When Heaven Fell

 

 

Once there were hills here, green and wide under a sky as broad as the shoulders of Aru. I remember the way the rose trees stood transfixed upon them in the light of the far distant sun burning bright between our twin moons. Those twin moons the color of pomegranate wine with the sun pouring through them its virgin graces. Nothing was more beautiful than when the daughters of our village danced upon those hills in the height of spring, with their hair long and flying and the young men sported with each other in the silkgrass, wearing the golden stains of the Hunt upon their brows and on their arms, signs of their training for the last rays of light on midsummer’s eve when they would depart for the Forest of Tagril to hunt the razor-boar under the gaze of the stars. I remember how the elders whose white hair hung to their heels stood in their festival robes around the banquet table and blessed the gods for the bounty of the feast and the safety of the hunters, how the song of the flute blended with the voice of the singer and spun weavings of golden halls vast upon the mountain of heaven, how the scent of flowers clung to the neck of my love and the sweetness of nectar was on her tongue. The laughter of my children was in the air and in the earth. The sweat of work, the wine of the harvest, and the joy of lovemaking were ours in those days of peace.

But then, as it must ever, came knowledge.

A star descended and made its resting place in the hills of our country. With it came a  company of men, strange of habit and speech demanding lodging and food. They would not hear the songs of our youths, nor the tales of our heroes, nor the blessings of the elders. They were men hard of face whose bodies were fit only for work. Their eyes thirsted for all they saw. After they had drunk their fill of our wine and eaten of our meat and bread until they could eat no more, they took our daughters and had knowledge of them, though they protested, and we stood by with our hands shaking at our sides, for we did not know then that the same hands which slew boars in the midnight valleys of Tangril could do violence also to men. We had learned what it was to be helpless.

Late in the morning, the company of men, laughing and shouting, returned to their star and it rose up once again and vanished into the pale breast of heaven. The place where it had lain was scorched black with flame. We tended to our daughters, but their minds raved and their bodies grew weak and withered. The light that was in their eyes shone no longer and they too departed from us. We laid them in a glade together to lie beneath the trees and rise no more. We had learned what death was.

Fierce anger festered in our hearts. We hunted boar and wolf, though there was no feast, and slew them with pleasure, not of sport, but of a lust for blood. The beasts of Tangril and the river creatures of the Saran and the birds of the sky forsook our company and we knew what it was to be feared. The weapons of the hunt, our silver blades and whipwood bows, we scribed with the names of our daughters, sharpened their edges and strengthened their spines, looking to the sky, waiting for the return of the strange men in their gleaming star.

Two long lives of the earth passed and we waited with our anger as with a splinter in the skin. No longer did we paint our bodies for the hunt or array the tables for the feasts or sing the sweet songs of the festival. We became as visitors in our own country and the earth itself was strange to us.

When the embers of the summer lay scattered once again upon the ground, we felt a change in the wind. We gazed into the scattered courts of heaven and marked dark, enormous shapes against the stars. Flashes of light and fire raining down out of the silence. The stars themselves fell out of the depths and into the bosom of Moora. All through the night dark hill country lay the wreck of stars and the shapes of men were everywhere scrambling down their sides or lying burning in the grass. This was the moment for which we had waited so long. With blades drawn and bodies painted, we stole into the hills, moving through the broken hulls of godships as silent as mist. We slew every man we met, whether broken or whole, returning to them the agony they wreaked upon our daughters. We slew them, man by man, until our arms were wretched with blood, until we grew tired and the hard sun rose above us in an empty sky. None were left alive to gasp in their wounds. We had learned what war was.

The return to our home was made in silence. Our children turned from us in fear when they beheld us. The elders called us cursed and refused to bless the gods for our homecoming. Our lovers looked on us with horror. The look of death was on us. We stank of it. We had learned what it was to be hated.

We went once more to the hills of our country, once so green, now clotted with destruction, burnt black with the blood of men and the death of stars. We thought of our daughters lying in the arms of the earth, still and cold, of how their bodies had flown in elegance through the sweet air of spring, of how they would dance no longer. Never again would the rose trees bloom in the light of our sun with her moons about her. The dancers and the music had gone. The tide is rising around us, bearing with it murderous men from strange worlds, godless machines that eat the earth and tear at the sky. How high will it rise before it ebbs? Until we drown? Such were my thoughts when heaven fell.

Lament of the Scullery Boy

 

Sleep! No sleep for the scullery boy. Eggs! Eggs for His Majesty and His Majesty’s retainers and His Majesty’s mistress and Her Highness the Queen, and of course the ambassador from Indostan and all his courtiers, and by damn His Majesty’s favorite horse. He does not think, His Majesty, that in the preparation of three dozen plates of pheasant eggs, some one of his humble servants must go without a night’s sleep fetching them from nests grossled in the marshes and be about breaking them one by one by one all through the grey dawn and turning them in the pan as many at a time as I can so they don’t get cold, Your Majesty, right up against the jangling breakfast bell. No, by my ligaments, His Majesty is utterly unaware of the trials visited upon his humble servant. He goes on, His Majesty, regally oblivious to the veritable ordeal that attends the acquisition of so many filthy pheasant eggs, and every day of every month, save only Lent, when I am consigned to help the master of His Majesty’s hounds pick the nits from the beasts’ nether regions, they being retired as well for the holy season. By damn, those eggs, Your Majesty! I pray God that He may hasten a regiment north to fetch some savage bastard to do his thralldom digging eggs that I may attain a less pernicious post. By damn I’d scrub the floor in the mews or fetch in the grain at harvest or polish His Majesty’s cutlery – any duty in His Majesty’s wide demesne but eggs! It is a mean life – the meanest and most ignoble. I do not intend to make myself ungrateful. My complaint is laid on behalf of my potential. I have an ear for music and a mind for lays, ballads, epics, tragedies in song – all manner of minstrelsy. 

Once, not three years ago, I took up with a band of musicians who had stayed a week entertaining His Majesty at court and table, a ragged lot, but noble – noble in the way that falcons are. I made good showing of my talents and they agreed to take me on. I stole away the night of their departure, having planned to join them at a certain inn in the next village. Horror and infamy! the evil sight that greeted me upon reaching the place. The wicked light of twoscore of torches thrown upon the wretched bodies of the minstrels all hanged like festival baubles from a dogwood tree. I fled straight away to my chamber and fell upon my cot, quaking until morning. Later I learned that the eldest bard had loved His Majesty’s daughter, and though it would have been far easier to hang those who had not, His Majesty was swift in his revenge. Blessed be the Virgin I had not been among their company when His Majesty’s men overtook them. 

Great was my grief. Before that night, I had labored under the delusion that my work was dignified, low as it was, because it was done in service to the King. No, by damn! it was then that I realized I was only fattening swine. Death would come to corrupt all, minstrel and lordling alike. To stuff pigs for a churchyard to consume, that was my lot! It were better to have run on that night than to come cowering back like a beaten dog to its kennel. but now I cannot, for I too have grown fat on eggs – lazy of body and languorous of mind – the freedom of outlawry no longer holds any charm. A pig is a pig whether he lives in a house or a bog. Death shall come for me one day and what, then, will it matter what I have done and where I have gone? It is all the same to sod.

Damn you, Your Majesty. Damn you.

Sündermensch

“One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: ‘Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’

But the other criminal rebuked him. ‘Don’t you fear God,’ he said, ‘since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.’

Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’

Jesus answered him, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.’”

Luke 23:39-42

 

 

I sit looking through the chain link fence that borders the unfinished tennis court where my friends are playing soccer. The night air is heavy in my lungs. A procession, dressed in black, moves out of the trees and across the cement toward them, forcing the game to a temporary stop. Some in the procession are laughing, some are quiet. They pass like a vaporous mass through the two dislocated teams. When they reach the fence, they struggle over and continue on into the darkness. I stand to leave as the game begins again and raise a parting hand. It’s the last I’ll ever see of them. They shout farewells amid the sound of tennis shoes and rubber.

 

Back in my room, I undress, take off my cross and the ring she gave me, laying them beside the sink. I let the water roll over me, thinking of the way we justify one thing by another. I have yet to resolve that. The last of the loose water drips off my body. The towel smells of mildew and old sweat. I put the cross around my neck, then the ring. My bag is by the door with my coat folded over it, waxed cotton stiff as a tarpaulin.

 

The lights of the city are slick and dim with early evening’s rain. Bass-heavy music pounds on the other side of anonymous doors, the dirty neon burns in the windows of the lounges where exotic herbs are smoked, trash collects in stairwells leading down into clubs where young women undress for old men and boys just of age.

 

A beggar, face scarred above the eye, across the bridge of his nose, deep into his cheek, approaches me, eyes like a hungry dog’s. “Could you give me something for a bite or a swallow on a Friday night?” I offer to take him to the hot dog place across the street. he looks at me as if still waiting for a response. I tell him sorry. He says, “God bless you” and I continue down the street. “Silver and gold have I none…” I whisper to myself, feeling the tenderness of new guilt like a fresh bruise.

 

The touch of steel against my hip has lost its coldness. I am the angel of death.

