Firewalking

I.
It is a decade after my first dance on the coals when I dream I am fire. My unconscious douses me in wakefulness before an incriminating thought can be recorded and the State can trace it back to me. When I was sent to walk the coals I was eight years old and terribly frail from hunger. My only interaction with heat had been my mother smacking my hand away from our whistling kettle. Then, I was sent here for stealing a handful of our neighbor’s apples, and in my absence my mother and sister were collected as wards of the State. I can’t recall if I cried during my showcase but the audience always tries to break you during a premiere. If you can’t perform they bring you to the Three-Ring where the spotlight shines you unto the reaper. As if the coals hadn’t been enough, they pelted me with glass, stones, even apples, what I’d given my life for and had sent me here.

The coals murmur and the spectators jeer: a familiar dissonance, a blighted prayer of a summoning as I take another step into the fires I must quench from kindling to ash, or else be faded out in the spotlight of the Three-Ring.
–
This is the first in a planned series. If you’d like to see more, please let me know and pass it on.

Of water and the fire within.

Once, many years ago in a land much like ours, two children were born, twins: a boy and a girl. Their mother and father raised them like you and like me, in a humble home of humble means, where they lovingly gave of themselves and more, day in and day out. And the children gave, too, first through their cheerful eyes, soon from their laughter, and then from the words they learned (though they borrowed many from their parents). The days passed as such: the boy Fybère bore rosy cheeks and auburn hair, and the girl, Waeterède, pale skin and black, bright eyes. They were beautiful children, well loved and well cared for.

Years passed as the days had, and the parents watched their children play, fight, forgive, and so on into their adulthood. And eventually, as expected, their parents died. It is here that some stories might end: those are not the stories we remember. It is here that some stories might tell of a feud rising up from old wounds between brother and sister; these are the stories we learn from. This is neither of those stories, but some remember it as the most important because it is about how a world was born. Judge for yourself.

Fybère and Waeterède suffered their parents’ deaths together, and sought to shield their grief in each other’s strength. Days passed, but unlike their youth these days seemed not to shine, but in the misery to fester.

Often Fybère would say, “I wish mother were here today, to plant bulbs with us, and to guide our hands in the soil.”

“And Father to tell us of his days in the swamps and the fantastic stories of his mother, the marsh maiden,” Waeterède would respond.

After they concluded their daily wishing, their hearts felt hollow still, and every day more more hollow than before. They cast their house in a shadow, from which they dared not reach or rise. They sought nor saw naught but gloom.

It was then, that something expected happened: it was something unexceptional that you might guess at, but I will tell of it in precise terms to tell the story truthfully so that the importance of this event will be understood and not mistaken. As is often the case when one suffers a deep pain, people notice. From the shadow on their home, a voice was born and filled their house.

“Awake,” a child’s voice said one night.

“Was that you, brother?” Waeterède asked.

“Not I. I thought it was you, sister.” Fybère said.

Then, the pair returned to sleep.

When they woke up the next morning, after they had wiped their eyes of sleep they found, sitting upon their kitchen table, a girl not more than eight years old.

“I hope I didn’t wake you,” the girl said, a knowing twinkle in her eyes.

“You sound like the voice that woke me at twilight,” Waeterède perceived.

“I am the very same!” the girl said. She laughed then, and slid off the table and ran quickly out of sight.

“Come back here at once!” Fybère commanded, “How did you enter our home uninvited, unnoticed, most unwelcome?”

“Be kinder brother, she is young and naive.”

“That is something that we have in common, then,” the girl said, from the shadows, “as for your question: you made it very easy for me to slip into your home—when I slipped out of your hearts.”

A storm breeze filled their house and threw open all the windows.

Then, silence.

Waeterède and Fybère searched the kitchen for the girl, and when they found nothing, they inspected their home for missing items, family heirlooms, precious tokens from their parents.

“The girl took nothing. It seems she only meant to give us the mischief and mystery of her appearance,” Fybère said.

Waeterède remained silent, intent on hearing something in the telling silence, and it told her this: “Fybère, I have my hand on my chest and I feel nothing, and when I hold my hands over my ears, I hear nothing, not even the imitation sound of the shore. I fear my heart has stopped beating, yet I do not feel faint.”

Fybère’s rosy face blanched, and he took his sister’s wrist. It was true: Waeterède appeared as healthy as ever, yet she had no heartbeat.

“Brother, I feel your hand, and you feel as cold-blooded as an eel.”

Fybère checked his fingers against his wrist, his neck, his chest. “I am deathly, too.”

Then they heard, from outside, the giggling of what was unmistakably the little girl that had appeared on their kitchen table. They opened the front door and stepped outside into a field of sunflowers.

