eh, i've got a thousand ripples to study

The Wujing Zongyao (Chinese: 武經總要), sometimes rendered in English as the Complete Essentials for the Military Classics, is a Chinese military compendium written from around 1040 to 1044.

(Flash Fiction month 2026, day 21, finally returning after losing almost the entire middle third of the month to a bad cold. Permanent link including description of challenge here!)

1. A LABYRINTH HAS ONLY ONE PATH

Grace sees the space between things. The emptiness between one cafeteria table and another. Between people. There’s always some space there, unless they’re hugging. Though sometimes she wonders if she could sneak through the tiny space a hug leaves. Space for Jesus, people will joke, even though not a single one of them has ever been told to leave that space. That’s for other people. Hicks in the country, she thinks they assume.

That’s a type of space, too. Presumed. Between reference and what is referenced. Between signifier and signified. 

She slips in the space between the sounds of conversations and finds a space to herself, against the wall.

People still ask her to speak about herself, sometimes. New to Seattle, does she miss the sun? Of course she does. That’s a space between things. There’s a space between raindrops, too.

2. YET THE MYTHICAL LABYRINTH HAD MANY PATHS

Grace is just the result of the previous generation. The way her mother and aunt split apart. As if their entire lives were a competition to be as opposite from the other as they could. Twins. One who tells only the truth, one who tells only lies? She thinks this and laughs.

At her aunt’s, she shares her space with five cats. It’s just a stereotype, all of it. Spinster and preacher’s wife. No truer than myth. And yet she is here. Wondering sometimes if any of it is real. Or if somehow her entire life is a fabrication by herself. Something to make a good story. Maybe while she’s in a coma somewhere else, a different her, with a life that’s not a myth. Telling this story to herself.

3. IT IS HARD TO DEPICT MANY PATHS ON COINS

Grace thinks a lot about wishing, and growing up. About saying you want something aloud, where goblin kings can hear you. About wanting your parents gone.

About an arrest happening, because what is CPS if not a contingent of goblin kings, marching in a great parade?

She was hurt. Of course she was. Her arm never did heal right. Her parents did deserve what happened. Of course they did. And it was her fault. Because she wished it to an empty room at night, where goblin kings could hear.

4. THE LABYRINTH WAS SIMPLIFIED

A teacher talking to a class leaves so much space. Between what is said and what is heard. 

A girl who barely explains where she comes from leaves even more space than that.

She closes her eyes, during one of those classes. But there is space between her and sleep, too. In her head she traces the contours of a maze. Of a labyrinth. They are not the same thing. Of course they are the same thing. She is trying to find an exit. She is trying to find the center. They are not the same thing. Of course they are the same thing.

She was told what to believe but even more than that she’s been told to believe that she was told what to believe. And where does that leave her? Tracing a labyrinth. There’s a journey ahead of her but none of the people sending her on that journey can help her. But that’s a myth, too. She’s the perfect shape of a protagonist and she knows it. So she must have made that up, too. It’s all too perfect. Every way she cuts it, she’s a morality tale. Isn’t that right?

5. AND SO IT CAME TO MEAN SOMETHING ELSE

Her phone buzzes. There’s a space between that moment and the start of the ringtone. Custom. This is no place, but here I am.

She picks it up.

The voice sounds distant. Static. Tinny. Understanding any of its words is like crossing such a wide space. A canyon just barely bridged. A step between walls of a labyrinth.

“Your mother is out of the hospital.”

Her mother was not taken to a hospital. Her mother was taken to a prison. Her mother…

Grace looks down at her wrist. It’s healed perfectly.

“I’m not sure you have the right number,” she manages to say.

But the person on the other hand pronounces her full name. The way you’d say the full name of some faerie. Of some goblin king. That fulfilled its own wishes.

She remembers a trial. She knows there was a trial. She remembers sitting…

Where was she sitting, exactly?

There is a space between things.

She has found a space between things.

And she knows, in a moment like the precipice at the center of a labyrinth, that when she ends this call she will find a space between things again. She knows she could choose not to. But she has gotten so good at finding that space between things.

“I don’t want to see her,” she says. And she ends the call.

…And thinks, maybe she heard her phone ring. But it’s not ringing anymore.

even though it's so very late and they have to report to their jobs in a few hours, they both get in the car, one driving, one shotgun, you in the back like a child needing a drive to settle into sleep, even though one could drive and the other sleep, because they can't sleep without each other, they'd rather drive you across the city rather than be apart for half an hour, the office buildings lit pointlessly beautiful for nobody except you to admire their reflections in the water, the lovers too busy talking about that colleague they don't like, tomorrow's dinner plans, how once they bought peaches on a road trip and ate and ate until they could taste it in each other's pores, they get out of car together to kiss you goodnight, you who have perfected the ghost goodbye, exiting gatherings noiselessly, leaving only a dahlia-scented perfume, your ribcage compressing to slide through doors ajar and untouched, yesterday you were a flash of white in a pigeon's blinking eye, in the day few hours old you stand solid and full of other people's love for each other spilling over, warm leftovers.