 

It will rain again before long. I feel it coming like a far-off train trembling the asphalt.

 

Traffic is heavier on the main avenue running off the beltline. It shimmers and burns, but unobtrusively. No one uses their horns at night. I pull a lank five out of my wallet and fold it in my pocket. I’ve decided that the next vagrant I come across will receive it and a blessing from me, whatever that’s worth. I wonder if I stand guilty already, though I have yet to sin. I wonder if I were to die this instant with no crime on my hands, freshly absolved just this morning, what my destination would be. This is a question I wish I had asked Father Dichter. “Is the sin you intend as damning as the one you have committed?” I rub the old bill in my pocket, wishing one lonely old man would stumble across my path, but there are rarely second chances with this sort of thing.

 

My thoughts are heavy tonight; for the past week they have been weighing me down. I’ve felt this ache of gestating rain inside me, like something was building in me, a hollow pressure, like the feeling in your ears before they crack in an airplane. The weight of something penultimate. It’s a dangerous way to live.

 

I woke up this morning with a split in my heel. This time of year breaks my skin like like a drought splinters a river bed. I rubbed some lotion into it, but it hasn’t healed. The shower helped somewhat, but now that my skin has dried again, I can feel it starting to spread further through the callous mass, ripping deep into the living interior where the blood has retreated. My sock is sticky with blood. I’ve gotten used to it by now. When summer comes, it seals up. There’s no uncertainty. It’s the mystery of a wound that gives it power. I can endure a lot if I understand it.

 

The desolate part of town, like the dried innards of a huge animal broken open, is behind me now. Before long I’ll be in the suburbs, not the upper class resort communities with ground pools and three stall garages, but those where five college kids together can rent a house for the year, all-white, of course, with street names like Pine and Sherman. I think about walking, and how we are defined by how we walk. I have a standard gait, nothing that would turn heads or stick in the memory. But there was a student at my school whose walk I’ll never forget. He was a skinny boy, with a body like a doorpost, big, square feet, and the kind of face that could have belonged to anyone from twelve to twenty-four. He walked like a marionette, as if there were strings tied to his shoulders and heels, as if his slight weight was supported not by bones, but by a puppeteer fifteen feet above him. There was a perpetual lilt to his step, the kind Pinochio might have had, except that his perpetual expression of melancholy made it all strange and unsettling.

 

I turn onto the street I’ve been looking for. On the left side of the caldesac, in the distance, shaded from the red city light by a web of trees, is the house. When I reach it, there is a hazy pool of light on the walk, spilling out of the dirty kitchen window. An owl, a creature I have never seen and only once heard, hoots in the dense cloud of leaves above me.  I step through the light, up the broken concrete path, and knock on the cold aluminum storm door. Quiet, feverish things crawl in the dark of my mind. There is a shuffling inside, jumbled sounds, a cough. The clockwork sound of deadbolt and door lock being undone. Derek’s face is thrown into the darkness.

 

“What do you want, Will? It’s four in the morning.”

“The night is young. I wanted to talk with you about something.” My voice is foreign and tender, like a confessional.

 

“Sure. Yeah. Alright.” He holds the door open for me, naked white arm stuck out stiff into the night, like a gatekeeper in fantasy movies, casting a beaten look down the street. I pass over the threshold of his house, past his outstretched arm, feeling the warmth and nearness emanating from his body, before the recapitulating creak of the door brings his arm back to his side. He has not felt it, that tingling, melting sensation of the proximity of two beings. He does not feel anything. Those beautiful eyes like diamonds in the depths of a mine. The TV burns blue in the living room. Half a pizza sits in its box on the floor with a fifth of lemon Smirnoff next to it. Derek drinks alone now, growing more sober all the time. the childish glee that accompanied our first few years of drinking, when we were nineteen and free, dissipated with our interest in science fiction and classic rock. We don’t “get shit-faced” anymore. We don’t get anything. We just drink.

 

Derek offers me the bottle, but I don’t take it. The weight is on me again: the expanding hollowness of unborn rain.

 

“You walked?” he asks.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Shit!”

 

“It’s not a big deal. It’s a nice night.” Derek never understood my affinity for walking. He drove everywhere in his broken down For Taurus, even across the four-acre community college campus when we were there together. He gained about twenty pounds that first year, but it ll burned away when he started smoking. That was the strange thing about him: whatever he imbibed – alcohol, fast food, Mountain Dew – it was all coal in the engine, fuel that made him charge on harder and faster towards that blazing goal he had foreseen long ago at the end of his path.

 

“Have a seat, I guess, and some pizza if you want it. I’m done with it.”

 

“Thanks. I’m good for now.”

 

We sit for a while and stare at the TV in a kind of agitated silence: we haven’t spoken for two weeks: some inane show about explosions and cars and machine guns masquerading as educational. The volume is down to a murmur. He watches TV not out of interest, but to avoid being alone with himself, to hear the whining rumble of human speech, for the same reason he went to the same prostitute on Division Avenue for two months until she stopped working that side of town – “Cops,” he had said in that disaffected drawl he always used to deflect the conversation from listing too close to his soul. He had been saving up money from his car mechanic’s paycheck to buy off her pimp. I knew that, but of course he thought I didn’t. “-they’re always after those bitches.”

 

“Compensating, right?”

 

“Damn right. They can’t get any at home, so why the hell should anyone else? Fuckin’ pigs.”

 

Whether it was police or something more personal, I don’t know, but Derek was different after that, like a light inside him had burned out and no one had bothered to replace it. The haphazard, cockeyed joy was gone, the man had left the computer, but it was still running on and on with its equations into the grey future. I had loved him in those months, but there is only so long you can love a machine.

 

“Been awhile,” he says.

 

“Yeah, it has. I’ve been meaning to get back over here… had any parties lately?”

 

“Nah, man, CC’s got finals, so’s ASU. Katz and Beaner and them’ve been looking for jobs nonstop since LCI shut down – ain’t got time to drink. Fuck, they couldn’t even afford it if they did.”

 

“That’s the beauty of being a mechanic, then. People always need their cars fixed.” 

 

I hate myself for saying things like this, the kind of trite nonsense only said to cover the silence. Derek and I don’t need that anymore, but the habit persists.

 

“Maybe. You’d be surprised how long people can put off getting something fixed if they don’t have the money.”

 

“True, but I bet you’d get Lexie fixed if you had to sell your house.”

 

“Nah, it’s a piece of shit anyways. I was gonna put her up for sale -”

 

Derek pauses and the air is bloated with his silence, the pressure of thoughts building up in his throat, building, fighting to get out, but he sits with them as long as he can. His eyes are heavy and red, his face almost imperceptibly swollen around the cheek bones, as if he’s about to cry, but it would never have breached the iron defenses of his soul. They allowed “neither ingress nor egress.” It was the night, it was our secret, it was the hollow, mean-spirited nature of life that was pummeling him like a practice bag. It had nothing to do with emotion. Our deeds are all done and we are riding the slow wave of their consequences.

 

The heavy fog seems to lift momentarily and Derek stares at me for a moment, clear-eyed.

 

“Did you come all the way out here just to keep me up with this stuff, or did you want something? You said you had something you wanted to tell me, so we might as well get down to it.”

 

A thrill like being stripped naked on a stage goes through me. The tone in Derek’s voice tells me he knows the course I’m steering us into. He reaches for his vodka.

 

“It’s about what happened two weeks ago.”

 

Derek winces like new stitches are being torn out of his skin.

 

“Yeah, what about it? Anyone getting suspicious?”

 

“Not exactly.”

 

I’m starting to sweat and I feel pale, cold as a corpse. I can feel Derek shifting uncomfortably on the couch beside me.

 

“You know I’ve always had this thing with guilt. Remember that time in middle school when we took your dad’s car out that night and we hit that mailbox? Remember how I couldn’t live with it – ”

 

“You better be careful, Will.”

 

His voice is dangerous, too steady and cool.

 

“That clerk, Derek, what was her name?”

“That bitch had it coming, Will. She never should have gone for that button. It’s her fault, Will. Listen to me, Will – ”

 

“Annelise, that was it. Annelise McCormick.”

 

“Will.”

 

“We shot her, Derek. We sprayed the side of her head all over the cigarette cartons.”

 

“Shut up, Will!”

 

“She was getting her diploma. She – ”

 

“Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”

 

“She had a kid!”

 

Derek gets up, burrowing his fist into his temple like he’s trying to suffocate a headache, the other gripping the neck of his empty bottle. He stalks the floor like an angry panther. Every word I say is a tack wheedled into his hide.

 

“Someone has to claim responsibility for her. God-damn-it! Someone has to love her for once in her life!”

 

My eyes are streaming.

 

“Did you call it in?”

 

“No.”

 

Derek turns his face one me and a phosphorescent light flashed in his eyes.

 

“You’re gonna wish you had, Will. You know what the you, me, and Radley agreed on – If it came down to our asses, it was every man for himself. Radley and me – ”

 

“Radley’s dead, Derek,” I tell him flatly, feeling the gun metal come alive against my skin. It’s starting to burn. For a while, Derek is silent. The hand gripping the bottle gradually loosens and it falls to the carpet with a hollow thump. The sound startles him and he begins to understand why I’m here. My thoughts are racing, quick and clear as vodka. I’m struck by the cruel irony of everything. I, one of the damned, stand in the place of the Savior. My own jackal laugh surprises me.