“Where has the highway gone?” Waeterède said.

“I took it away when I arrived,” the little girl said, and she peeked her green eyes between the swaying stalks. “Follow me.”

And so they did. They passed through the field of sunflowers, crossed a bridge that they did not recognize over a river that they could not name, to a field that they had never seen with the softest grass they’d ever felt.

The little girl sat and bore a deep stare into Fybère and Waeterède. “What do you notice?”

“That I cannot feel my heartbeat yet,” Fybère answered.

“What else?”

“The wind is different,” Waeterède said, “it passes through and pulls me at the same time. I feel not of my own will, but the wind’s.”

“Your sister wins. Perhaps she is the smarter twin. But it is not the answer I seek.”

Flustered by the girl’s mocking, Fybère looked away and up to the sky. “Oh, there are many butterflies above the field!” And indeed there were a dozen butterflies flitting and flapping above their heads. “I’ve only read about them before.”

“That’s because your parents killed them all, save these.”

Neither twin had a response for the girl. They had not known this about their parents.

“Before you were born, your parents caught as many as they could—which was most of their population—and ground them up to eat. Even still, it did not grant them the wish they sought.”

“This is nonsense. Our parents worked for everything they had,” Fybère said.

“You speak true, but your parents were both infertile, and so they had to work for a child too. They used the butterflies for that purpose, but instead of the child they asked for, they got two. As a result they had to work twice as hard to support the both of you.”

“I think that you outstep yourself, child,” Waeterède said.

“Yet, only one of you was the cause of your parents’ deaths. The other is free of guilt. So, which of you is it,” she said and laughed, “Your pain has brought me forth to reveal this thing, and then reveal a second.”

Fybère stood up, and walked a few paces away. Waeterède followed and said, “Where are you going? You will surely lose your way.”

“I will go anywhere but here. This demon girl will not blame us for these deaths. It is unjust, unearned. Unnatural.”

The girl called to them, “Anywhere you go you will find me. I suspect it might give you great comfort to have your heartbeats back within your chest. Cold-blood does not suit either of you. You both seem ill and grim.”

Fybère and Waeterède had gazed at the girl for so long, listening in deep attention, that they had not seen each other since entering the field until now. Fybère’s face had drained from rosy to grey, and his hair was thinning and black. Waeterède’s eyes had become a sour yellow-green and her skin had become wrinkled, loose, and sagged with old age.

“Explain what you have done,” Fybère commanded, and took a step. He felt weaker and stiff, crooked and hunched.

The girl merely laughed, a cruel deep laugh, then leapt up into the air and grasped a butterfly lightly in her hand. She tore the butterfly’s wings off its body as casually as if she had ripped a paper in twain.

“The right wing’s for you,” she said, and handed it to Waeterède, “and the left for you.”

Fybère and Waeterède held their wings and felt a burden release within them.

“You are never to see each other from this day forward until the time that each of your wings have grown a whole butterfly again. When there are two butterflies, then you will be restored to your youth and to each other. Until then you will neither see or hear each another.”

Waeterède turned again where she had last seen her brother—but he was gone! Likewise, Fydère turned to his sister, but she was absent. The girl smiled as she saw the twins’ reactions as plainly before her as the twins were blind to each other. With that laughter ringing in their ears, she disappeared into the soil of the field and was gone.

—

Waeterède departed from the field over the bridge and through the sunflowers but couldn’t find her family home. She retired to the base of a volcano where she planted the butterfly wing in the ash and checked on it every day.

Fybère took the same path beside his sister—though both were unaware—and he made his home in a sea-cave. He nestled the wing in the water-saturated sand, and secured it every day to assure that it wouldn’t drift to sea.

And so years passed this way. The grief they had held for their parents was numbed by the fresh sadness at the loss of each other.

One day, a boy found his way to Waeterède’s home and knocked on her door.

“Yes, what can I do for you?” She said when she answered the call. She appeared now as an old woman, wrinkled and covered in warts and in boils, mud caked to her feet and ash drifting from her body in every movement.

“Nothing, but I wanted to let you know that the volcano is about to erupt, so you better move out somewhere safer.”

“And how do you know that? I’ve lived here many years and I’ve heard not as much as a whimper from that volcano.”

“I know because I know. I am of the volcano, and I say it’s time to spew fire and lava and ash.”

“How reckless!” Waeterède said and slammed the door.

The very same day a girl appeared near the sea-cave and called out for Fybère: “Hello, does anyone live here?”

