turned the crown clockwise, and chose to remain in the present deliberately. She wrote a note on recipe paper, the same words she had once received:

Eight winds only. Counterclockwise to go back, clockwise to return. Use them for what you can’t forget. Pay the toll.

She wrapped the watch, tied the twine, and sent it to herself. When the courier squinted at her badge, the loop closed.

Ledger, final line:

I sat in the chair.

He is alive somewhere under the same sky.

I am here.

That night she made rice pudding, burning the milk a little. She left a second spoon by the plate, a token. Across the city, her brother laughed with his child, her mother’s recipes echoed in her own kitchen, and Mara breathed into the cobalt dusk, knowing she did not need another wind.