 

I look deep into Derek’s eyes.

 

“My friend, ‘today you will be with me in Paradise.’”

 

The gun is in my hand. I fire. Derek staggers forward, hist chest welling up blood like a spring from deep in the earth. I catch him and hold him until he twitches out the last of his life, then lay him tenderly on the floor. I never hated him, only the empty shell of him he had left behind all those months ago. He had been trapped here ever since, a soul bound to a body it no longer owned. Now he was free to go where he would. I lay the body gently down on the carpet and turn the weapon so that its hungry mouth gapes at me. The metal is still hot. I know the words of that ancient eulogy, but somehow I can’t bring myself to commit that final blasphemy. My deeds have been enough.

 

“Amen.”

 

The bullet goes through me like the sun’s molten tear. I fall into the endless, bottomless, unbounded forever as a curtain of light closes over me. There is golden rain on my face.

The Snowflake Girl: A Story of Christmas

To continue trotting out past efforts, here’s a story I wrote for my girlfriend as a gift last Christmas. Too saccharine probably, but it’s intended to be a children’s story. The idea was that I would write it and she would illustrate it, being the wonderful artist herself. Now that school is over for the summer, who knows, we might get around to it.

The Snowflake Girl

A Story of Christmas

 

Once upon a time, before you were born, before even your parents were born, and when your grandparents were still young children, there lived a little boy in a great old house surrounded by trees. When the boy looked out the big bay window in the living room of that house, he would see all the other warm houses with children playing in their yards and dogs being walked on the sidewalk. But when he looked out the window of his bedroom upstairs, he would see nothing but a forest of trees with dark, tangled branches and thick, knotted trunks. Strange things happened in that wood, according to old couple that lived next door, especially at the start of winter when the wind began to get clean and cold and taste like snow.

Sometimes when the boy looked out at night, he would think that he saw tiny blue and green and golden lights flitting to and fro between the trees. They seemed so real whenever he saw them, but in the morning, he was never as sure as he had been the night before that they were not just part of his dreams or a gathering of fireflies and nothing more. The little boy kept these visions to himself, knowing no one would believe him. But it was not easy, because the best secrets are the ones hardest not to share.

One night, at that time when the trees had lost all but a few leaves and the houses were beginning to smell like Christmas, the little boy noticed a particularly bright light in the woods. It was not blue or green or golden, but a starry silver-white. The little boy got out of his bed and went to the window. The light seemed to be growing larger and coming nearer. He opened the window (even though it was very cold) and heard the sounds of the pine trees brushing against each other in the quiet wind and saw the glint of the moonlight on the snow. There was the pale light, floating up out of the wood into the open air. As it came nearer and nearer, a faint twinkling sound like tiny bells grew in the young boy’s ear. He reached out his hand and the tiny light came to him. It settled on his finger with the cool sting of snow. It was very bright, so bright that he had to look at it sideways, through his fingers. The light fluttered on his finger and made a sound like a merry laugh, if you can imagine what the laugh of a fairy made of rose-colored diamond might sound like. Then, with a flash, it flew out the window and was gone.

He watched out his window for what felt like hours and hours, but which were really only a few minutes, because time goes slowly when you are waiting for something, but the light did not come back.

 

Soon it was Christmas Eve. The night before, a wild storm had covered everything, even the tree trunks, with white, frosting-colored snow. The snow was still falling outside the big bay window as the little boy’s family gathered around the fire to tell stories. The Christmas tree was covered with ribbons and candy canes and lights. Beneath its branches was a mountain of presents and a little toy forest with wooden soldiers and reindeer. A tin train with a green engine and a red caboose ran between the presents and through the toy forest, now and then blowing its electric whistle.

The little boy loved Christmas Eve. It was the one time of year he could stay up until midnight and his parents would not mind. It was also the night his father would tell stories, some of them about when he was a boy, about how deep the snow was then and how far his father had to go to find a Christmas tree, and others about friendly dragons and evil trolls and adventures in far-away places. He liked those stories best of all.

When the fire had burned down low and their cups of hot cider were all empty and his father’s stories were finished, the clock on the wall chimed midnight. One by one, his sleeping brothers and sisters were carried off to bed, but the little boy was wide awake. He lay beside the fireplace until everyone else was gone. Tonight was different somehow from any other Christmas Eve he could remember.

At last, he climbed the stairs and walked to his room. The doorway was dark, but he could just see the faint shine of moonlight on his window. Before he climbed into bed, he decided to go look out to see if the lights were dancing in the woods, and if they were, whether or not he might be able to see the silvery-white light that had visited him before.

As he leaned in close to the pane, his nose pressing against its icy surface, he saw that sure enough! there they were in the woods, flitting about between the trees. And in the midst of all of them was the pale light. As quickly as he could, he opened the window and as soon as he did, the light seemed to notice him. It flew out of the woods faster than ever and was soon just outside the window, filling the room with brightness a hundred times stronger than before.

The light crossed the window sill and entered the room. “What are you?” the little boy asked, and as he did, the light began to fade before his eyes, revealing the form of a little silver-haired girl with tiny bells hanging from her ears and a face like the moon. “Are you a fairy?” the little boy asked.

The little girl laughed merrily, making her bells twinkle. “You may call me that, if you want,” she said, taking his hand in hers.

“Oh! You’re cold!” the little boy said with concern and surprise. “Like a snowflake.”

“Don’t worry,” said the little girl, smiling. “Come with me.”

She led him by the hand, out of his room, down the stairs, and into the living room. “The fire was out when I went upstairs,” the little boy said. “And the Christmas tree is so much bigger than it was.”

He was right. The fire, which had burned down to embers before, was now blazing brightly and the tree was enormous! – its lowest branches seemed as far away as the wooden beams that ran along the ceiling. The mountain of presents had become a mountain range stretching far away above his head; the tin train was now a great shining engine steaming through its valleys. The little wooden soldiers had grown tall and were marching to and fro, playing reveries on bugles and drums. The reindeer were snuffling about the fallen nettles or chasing each other through the snowy glade of evergreens at the base of the tree.

The silver-haired girl ran off dancing into the wonderland about her, and the little boy followed, more amazed than he had ever been. They played for hours in that magical land, all glowing and warm from the fire. They climbed to the tops of the wrapping paper mountains and swung down on ropes of tinsel. They had a battle with the toy soldiers, tossing popcorn and chocolate balls back and forth until the reindeer arrived and carried them off to safety. When the little boy’s dog Lawrence came bounding in to see what all the noise was about they found that he had grown to a monstrous size. But Lawrence was a nice dog and knew the little boy right away. They wrestled in the snowy valley while the silver-haired girl watched and laughed.

When both boy and dog were tired, the silver-haired girl motioned for the boy to follow her. She led him to the base of the giant tree, which had sent twisting roots into the floor. “There is someone at the top of this tree I would like you to meet.” The little boy looked at her wonderingly. The trunk was now as large as the trees in the woods which three people holding hands could not reach around. 

“How will we get climb it?” he asked. 

“Oh, easily,” she replied. Then she made of loud, clear whistle and something rustled in the branches high above.

“What is it?” the boy asked, but he did not have to wait long for his answer. Down through the tree, from branch to branch, came leaping a red squirrel almost as big as Lawrence.

“Patricia will take us there faster than we could ever climb,” said the little girl. The little boy had never been so close to a squirrel before, especially one that was taller than he was. Patricia watched him with her bright black eyes as she knelt to let them climb onto her back. As soon as they were ready, she scampered up the trunk and, going from limb to limb and branch to branch, brought them to a cozy cleft near the top. They thanked her greatly and, with a whisk of her bushy tail, was out of sight.

“Would you like to meet my lady?” the silver-haired girl asked.

“Yes, please,” the little boy answered. “Where is she?”

“Just above us. We must climb a little way first.” Soon, they were nearly there. “Wait  here a moment, I must go ahead.”

“Wait!” the little boy whispered, “who is she?” 

“She is the greatest of my people, the mistress of the wood,” she answered.

The little boy waited where she had left him, very near the top of the tree, beneath one of the last tufts of green needles. He heard the pretty voice of the girl and then rich, sparkling laughter that was, if possible, even more wonderful. 

“Come right up!” the silver-haired girl said. “She’s waiting for you.”

When the little boy had pulled himself onto the last branch, he looked up and saw the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, tall, stately, and yet as merry as the little girl. She wore a dress of deep blue that flowed out around her like a fountain. In her ears were blushing pearls as large as Christmas ornaments. On her forehead was a coronet of diamond roses. And all about her was a deep radiance.

Now the little boy had read some stories that had noble ladies in them, so he thought he knew what to do. He knelt, lowered his eyes, and addressed her. “My lady, Mistress of the Wood.”

“No, no,” whispered the girl, “she is Mistress of the Wood only to me. To you she is the Queen of the Stars.”

“Oh, my dear child, how could the boy have known?” the Lady asked. Her voice was as rich as honey and as cool as night. “Please, stand.”