Fybère emerged, gaunt, bald, hunched over and covered with barnacles. “What is it? You’ll have to speak up,” he said, because mollusks had hidden in his ears and latched themselves between his fingers and toes.

“There’s a monsoon coming, I’m afraid you’ll have to go or you’ll be drowned in the dark of the night in the deep that’s to come.”

“And what do you know of the storm or the seas? The ocean’s been as hushed as a sleeping child, and for years!”

“I know because I know, and I come from the sea and before that I came from the clouds. I say it’s time for the wind and the rain.”

“How awful,” Fybère said and shuffled deeper into his cave.

That night the volcano and clouds burst, with ash and with rain, with lava and wind. Tears, all. Tears of fire and water buried Waeterède and Fybère and their butterfly wings in their safe hiding spots.

When the lava cooled, and the tides receded, each wing sprouted a body, and from the body, another wing. Two whole butterflies, reborn, more beautiful than they had ever been. Waeterède and Fybère met as butterflies on the wind and touched ground on the shoulders of the little shadow girl that had taunted, cursed, and instructed them years and years before.

“Now you are reborn together, and can give of that which you were born,” the girl who was born of the twins’ grief said. “And I predict that your kind will live on, bringing the rain and reigning the sea, tickling the earth and rearing the fires below, guiding them with your wings. This is the era of the butterfly.”

And so it was spoken, writ in the wind, and the twins listened to this wise young voice. They brought forth butterflies into the world again, those creatures that helm the world under wing.

“But what happened to their heartbeats?” A question often asked.

Their heartbeats fell to the tide and the earth; many times you have likely wept and smiled when you heard their perilous singing but did not know why.

I saw the apocalypse through the kitchen window.

And my eyelids framed a slideshow as it rolled up from the horizon and through the fields of wheat, across the neighbor’s yard and under the fence, over the road, then up my driveway to meet me. It was a whirlwind, earth-splitting, sonorous doom.

The last photographs I saw were of my imminent death, taken by my eyes and aided by my unyielding body, which was firm in its decision to go through the motions of washing this last bowl at the kitchen sink by the front window so that I could use it again for the next morning’s cereal.

No more mornings. No “next” anything. No more cereal, eating, sink, soap, kitchen window, me. Would I still be here after the apocalypse? Would I still be, and if so, what would that mean? After a star burns out it lives on, its energy lessened but still alive; would I be among the stars or snuffed out as a candle?

In those last moments I prided myself on how well I accepted my death to-be; I did not tremble, shriek, drop to my knees or cover my eyes, cry.

Instead, I remembered the first time my father parked his car in the driveway when he brought us the clock that I can hear ticking behind me on the wall.

I heard the shower running on the other side of the house and songs in ignorance echoing off the tiled walls. The dog in the backyard barked at the neighbor’s, or, it struck me, this time it barked at the crashing sound of beauty dying in the afternoon light.

My hands were wrinkled and soft, from years of washing dishes without rubber gloves. My face was calm: I could see the lines my father carved in our foreheads, my mother’s eyes twinkling above our cheekbones. I saw–reflected in the kitchen window, superimposed over the apocalypse which eclipsed me–that I smiled.

A tale to set your watch by.

“Why do you still wear that old thing, grandpa?” Jackson said and grasped his Grandfather’s wrist; it was the left which wore a Swiss automatic watch.

“Because it’s alive,” Grandfather said.

“No it isn’t!” Jackson said and laughed.

“Listen, and you tell me.”

Quieting, Jackson lay his left ear on the cool face of the watch.

The tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-ticking was more crisp and precise than his own young heart. Jackson’s fingers traced the weathered brown leather-band and tapped on the glass of the scratched gold-cased watch. He looked up at Grandfather, chuckled and said, “Is there time in here?”

“All the time in the world!” Grandfather said, and then laughed with his grandson at the thought.

“I use this,” Jackson said, and produced a cell phone from his pocket.

“Does your mother know you have that?”

“Yes,” he said. He illuminated the phone’s screen and showed his grandfather the time lit up in pixels.

“That’s new born time. It’s younger than you, my boy,” Grandfather said.

“Does that mean that your watch is as old as you are, Grandpa?”

“As old as me? How old do you think I am?”

They shared another laugh.

“How old is your watch?”

“My father gave me this watch. It has counted two lifetimes already. At least.”

“But how old is it?”

“Well, between my father and me, it should be at least 80 years old. Considering its history, I suspect it must be many years older than that.”

“Where does the time come from? Why can I hear it counting down inside your watch? Does it have memories? Is it really alive?”

“Well, those questions are each a story unto themselves.”