The boy rose at once, but bowed a little anyway, not wanting to seem rude. “Thank you, Queen,” he said, thinking it appropriate.

“You are more than welcome, my dear boy. It is the best kind of joy to be visited at last by one whom you have long loved from afar. I would like nothing better than to speak long with you of many things, but the hour has grown so late, and there is scarcely time for me to tell you the one thing of highest importance.”

The boy was in awe of the woman before him, who seemed to grow lovelier every moment she spoke. Could this be the same star his family had placed atop the Christmas tree every year? It was almost unbelievable. 

“Would you like to know, my boy,” she said, “what it is that carves the snowflakes, and holds up the stars, and puts the sweetness in the winter wind?”

“Yes, please, Queen,” the boy answered eagerly.

“Then come close to me and I will whisper it in your ear.” The boy drew close to the Queen of the Stars, and she, being so tall, stooped down so they were face to face. “Soon you must go, but always, always, even if you no longer remember me, remember the secret I am about to tell you.”

“I will,” the boy answered.

“Very well,” said the Queen. Cupping her hands about his ear, she leaned close and quietly whispered something that only he could hear.

Then, placing a kiss upon his forehead, the Queen of the Stars vanished. The silver-haired girl took the boy by the hand and they climbed down together to the branch where Patricia had left them. There she was again, patiently waiting for them. When they had climbed onto her back once again, she bounded off through the needles and branches, and before long, they were safely on the floor once again.

“Thank you, my friend,” the silver-haired girl said, patting the squirrel’s head. “I won’t be long now, don’t worry.”

The little boy, having thanked her as well, began to feel very sleepy. He knew that soon he must return to his bed, so he and the silver-haired girl said goodnight to the wooden soldiers and the reindeer and the Lawrence the dog (who had found the plate of cookies left for Santa Clause) and found their way back up the stairs. 

A change happened as they were climbing. A strange feeling came over the boy, almost as if he were falling out of something. He wondered for a minute if he might be dreaming. Each step grew smaller and smaller until finally, when they had reached the top, they had grown back to their normal size.

Back in his room, the little girl laid her hand upon his still-open windowsill and gazed out into the snowy night air. A glittering frost had fallen onto the wood panels on his walls while they had been down stairs. The girl’s face sparkled. “Goodnight, friend,” she said softly, taking his hand once more and giving it a gentle squeeze. In a moment, she had climbed onto the sill and jumped out. A great pale light shone through the window, forcing him to close his eyes. He recovered just in time to see it flit away into the dark forest beneath the stars and disappear.

A sudden sadness welled up in his chest. He crawled into bed, half of his mind dancing with all the wonderful things they had done that night and the other full of the squeeze of her hand and the sparkle of her face and the chime of her voice. He was asleep before he realized it, and the next thing he knew, the sounds of his brothers and sisters running around the house shouting “Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!” were ringing in his ears. 

His heart sank in his chest. “What was it the Queen had said?” He thought and thought until his head hurt, but he could not remember what it was the Queen had told him never to forget. And worse yet, the memory of the snowflake girl was already fading. He could not quite picture her face.

 

* * *

 

Ten years later, the little boy had grown into a young man. It was Christmastime again, and he had come home to celebrate with his family. Christmas Eve came, and as they had always done, he and his brothers and sisters gathered around the fireplace and listened to his father tell stories about his childhood.              They were always the same stories, but somehow, they had not lost their magic. 

As usual, the young man was the last to go to bed that night. He stayed in a chair by the Christmas tree, staring into the fire until very late. At last, he decided the time had come to get some sleep while there was still some to be gotten. He had begun to climb the stairs when a thought stopped him. He turned and looked at the tree, at all its sparkling ornaments and the presents, fewer now than they had been, lying together beneath its branches, and the glittering star at the very top. He hurried to his old room and threw open the window. The cold air was sharp against his face. He scanned the dark woods, wondering if just maybe he might catch a glimpse of those forest lights dancing through the trees, but he saw nothing.

The rest of the holiday sped by as it always does, and when the time came for the young man to leave, he felt like he had hardly been there at all.

His train was scheduled to leave at midday and he got there at the last call to board, having overslept by an hour. Steam was shooting from its whistle and the wheels creaked and rocked in its impatience to depart. Swinging his luggage to an attendant on board, he had one foot on the step when he heard a voice that was somehow familiar. “Excuse me, sir.”

He turned around and his eyes fell on the loveliest young woman he had ever seen. “‘Her eyes…” he thought. “But it couldn’t be.”

“I’m afraid I’m a bit lost,” She said. “Is this the train for the city?”

A shivering warmth flowed through him at the sound of her voice. It was the power of a distant, half-doubted memory come suddenly and brilliantly to life.

“Yes. It is,” he managed.

“And I wonder,” she said, “could I possibly share a car with you? I’m just dying for someone to talk to.”

All the way there, they talked together in a compartment by themselves. The young man had never been happier. Though neither of them said it (there was no need to) they both felt that all those years since that magical Christmas Eve had been nothing more than a passing dream. Now, at last, they had awoken.

As he looked into her deep, sea blue eyes, the young man remembered what the Queen of the Stars had told him, the secret of what carves the snowflakes, and holds up the stars, and puts the sweetness in the winter wind. It was love.

 

For What May Lie Ahead

This story about a year and a half old. It was one of the first short stories I was still proud of months after it was written. My writing tends to be like that – a source of exhilaration and fatherly pride one minute, and then a source of consternation and embarrassment the next. If you’re in the mood for a little bit of steampunk, go ahead and pick around these dry bones for a little living flesh.

 

 

For What May Lie Ahead

Publisher’s Note: this selection originally appeared in the January 186- edition of Erebus 

Oceanus. Reprinted with permission of the author.

 

‘I don’t say it can’t be done, only that it hasn’t been tried yet:’ my first words on the subject when Allan Lidenbrock and the Frenchman presented their theory to me. Theory! Ha! It was pure fantasy. My face must have told them as much, for it was a solemn stare that Allan fixed on me with just a whisper of a grin pulling the corners of his mouth. De Gouges stood by silently, pocket watch in hand and a bundle of notes under one arm. Allan waited until de Gouges had cleared his throat, then he began, ‘And that is exactly why we have to do it.’

‘First off, Allan –’ I started.

‘I’m sorry we haven’t more time to debate the logical implications of our endeavor, because I assure you, your logic is one of your finest aspects. However, time is short and there is much to be done. We’ve set the date for the twenty-third, which is tomorrow of course, so time is short. I should like to have you acquainted with the mechanism before then so that those in the scientific community who wish may continue our experiment if we do not return.’

‘Not return!’ I cried. ‘Look here, Allan, this theory of yours is hardly –’

‘Tut, tut. Take care not to disparage our work until you’ve seen it. Jules, when does the train depart for Dundee?’

‘Twenty minutes past the hour,’ de Gouges responded.

‘That’s half an hour! Isn’t that awfully soon?’

‘Quite right, as usual, my friend. It’s good to hear your logic is back in order. Now,’ Allan continued, ‘you have readied your bags as we asked, I trust.’ I began to protest, but he ploughed on, ‘I’ll have Herbert send for a brougham and we shall be underway in a few minutes. Have you enjoyed your time in London?’

By this time, I was beyond the reach of any parlor chatter, and so played the wall to Allan’s racket game all the way to the station. As soon as the great smoky engine had gotten underway, it was as though a lever were pulled in my brain and I realized that now, for better or worse, I was involved in their scheme.

The whole way to Scotland, Allan expounded his theory with de Gouges adding titbits here and there. I was not an easy ally. But once the initial shock of it had worn down, I became interested. Indeed, I was soon enthralled. My entire being was abuzz as their wild ideas grew in my mind. By the time we stepped onto the platform in Dundee, it was well into the early hours of the morning. My raving imagination coaxed my eyes upward and I beheld, as though for the first time, the marvel of the moon and stars. This venture of theirs, as I then thought, my mind being so intoxicated with the dreams they had planted there, would be well worth the relatively small risk involved. I was in palpitations until we reached the site.

* * *

‘You’ve constructed a giant catapult!’ I cried with indignation.

‘It’s a trebuchet actually, but I appreciate your enthusiasm.’

‘Well, you might have mentioned this piddling detail –’

‘Now then, logic, my friend. How else are Jules and I to get to space?’

For the second time in twenty-four hours, I was struck dumb by the sheer lunacy of what I perceived.

‘You see,’ Allan said as he proceeded to show me in a circuit around the contraption, ‘the practical application of ourTheory of the Transmission of Physical Bodies in the Cosmic Regions (which is as of yet, forthcoming; that is your part) is dependent upon our ability to propel our craft beyond the reach of earth’s gravity. As you may have guessed, this is a delicate matter requiring the utmost care and precision. Jules and I have been designing the mechanism before you for over five years. We believe it to be flawless in conception and construction down to the most exquisite detail.’

‘But…but how? How did you get all this material? The metal, the chain, the capsule? The plans, the design? It’s all mad! You want to blast yourselves into outer space with a medieval siege engine! Allan, this is too much, too much. I’ve had it!’

‘Come, now,’ Allan reassured, his shadowy smile again shading the edges of his mouth. ‘Look here.’ He laid his hand on one of the metal plates that formed a support for one of the two massive arms. ‘These aren’t the rustbucket iron sides old George lost the colonies with. These plates are made of the finest steel alloys in Europe. The Royal Navy has begun constructing a fleet of submersible war ships to withstand the pressures of the deep sea for hours at a time, using this very same steel. Jules and I will be going up, not down, and as we do, the pressure of the atmosphere will grow less and less until it vanishes altogether.’

De Gouges took a blueprint from his jacket and after unfolding it, handed it to Allan. ‘We’ve been testing the design for over six years and have gone through two dozen models before we built the full-scale mechanism. It isn’t some crude war machine. With only half the counterweight set, it can throw an object of our capsule’s dimensions almost fifteen miles.’

‘Indeed,’ remarked de Gouges, ‘it nearly struck St. Andrew’s – ’

‘Before we had quite worked out the trajectory,’ Allan finished. I groaned. ‘There is nothing whatever to fear, I promise you. The atmosphere, as we reckon, is not nearly so thick. We shall be safely within the bosom of lenient Aether before you can say “jackanapes”. (At least, before the papers can.)’

I am not sure what it was exactly, but at that moment, I began to laugh. It could have been Allan’s comic reassurance, my fatigue from having ridden a train all night and the previous day, or simply the immensity of what my friends were attempting to accomplish. At any rate, the battlements of my will were being steadily overrun.

‘Well, Allan, Jules, what is it you want me to do?’

They turned to each other with matching smiles. ‘We would like you,’ Allan responded, ‘to supervise and document the experiment, to prepare the way for our successors. You call our mechanism a catapult, do you?’ Allan gazed up at the towering structure silhouetted dark and fantastic against the stars, the capsule hung like an August apple from the twin arms. He gave a deep laugh. ‘Then we want you to cut the mooring.’

‘When do you leave?’ I asked.

‘Tonight.’

* * *

The day was spent in preparation. As Lidenbrock and de Gouges had very little to do for their part aside from readying a few provisions and stowing the charts and instruments aboard, the greater part of their energies was spent on my account. Allan made sure I was thoroughly acquainted with the mechanism. Once the capsule was securely attached, an apparatus was wound almost as one winds a clock: every turn of the crank corresponding to a full revolution of the arms through a network of gears. When the crank was released, the mighty arms unwound, spinning round through their cycle, gathering speed at each revolution until the air rang with their violence. A latch connecting the capsule to the arms was set to release once a certain speed had been attained, at which point, the capsule would be flung with a titan’s force into the sky.

‘This, of all points in the plan, should fret you least,’ Allan explained, ‘we’ve precisely calibrated our machine to send us at the fastest possible speed to the thinnest point of the atmosphere (straight up) so that we will over-shoot the required distance by several miles at least.’

‘And once you do reach outer space…?’ I probed.

The capsule had been lowered to the ground and was now resting on a little raised stage. We walked over to it. It was vaguely egg-shaped, roughly the size of a middle-class bedroom, and composed of the steel in which Allan had so confidently boasted. Countless glass portholes covered it like leopard’s spots. Fin-like rudders protruded symmetrically from its hull. Allan pointed out two oblong slats on either side.

‘These are the openings for a pair of retractable, jointed wings. Jules and I shall be able to steer with the rudders and propel ourselves with the wings by pedaling from the inside.’

‘They flap like a gull’s?’ I asked.

Allan nodded.

I was not well versed in modern physics then, but even so, this posed a problem to me. ‘Isn’t resistance in short supply up there? Certainly, there would be no stopping your momentum, but wouldn’t that also infer that you would have nothing to push against or steer through?’

‘Aha! That’s my old friend!’ Allan cried. ‘Thank you for sniffing out one of two fundamental misgivings in our plan (note that they are “misgivings” not “weaknesses”). Let me address both with one explanation. My greatest fear is really the exact opposite of what you suggest. You are quite right, a vacuum could not be steered or paddled through, at least, not well. De Gouges, sharp chap that he is, suggested the same thing. That is where Cosmic Transmission applies. You see, I do not actually believe such a vacuum exists. To be sure, there should be a paucity of real friction, but there is the aether, and the interstellar wind, and you have not fully accounted for gravity, which is the hinge of the theory. As I propose, there is a web of currents running through the cosmos, currents of gravity, pulling every unfastened object towards their sources, almost as boats are drawn to seas on rivers. The strongest current is, of course, that of the sun. No, my largest concern, the second great misgiving, is that when our capsule comes to the very limit of earth’s atmospheric nimbus, we shall strike a thickness, the hem of this gravitational garment, and stop with such force, that we shall be obliterated. De Gouges assures me this is impossible, but I worry all the same. The rest is a surety.’

He then showed me inside the craft where a real fairy land of wonderful instruments, dials, charts, and models of every description met my eyes. One of these instruments Allan lifted from the concave dish in which it sat.

‘This is the first invention in a new field of science, a tool for “intercelestial navigation”, a solar compass.’ Allan held in his hands a glass orb the size of a grapefruit, with little ticks arranged all over its surface, resembling those of a mundane compass, but in a strange system I had never previously seen. A central globe was suspended within the sphere into which as many as fifteen needles were fixed, all trembling as if pulled by an unseen force.

‘Observe,’ Allan said. He shook the orb in his hands and for a moment, the forest of needles scattered in all directions around the central globe, then, in a flash, they clustered together, pointing to one tick on the edge of the glass. ‘The sun, you see.’ Looking up through one of the portholes, I saw the yellow light gleaming down directly on the angle of the needles. ‘Rather than point to magnetic north, this compass points to the largest center of gravity in whatever particular solar system it happens to be. Now, in space, without the earth to counterbalance it, a few needles would follow the currents of the other planets and their moons. With this and a specially augmented sextant, de Gouges and I shall navigate.’

‘There is still the problem of propulsion,’ I prodded.

‘Really? On the contrary, my dear friend, there is no problem. The currents will do the sailing for us. We have only to alter the direction of our rudders, pedal like mad for a few moments in opposition to the resisting gravity, which will provide all the tension desired, and we’ll leap across the gravitational currents like salmon leaping streams.’ Allan gave the crystal compass a jolt to the left and watched the needles swivel in perfect accordance with Newton’s First Law. Before they could flash back toward the sun, he jolted the compass to the right and the needles washed to the other side as through water.

Setting the compass in my hand, Allan winked. ‘It’s a marvel really: de Gouges’s work.’ I felt the energy flowing through the instrument as the needles quivered like trees stirred in a metallic wind. Allan ducked out of the open hatch into the sunlight, but before he continued about his business, he turned back to me with a mischievous grin.

‘I do believe we’ll all be famous.’

* * *

 

It was a grave sort of Last Supper we had that night. We did not talk a great deal about what was to happen at fifteen past twelve, but largely of our Oxford years, the ladies we had pursued but never really known, the old professors we had loved or despised and were now likely retired or passed on. We laughed now and then, but not far below the surface of our merriment was a somber ache. 

The fire burned bright, warm, rich with the fragrance of earth, of home. Time reduced it to embers and our talk went with the flames. After a while of unspoken reminiscence, Allan took a folded letter from his pocket and set it on my knee. 

‘For the weeks after our departure. Until we return. You may tell others why we’ve gone.’

I said nothing. How could I? Allan with his fiery precision, de Gouges with his steady assurance, I had thought they were as confident of their success as I was about sunrise and breakfast. I began to see they too had doubts.

The mechanism sat in the center of a depression in the earth, nearly deep enough to be a valley. The hills around were tall and covered in pines. All that might be glimpsed by the chance onlooker would be the capsule as it was slung heavenward. It would be a perfect secret until their return, or until the date specified in Allan’s note.

I embraced the men before I shut them in their craft. I do confess a tear or two as I wound the gears, knowing that, though it was by their instruction, it would be my own hand that released them to whatever fate would deal them, if fate reaches so far.

The lever was pulled and the mechanism hummed into motion. Faster and faster it spun until the air was sliced into a screeching blur. The groans emitted by the straining machine shook the hills around and forced my hands to my ears. Just before I felt certain the whole juggernaut would destroy itself in its fury, I felt an almost silent click, and saw that the capsule had been discharged. My eyes frantically searched the lidless sky, scanning the stars for a sign of my friends. Then I found it, a pale point of light, like a comet without a tail, hastening on into the speckled blackness. I traced its course until it passed before the moon and I lost it.

* * *

Several years have passed, and no word of Lidenbrock and de Gouges has reached me. Not a night has gone by that I have not gazed into the vastness of the sky and wondered about my friends. The date specified in Allan’s letter by which I am to make their theory and experiment public is drawing close. Of how I am to do this, I confess ignorance. Allan left his notes with me and the mechanism still stands, but without evidence, and no sign of their success, who will believe me? I can only hope, as they gave no details of their journey, that they have come to no harm and are indeed accomplishing what they set out to do. But it is merely a hope.