–

In our time, batteries power many things, including cellphones and watches. Batteries can be replaced, and sometimes they can be electrically recharged. Some watches are special, and like mine, recharge the battery with human life. Whenever I move, my activity charges the battery. If I had this watch on my wrist from birth to death, it would outlive me and continue to tell time long after its last charge.

I hear these watches are special, more than simply because of the rechargeable battery. My father told me that he traded a traveling musician a pack of cigarettes for this watch. The musician said the watch was dead and had no use for it anymore, but its craftsmanship was valuable on its own. My father had his suspicions that the watch could be restored to life, but he said nothing about it, as he had nothing else to trade but the cigarettes.

After they had made the trade the musician told him about his own first days with the watch, and how it had been his muse. He had been so inspired by the tick-tick-ticking music of this old watch that he had composed music since he discovered its unique gift for three days straight. After three days of drinking sun and moon but not sleeping at all, the watch sang so more, and his compositions abruptly stopped. When the watch ceased to tick, the musician set out traveling to find replacement parts for the watch, but could find none. No one knew how the watch could be fixed, that is, until he met my father.

The musician was glad to be rid of the watch which he believed had teased, tricked, and tormented him in singing, inspiring, and then suddenly becoming mute. The musician warned my father of the devilish nature of the watch, but expressed hope that should it be restored to life, it would serve my father better than it had served him.

My father pocketed the watch and resumed his travels. By the end of the day, when my father had lay down to sleep, he was kept awake by a ticking that grew louder with each tick-tick-tick. He remembered the watch, and saw that it had resumed life: it was ticking and counting its way toward midnight. Outside of a guess, my father had no way of discerning what time it was, but he believed the watch always told true time. He wrapped the watch around his wrist and lay down to sleep again. The ticking had muted now, perhaps happy to once again accompany a traveler who asked nothing of the watch.

My father was awoken, deep in the twilight mist, by a woman who appeared young, but by her words and her movements seemed ancient and wise. She held a lantern aloft and beckoned my father to follow.

I should mention, I never believed my father about the mist-maiden who led him from his camp, but it’s part of the watch’s history nonetheless.

They arrived at a cottage that seemed to emerge from the side of a grassy hill, its foundation rooted like a tree in the soil and stone. She set up some tea for the pair, and the woman finally said, “Tell me how you came by that watch, young traveler.”

My father was startled because her voice sounded old and grandmotherly, rather unbefitting her young appearance. Perhaps out of his surprise, or in fear of lying he said, “I won it in a trade, perhaps coming away better than the other man. All I could offer was a pack of cigarettes, though I knew the watch was indeed special, more than the musician was aware.”

“It was smart to be honest with me. Very smart. Shows you don’t mind giving me the advantage.”

My father remained silent, and took a sip of the tea.

“You also trust me not to poison your drink. You’re either very polite or very stupid.”

“Perhaps both,” my father said, and took another sip.

“A clever one, too.” She took a sip of her own tea. “Not poisoned. I’d have no use for you if it were poisoned.”

“Use?”

“Mind yourself. In my own time.”

They sat for a while sipping their tea. My father described her hill-cottage as if it were a tree carved from within: there were columns, arches, and a high vaulted ceiling. Where there were gaps in the bark of the wood spiders had filled in webs that were dotted with dew. Pools of water collected just beneath these windowsills, and though exposed to the elements the place was rather warm. The hill-cottage had an earthy smell, like soil rubbed between the palms, mixed in with the smell of rain on cool stones, yet there was also a sweetness in the air, like lily or jasmine. My father noticed that that the woman was hunched over now, in her seated position, and that she had a leafy shrub rooted on her back like a hump, which sprouted vines that encircled her neck and face like an elaborate scarf and Easter bonnet.

“I called on you because I wanted to trick you into giving me my late husband’s watch. I haven’t seen it in some years, and I was shocked to hear it tick-tick-tick-ticking so close to home.”

“If you wanted to trick me, you may have just given yourself away.”

“When I heard that you had made a fair trade for it, I knew I would be unable to simply steal it from you by my own wiles. I thought I’d try to barter it back from you.”

My father was taken aback. Somehow he had gained the trust of this forest-woman, and now spoke as equals.

“I want for nothing other than this watch.”

“Could I convince you if I told you that the watch also my child?”

–

My husband was an Elm, and I am an Ivy. We fell in love, young. When he was a sapling, I grew upon the ground as sparse ivy, and in mid-age he invited me to grow upon his bark. We were inseparable for years and years until a woodsman chopped him down, and me along with him. Then we became half-human, half-plant, and despite the shock of our uprooting, we were no worse off. We wandered the forest spreading our seed, and we were very happy. We spent years and years more like this, but soon we desired to make an Elm and Ivy child that was equally ours.