My only comfort is in the letter given to me by Allan before he departed. A piece of it runs thus:

‘Beloved friend, what can I do but thank you for your faith in me? And if not faith, then your cooperation at least, which has been most heartening. Believe that it is the strength of your friendship that sustains Jules and I wherever we may now be. 

‘I suppose I ought to tell you why we have attempted this fool’s errand. There is much I could say, much I could give you of my divided soul which longs both for heaven and for earth. It is the heaven-beckoned side that won out at last. Though it may prove mad in the end, it was hope that drove me to it: a yearning for what may lie ahead at the cost of what I must leave behind. But the worth of it is in the hoping. And, for better or worse, I have gone now and brought another with me. Do not grieve for me if I do not return, for if I do not, perhaps it is because I have found at last what all men dream of, something that, once touched, can never be relinquished.

‘I can do no better now than to leave you in the hands of another dreamer, one who ever shared my mind, and spoke the things I felt, but could never articulate: “All that man sees has to do with man. No shining belt or gleaming moon, no red and green glory in a self-encircling twin-star, but has a relation with the hidden things of a man’s soul. They are portions of the living house wherein he abides.”

Goodbye, dear friend,

Allan Lidenbrock

October 3, 186- ’

 

One Short Sleep Past

“One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally.” – John Donne

 

 

An old oak tree in the middle of a large forest addressed itself to the birds resting in its branches. Here is a portion of the many things it told them, concerning the manner in which it had become a tree.

 

When I met her, she was dressed all in furs. The early evening light was cool and sweet like a new coat taken from its hanger and put on. Her dark eyes sparkled with a lupine keenness. Overhead the sky rose blue for a billion miles and the twittering of distant birds chimed in my ears.

She took my hand, leaned toward me, inclining her face with an intimacy that sprang from the guileless well of her being. With cool lips she kissed my cheek. She smelled of lavender and anise. I followed her where she led: out under the stars that were scattered above us in a mist of silver. Almost half a moon hung among them, “like a slice of lemon,” as a woman I had loved once said. The sweetness of the candied air stung my cheek. Somewhere a fire was burning and in the grass, spiderwebs glinted with early dew. The city hummed, as it always did, like a restless furnace in the basement of my mind.

She, leading me gently by the hand, brought me to the edge of a woods, one that I had passed nearly every day of my life. It had worked a slow spell in my mind – the thought of it growing larger with the years – but I had never ventured into it. Now I felt its enormity.  and something in me resisted it. It had a presence, a consciousness that oppressed me. The trees were tall, straight as columns in a Grecian palace, with no undergrowth between them. It was a remnant of the New Deal, that great realization of the American belief that the interior of the cosmos could be ordered by straightening its outer fixtures. There was a haunting beauty in it, like the shivering silences between movements in an ancient symphony, like the rows in a cemetery for gods.

She touched my face and our eyes found each other. A cool wind flowed around her, stirring the folds of her garments and playing in the tresses of her hair. It caught up the fibers of her body and little by little, scattered her like snow. Her hand slipped sand-like out of mine, followed by wrist, arm, shoulders, chest, waist. Last of all were her eyes, leaving a silver glimmer in the air before me, like the ephemeral tracings of comets. The way was set before me and I followed it in silence, listening to the creak of branches and the flutter of leaves. Night fell, and with it, the airiness of evening fled. I sharpened to the air and the trees and the brilliance of the moon. I wakened to the hidden things – the golden flash of a toad’s eyes from the dark of its burrow, the papery rustle of birds settling into their leafy nests, the electric fizzle of the underlying silence – like an enormous creature holding its breath. It was then I noticed, shocked almost, that the groan of traffic on the interstate, which had dogged me almost all my life, had vanished. The highway was only just out of sight, and yet its roar had gone. I strained my ears – nothing but the creepings and clickings and of small creatures in the branches. 

A city child on his first trip into the country, astounded by the smell of clean air.

Where I was going was a mystery. Why I kept walking at all was not – nothing lay behind me that held the least value to me. It was a hollow world, a noisy world – consumption without satisfaction, progress without purpose – and I was body and soul a part of it, “distracted from distraction by distraction.” But now the twilight had deepened into evening, and darkness had finally settled over that God-forsaken kingdom.

The trees had grown taller, their trunks thicker and the darkness more enfolding. All the weight – the guilt, the inadequacy, the regrets – became like a physical weight, a leather pack hung from my shoulders whose contents stuck out jagged into my spine. I was conscious of everything I had ever done – all the debts laid down in my name. The trees towered and the wind sighed on. I staggered under that angry weight, stumbling against the boles, tripping over roots, falling and catching myself, but the harder I was beaten down, the more I determined to reach the end of the path.

A fire was burning before me, so intense I felt its scorching fingers on my face, against my temples, on my thighs. I knew it would consume me if I continued toward it, but I staggered on against the long shadows of the trees sent shivering down on either side of me like slices of midnight. I staggered on, into the blaze, feeling the skin of my thighs begin to crackle in the desiccating heat. I staggered on until the trees fell away and I was standing on the edge of a dark clearing with the fire burning over me. I fell to my knees in the rich grass and gazed up into the heart of the fire, brighter than the seat of a nuclear explosion. As I looked, a human form began to distill itself from the flames. It burned like a white-hot coal. It made no gesture to me, but I heard, or understood, its voice in my head. I felt for the straps of my pack. They had been bound up with my shoulders for so long, the burden interpenetrated so completely with the flesh of my back, that I had never known it was there. I slipped off the straps and slung it to the ground – a weathered old rucksack filled with broken concrete, the fragmented foundation of a broken regime. The burning figure, which had descended from its place and now was standing in the grass with me, stooped to put his hand among the rocks and they were immediately consumed by his fire. After blazing for a moment, all sign of the pack and its contents had vanished, leaving only a faint smell like dust and old mortar.

Then the figure turned to me. I could see its face – beautiful and noble. It belonged to the prince of some distant star, glowing like an emulsion of gold and marble. His eyes were dark and rich like ebony heartwood; they seemed glad, in all their alien splendor, to behold me. His body could have been sculpted by Michelangelo – sleek, powerful, and full of grace. Utterly unself-possessed, as if he was completely unaware of his own majesty. An aura of silver hung about him in the night air of the glade, and when he spoke, it was like being bathed in light.

“Child, have you come to die?”

It was suddenly clear to me how weary I had been for so long, how self-abused and ragged. At last, I knew what it was I had been seeking.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Then may you live.”

The man laid his hands on my head, covering the places the fire had scorched. An intense warmth, incredibly hot, but without the violence of fire, flowed through me from where he laid his hands, searching out every hidden place within me until I was known completely. The dusty rooms of my soul had been thrown open and the light poured in, scattering the shadows there like bats in the sudden glory of morning.

I was dazzled beyond speech, beyond thought. The last thing I perceived before I slept was the love of those dark eyes and the feeling of his tender kiss on my lips.

I fell out of myself. My soul steeped from my body like the dark liquor from a packet of tea, like I used to as a child, letting myself sink down into the depths of a pool, hanging limply, suspended as an insect in amber, my perceptions drawn within myself, feeling the hollow of my chest, listening to the still beat of my heart. I could not see in the way I had before, my material eyes had been shut and would remain so until the long day of the earth had closed into sunset and stars. But I was aware of everything, could feel every blossom, every cricket, every small creature burrowed in the ground like a thought in my mind. I could feel my body too, like an old chair finally risen from, could feel the burning man make a hollow for it in the sod and lower it down, could feel the dirt fall in gentle handfuls upon it until all was dark and close. 

How long I remained there I don’t know. I had come to the borderlands of time and the country beyond, tethered by an old oath to my time-bound body and yet free to test its bonds, free to wander. 

I walked in pale halls upon the moon and read its tragic history in the ancient books that lay open on pedestals of meerschaum. I wandered in strange forests beside the sea where giants made their beds. I danced in the fields of burning canna and brilliant daffodil upon the sun. I descended long staircases with Piranesi, down into vaulted dungeons where the restless dead work out their salvation. I gazed upon the gears that turned the hands of time in the ruined palace where Khronos sleeps. But after all this, I returned to that glade where my body lay. I waited in the earth and felt the slow progression of the seasons work their changes in the air above. I felt tremors in the earth and in the sky and in the heart of humanity, but over and through all this was the overwhelming comfort of sleep. I had become a seed dreaming in the ground with little to mark the passing ages and no reason to mind them.

After a time, I felt my body stirring, pulsing with a newly thawed vitality. I felt my body changing, growing, sprouting up. My hands stretched out long and my fingers spindled into tendrils, my knuckles curled into leafy buds. My legs branched into a thousand filamented roots. My body grew, pushing head and shoulders, glorious with golden leaves, through the veil of grass, high into the air, caressing heaven. I embraced the world from infinite points of contact – my crown and branches surging with exaltation in the movements of the wind. My trunk and roots firm and immovable. Small birds made their homes in my joints, squirrels played in my hair, the rain was splendor itself. I knew the world and the one through whom it had its being. Distant worlds swung by overhead, anchored in the brave center upholding it all.

Trees, trains, islands, and bureaucracies, painters, prophets, pugilists, and politicians, the earth, the sky, the sun, the moon, the sea and all her dead, temple and arena and arcadia, bacteria, barber shops, and Babylon – all were bound together in the mind of God. I had lived, died, and come to life again. I had seen the tapestry in the celestial city where it hangs. I knew the story and my place in it.  I was, for all the empty sorrow of the world, content.

Saint Valentine’s Anger

“I will always love you,” he whispered fiercely. There was an almost violent urgency in his love at all times, but especially today, especially now in these penultimate moments when  every word rang like a broken Liberty Bell.

“They’ll be here soon,” I said.

“I know,” he answered.

“What can we do?”

He didn’t respond, but drew me to himself and held me tightly. His arms shook.

“I’ll always love you too,” I said into his shoulder.

“I know,” he answered.

 

The driveway was carpeted with soggy autumn leaves, so the government car made almost no sound as it dragged up to the house. We were waiting by the window in the study, hidden by the branches of the crabapple tree outside. Two men got out of the car and walked up the path to the door. One was middle-aged and pudgy, with a fatherly cast to his eyes. The other, square-jawed and towering, the substantial heft of his chest and arms filling out his charcoal overcoat. The passed out of view and a moment later, the doorbell rang.

I saw the gun glint in his hand as he lifted it from the table. I hated that weapon the moment I saw it, the night my lover had brought it home. It was illegal of course – a state officer can’t disable a revolver from his computer. They are cold, untamed machines.

I could tell he knew what I was thinking, because he gave me that prying look of his.

“Please don’t,” I said. 

The doorbell rang again. They knew we were here.

“Is this a comedy or a tragedy?” he asked. 

No words came to mind. I kissed him and he kissed me back.

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you too,” returned.

A heavy hand was pounding slowly on the door. A full minute passed as we held each other against its weight. 

“You go to the door. I’ll wait in the hall,” he said.

I assented. There was no room for debate anymore. I could not stop him from doing what he was about to do – he loved me too much.

The figures of the two men were thrown through the painted glass panels and onto the floor. The door handle felt like cold lead in my palm. I pulled it open.

“Hello, miss,” the pudgy man said. “I’m Gerald Spoonwood. My associate, Mr. Stahlbein, and I are from the Department of Psychology, Personhood and Mating Division. I imagine you know why we’re here.”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, congratulations and Happy Valentine’s Day! The selection process has been completed! We’ve found you the perfect romantic partner, your friends and family have all approved – you couldn’t ask for a better present than that, could you? We’ve come to take you to meet him.”

My jaw was sutured shut. What could I say?

“If you’d please step outside with us and get into the car, we can be on our way. The lucky man is already waiting for you at the resort.”

I made no move. My hand was still on the door handle, and I must have begun to close it because the broad forearm of the larger man – Stahlbein – stopped its progress with the flat of his hand.

“Please come with us, miss,” Spoonwood said.

Stahlbein had lain his hand on my arm. I squirmed away and he shoved open the door with his shoulder, crashing it into panelling. He lunged at me. Two loud cracks burst the air. Stahlbein buckled at the knees, crumpling like aluminum foil. He coughed and sputtered, hands clutching at his chest.

“In the name of God!” Spoonwood spluttered. My lover strode into the grey light, grabbed him by the throat and slammed him against the doorpost.

“If you don’t get the hell out of here the second I let go, it’ll be you next.”

He flung the little man onto the porch steps and he scampered down the drive. He threw open the car door, fumbled a minute for his keys, and peeled away. The blue smoke of burnt rubber hung in the air.

My attention was drawn to the man stretched across the door sill. He lay face down with his hands beneath him, like a prostrate monk.

My lover took me in his arms and held me.

“They won’t stop,” I said. “They’ll come back and force me to go.”

“You know I’ll kill anyone who tries.”

Both of us began to cry.

After some time, he said, “We could run.”

“Where could we go?”

“We’d find someplace.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

 

Even if it ends today, even if they erase our memories and pair us with new lovers, even if they kill us, we would still have known what it was to truly love another person, to nurture that struggling, helpless, imperfect creature between us, to soothe it in the dark when it woke from bad dreams, to laugh with it in the morning when the first light of morning fell across its face, to risk everything, even unhappiness, in its defense, to lay down everything dear to us for its sake and be able to say, in all truth, that we would give our souls to possess it even for a day. “Love suffers all,” we have been told, and for its sake, so have we, willingly, desperately.

The Idiot and the Magistrate

 

 

      Fearlessly, the idiot faced the crowd

      Smiling

      Merciless, the magistrate turns ‘round

      Frowning

                                        – Roger Waters

 

Thomas Finchley climbed to the top of the church at half past ten one summer morning many years ago. With a loud voice he addressed the people gathered in the market square below.

“I wish to speak a few words!” He shouted with a smile to the amazed crowd. “You are all blessed to draw breath! The echo of eternity resounds in every passing moment of this day! It is the eve of the Glorious Unveiling! Can’t you feel the earth shaking?”

“Lord God, is that the twopenny gazette seller?”

“I do believe it is!”

“Look at ‘im up there!”

“However did he…”

“Ay, Tom Finchley! Wot’re you doing up there, man?”

The crowd buzzed like a prodded beehive. Lord Boughton, who was passing through the square, as was his custom on market days, noticed the commotion and stopped. “I’ll be damned,” he growled to his retainers, “that doddering fool will have this town in disarray with all this fanciful nonsense. On market day at that!

“Ay, Hawker! You there on the church roof. Come down this moment!”

“My apologies, sir,” Thomas Finchley replied, “but my conscience forbids me. I have a word to speak to the people, a word from the Father Himself to all His earthbound children.”

“Heed my warning, Hawker, you must come down at once or face the wrath of the court!” The magistrate flushed red as he yelled.

“Good people!” Thomas Finchley shouted. “All moments touch all others, and if you want to glimpse eternity, gaze into the eyes of your neighbor, for Death is nearer than a lover. Weep today as you round a bend in the road or sweep out the dust in your doorway or lay your hand to the plow, for ‘It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting,’ as the Holy Book says, ‘For that is the destiny of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart.’”

“Come down at once, or by my word we shall shoot you down!” the magistrate bellowed. The crowd seemed entranced in what they witnessed. All activity had ceased in the stalls and stores.

“Magistrate, don’t you know that you may fell a partridge with a stone, but you cannot stop it flying? Shoot me down from this croft, but I shall fly straight to Paradise and recommend you to Saint Peter!”

“Very well,” Lord Boughton barked to the guard beside him. “Let fly.”

The man raised his musket and his charge flashed. An emission of smoke lurched from the lock and sailed slowly upward, hanging together against the morning sky. The ball struck Thomas Finchley in his breastbone and he fell to the stone below. The magistrate’s men dragged the body away immediately and the sexton was called to scrub the blood from the steps where it had spilled. Before the clock tower had struck eleven, the market square was filled again with the bustle of trade.

The Patient Dies: A Fugue on a Theme by Superman

 

For starters, let me just say that I’m probably insane, at least I think it’s safe to assume so because they’ve got me locked in this square room where two walls are made of glass so they can monitor me all the time. That’s one of my hypotheses at the moment, the other probably betrays that I am, in fact, insane, but that can wait. Right now, I’d like to point out to you that, as you can see, I’m not in a straight jacket and that, however, the walls and ceiling and floor are white, like they would be in a mental institution, but they aren’t padded. The biggest problem here is that I have no privacy. Anyone can walk by at any time and watch me for as long as they want. Luckily, I’m not much of a pervert, because if I was, it’d be pretty humiliating. Then again, I guess it’s pretty humiliating living in this hamster cage even if I’m not doing anything specifically embarrassing. If I am really mentally unstable, my guess would be that it’s a problem with my memory because I can’t remember much of anything. Maybe that’s because there isn’t much to remember, because as far as I know, I’ve always lived in this room – for a very long time anyway.

 

 

The faces of the doctors and technicians outside change like a grey Kaleidoscope someone up top is twisting around very slowly for his own amusement. This doesn’t affect me much because none of them except the head doctor ever talks to me. Once a day or so, he stands by the corner where the glass wall and the plaster wall meet on the right side of the room from my point of view and leans into what is probably a microphone, but is hidden behind the wall. He comes on the microphone and says, “So how’s The Patient today?” in a voice that’s apparently supposed to sound compassionate or commiserating or something, but is obviously just a facade. I know he doesn’t care. If he did, he’d get me out of here, or ask me some real questions other than “What books would you like today?” or at least explain what’s going on here. When I got old enough to realize that not everyone lived in a room like me – to understand that I was the exception and that those white coats in the hall were the rule – I asked him why I was here. All he said was, in that paternal tone of his, “You’re sick.” So you can see why I have two ideas about what’s really wrong with me. He either means I’m sick in my mind, or I’m sick in my body, or maybe both – that’s another option. Then there’s a third option – that maybe I’m not sick at all, that maybe all those people outside are sick and I’m just too well. 