We set my seed in a drop of water on one of his large Elm leaves, and placed it out in the sun and moon and rain for a year. When we returned where we had left our offspring-to-be, it had become a tiny heart that tick-ticked when we held it in our hands.

Our tragedy however, was that our offspring would not grow, no matter how we loved it, and it would only live so long as we carried it with us, always. My husband, the imaginative one that he was, invented the device on your wrist, that “watch,” to house our little creature. As long one of us carried it, our Elm-Ivy child would live and remember its parents, always.

–

My father felt a chill inside him, and a welling of tears. A small plant creature lived inside his watch. This creature had helped the musician sing and compose, and now my father had restored it to life with his activity.

“I see that you are touched by my story. Does this mean I can have my watch-child back? I’d like to remember my husband through it.”

“Before I decide, let me ask you a question: will you die someday, like your Elm Husband?”

“It is inevitable, yes.”

“Then I think that I am better suited to caring for this watch.”

“How do you suppose that? You too will meet the soil one day. We share the same fate.”

“Forgive me for being frank but, you are the only other living forest creature, are you not?”

“This is correct.”

“Then what will happen to this watch–your child as you say–when you pass on?”

The woman could offer no answer.

“I have a child on the way, back in my homeland far from here. If you allow me to keep this treasure, I can assure you that your offspring will live a long life with every member of my lineage, and it will outlive them all, and so live forever.”

The woman finished her tea, scratched her ivy-wreathed head, and said, “What you offer is great, and smacks of mythology. Though you give me no reason to distrust you, I fear that your offspring will not be so willing to care for such a creature of my kin.”

“You’re right. Neither of us have any reason to trust my descendants,” my father said, and finished the last drop of his tea. “I suppose I’ll just be on my way.”

“Wait. There may be a way to keep your promise. When you feel your child is ready to take on such a responsibility, tell him your story. If he is worthy of my child, his face will brighten in awe of the wonder of this creation, captured in a watch. Then you will know this descendant is worthy to wear the watch, and to live hand in hand with my offspring. They will be bonded in this way until your child dies, and mine will collect the tales of this, and subsequent members of your family.”

“And so we’ll set our watch with this tale, and that will decide who among my family will be entrusted with it.”

“Precisely. And if you find that none of your own are worthy, you are you seek me out and return it, but if I am dead, you are to bury the watch in the soil where I was born, not far from here, in hopes that times will change and someone worthy will come along and dig it up and realize its true magic. This you must swear.”

“I swear it,” my father said, without hesitation.

“Then we have a deal,” the woman said, and extended her hand in agreement.

They shook hands: in this moment the woman’s vines tangled around their held hands, tightened, and released.

My father claims he woke up at his camp as if he’d never been away, and swore to his dying day that he could still feel the cold pressure of the woman’s vines around his hand, bonding him to her, and to his oath.

–

“He told me this story long before you were born. That was the day he gave me this precious watch.”

Jackson’s eyes glimmered, and his face set into a wide smile. “Wow,” he said simply.

Then, Jackson felt the band of the watch tighten around his wrist as his Grandfather bestowed it to him. They sat there, marveling together at the delicate creature, listening to its delicate music sing tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick, as it heard to its story told once more at the beginning of its next life with the young boy.

Betelgeuse, betelgeuse, betelgeuse.

I hope you’re still here in a million years when Betelgeuse explodes in a breath of hydrogen out there beyond the azure nestled in Orion’s shoulder. Please, be awake and wait outside with your cup of coffee before work and in your bathrobe after dinner until the star expands in its light. See that vision of the transformed past and let it be your sun and moon, a star to sail by, a constellation inspired by your name.

Write poems, compose songs. Love under this morning star and travel by it at night. Let it be a song sung in the shower, the chords caught on the heartstrings of a violin and a cello, a bird posed on a branch that just catches sight of you and flies away, flower buds pursed between the timid sepals at the end of winter. Let it be the cradle of a mother’s arms, or the swing of a father’s, a bedtime story read by flashlight, a laugh that leaves you aching. Let it be you, let it be me. Let it be the mornings when you tear into an orange with your fingertips and leave the rind under your nails while you prepare breakfast, or the bloody dissection of a pomegranate and the tart, sweet seeds within, the supple and spiny leaves of an artichoke, the neon paste of an avocado. Let it be the grass crippled with frost, petrichor in the air when you’re heading home for a good read or a good sleep, and sweat in your hair on a sleepless summer night.

The color of these things I hope you find when you see Betelgeuse explode a million years from now.