 

When I was younger, they gave me comic books – Superman and The Flash and all those other old classics that everyone, even if they’ve never read one themselves, seems to know about. They’re just out there in the air, floating around for people to breathe in. Anyway, I read those stories of superhumans and gods and aliens and mutants, and I realized something – all those heroes, the good ones at least, not the villains always, weren’t sick, they were different because they were better than everybody else. Not better – that’s not what I mean. They were more than everybody else somehow. Superman was super because he had come from a different planet where everyone was stronger by nature, and when he got sent to Earth, he had to hide his true identity because all those lesser humans wouldn’t understand him, wouldn’t know how to interact with him. He couldn’t play basketball with anyone, for example, because a hard pick might kill the other player. I don’t remember if he ever had to decide whether or not to play basketball with someone, but it seemed like a logical problem to have for someone who could melt bricks just by looking at them. Anyway, I wonder sometimes if the reason they’re keeping me locked up here isn’t because I’m sick at all, but because I’m too well for the rest of the world, closer to what it really means to be human than all of them, and they aren’t prepared to deal with me. Maybe they haven’t told me this because they don’t want me breaking out of here. So there it is – that’s my theory, the one that probably confirms the first, which is that I’m just plain crazy.

 

I wonder if they’ll keep me here until I die. Dying was something no one told me about, something I first learned about from books. It was like a secret everyone knew but me and I had to figure it out for myself. I wondered why, when Spiderman caught Gwen Stacy with his web after the Green Goblin threw her off that bridge, he became so upset. He had caught her, what was there to be upset about? I understood pain. I had tripped and fallen against the glass and sprained my finger once, so I understood that. I thought that the fate Spiderman was trying to save Gwen from was nothing more serious than severe pain, so when he shot his web down and caught her, I assumed everything was fine. But once he had her in his arms, she didn’t move, she just lay limp like a doll and he cried his eyes out. The force of the whiplash had killed her. Eventually I came to understand that people’s lives, the condition that I and everyone I saw through my glass walls was in, could end. I discovered that people could die. At first I thought death only came when a person experienced more pain than they could stand, but then I realized that people could die sitting in their chairs, that babies could be born dead, that people could kill each other, that in one way or another, everyone died eventually either from disease, or hurt, or age, or someone’s intentions, or for no reason at all, just because, as people wrote, “Death had come for them.” I read that some people killed themselves, and some killed their children, even their own babies inside their bodies either because they didn’t want them or couldn’t survive if they did have them, and some killed their wives and husbands. I read about wars in which whole crowds of people got together with swords or guns or planes for the purpose of slaughtering each other – usually over money, which I didn’t understand then and don’t now. I realize now that nobody really understands death, the need for it, and I realize now that I don’t really understand it either.  I imagine it’s like getting struck by lightning and then falling asleep. But I’ve never been struck by lightning, of course, it’s just another experience I’ve gotten a vague idea about from all the things I’ve read.

 

Once I read a book called The Bible, which people, even in comics, refer to frequently, and seems important in some way. It’s very old, and that, I’ve realized, is often enough to make people think something is worth reading. Now I realize that there’s probably some truth to that because I know there are a lot less of the really old books and that must mean more than a few people thought they were worth reprinting and keeping around. Anyway, I read The Bible a couple times because it was so strange. I’d read a few things like Gilgamesh and The Bhagavad Gita and some of The Grimm Brothers’ Fairy Tales that sounded similar in the way they used words – almost like the words didn’t matter, that what they were saying was more important than the way they said it – but I found it so strange that the Bible meandered around a lot, throwing names around like snow until all that made sense was “this guy doing this thing for this reason in this place at some time.” Anyway, the reason I’m saying this is that in The Bible, I heard about people who died and then came back to life. And it wasn’t like Frankenstein because they actually seemed to be alive. There was a man named Jesus who seemed particularly important because four of the books in The Bible were devoted his life and most of the ones that came after that were mostly about what he had to say. Anyway, this man Jesus died and then came back to life a couple days later. I thought this was a decent situation because he sounded like one person you would actually want to have around again, even if you didn’t know him personally. There was a sentence about him in The Bible that I still remember: “As in Adam, all die, so also in Christ, all shall be made alive.” I don’t know if I believe that – no one in all the other books I’ve read seems to – but it’s stuck in my memory anyway.

 

I guess now that I’ve told you about death and everything, I might as well explain what I think my own situation actually is. Personally, I think I’m sort of like Clark Kent, like I said before, too well for this world, so they put me in this room apart from everyone to keep them safe from me. Maybe, like him, I don’t belong to this planet, but to some other lost world in a distant solar system. If this is true, I wonder if maybe the problem is the air that I breathe. According to the books I’ve read, ordinary humans breathe oxygen. Maybe I breathe some kind of poisonous chemical compound that would get into the air and infect it, or maybe my body itself is made of compounds and elements whose very presence would be deadly to anyone around me. I don’t know for sure. These walls are pretty thick, so maybe I have extraordinary strength like most of those heroes, and the reason they haven’t told me this is because they don’t want me to break out of here and cause all that inevitable destruction. 

 

I imagine it happening this way:

 

I test my strength first on the plaster wall, pushing on it until I feel it warp and crack and cave under my hands. Then I go to the glass, and without hesitating at all, punch my fist  right through it. The whole wall shatters, but I don’t feel anything. It’s true, I realize, all that is true. I am too much for this world. Call me The Patient, the only name I’ve ever known, the only I’ve ever been called, and the only name that describes me, an oddity, powerful and powerless, at the mercy of this foreign world. Air rushes past me, all that toxic air, into the hallway and everyone, all those doctors and technicians and nurses and executives fall to the floor dead. Then I’m out, running like some kind of animal through the halls, flinging my clothes from my body, my skin tingling in this new atmosphere, the oxygen like soda pop against my naked flesh, shouting as I go, “I’m free! I’m free! I’m free!” I come to an enormous room whose ceiling is hundreds of feet above me, and there are people everywhere. They’ve all heard of me before, most of them have watched me through the glass and their faces are familiar to me, except now they are the caged animals, caged by their own fear. This is not revenge. I don’t wish them any harm at all. They did what they had to do, and so have I. All of us wanted to live. And now I am living. I charge across the tiled floor of that enormous room and burst through the plate-glass doors, the steel frames bending around me like the wake of an asteroid, and then I’m leaping down the wide stone steps into that courtyard surrounded by huge medical buildings on every side, my first glimpse of the outside world with my own eyes. The polished cement flagstones of the courtyard are cool under my feet. I stand there, breathing in the newness of everything around me, the sweet, sharp taste of freedom on my face. Of course there are snipers on the roofs all around, waiting for years and years for this to happen, the last defense between me and a helpless world. My hearing, I find, is incredibly sharp – the walls of my prison must have been soundproofed to keep me from realizing this – but I find that this discovery comes too late to save my life. “Squadron, to your positions!” I hear the captain of the snipers whisper to his men, hand on his own steely rifle. I can see the red lasers shining like evil eyes from beneath each gun barrel as I whirl around, taking everything in, each pair of eyes, each hard mouth atop the buildings. I stand and wait for what I know is coming for me. They pull their trigers in unison, just as they were programmed, like toy soldiers, to do in their training, firing at dummies, accurately, remorselessly. All the bullets hit me at once, and I spin and I fall on that stone in the center of the courtyard, my red blood spilling into the gaps between the cement blocks, sketching a dark pattern all around me. My body twitches, my face goes white because I’m dying, and I realize this, but the world is not safe from me, and I mean it no harm, but with every gasping breath, the toxin in my lungs is spilling into the air, dispersing like grim music, that volatile poison inside me finding its way into every last corner of the city, killing every living thing in an instant like a silent hydrogen bomb.

 

I die, but before I die, I stare up into the blue sky, or maybe it will be cloudy, or dark and the moon will be up with all the stars. I don’t know, but I’ll be thinking of those words – “So also in Christ, all will be made alive” – because they seem ultimate, like a kind of eulogy, and I’ll remember Superman flying through the stars up there and how he died once, but didn’t stay that way. I don’t know what will happen after that lightning strike and sleep – no one does really, even though some have had visions of it, or say they have – maybe nothing, but I will be free, at least. This room has gotten smaller as I’ve gotten older. I’ll be free then. I’ve realized that. When I die, I’ll be free.

Vision of Heaven

I came out of surgery about an hour ago. My lung again. They went in with two instruments and cut off the bleb – the ugly blister that’s been leaking and causing my lung to collapse (spontaneous pneumothorax is the technical term) – then stapled the spot with titanium. But this isn’t what I want to write about.

They gave me some kind of anesthesia intravenously and through a breathing mask. I was expecting to black out and wake up a couple hours later in the recovery room, not remembering anything, but the opposite happened. You could say I had a vision of sorts.

I heard the roaring sound of waves. I was standing on the shore of a quiet, silver-grey sea with light-stricken clouds hanging over it. Behind me was a little cottage of pale yellow stone. It was my home. I was alone, but peaceful, totally and completely content. There was no sun because Christ, though I couldn’t see Him, was giving light to everything. Christ Himself was the light, at least, this is what I imagined while I was standing there. I also imagined being visited by Elizabeth and Brent and other old friends. That thought gave me the most intense feeling of happiness.

I told the nurse all about this when I started to come out of my narcotic fog. It was a vision, she said. I believe it was.