Sunfire and Moonshine

When the moment comes for her to walk into the fire, she grasps it with an air of indebted love. 

***

Look. None of this is literal; Selene pieces it together from splinters of shell, busted scraps of a thousand swollen hearts and hot redemptive ash. 

Her genesis is flame and the cold, cold moon. A female story born from uterine fire. 

Her earliest memory is of haze and smoke, a gauzelike diorama punctuated by harrowing screams and the hoarse hitching breaths of survivors. People on their bellies crawling like larvae toward exits, a crackling inferno detonating everything above them. Do you shriek when doing so scours your throat raw? Do you, poor slug, curl into an imaginary shell, a failed snail?

Around such memories and queries, stories coalesce. Accumulate. Agglomerate.

Selene has never seen a field. Abandoned lots staccato and bristling with scraggy dandelions and sullied drifts of morning glory and gummy, chastened condoms and discarded needles? Yes. An actual field? No. 

Her shining mother gone, consumed; broken father crumpled to naught, all clamour silenced; heart-rent; siblings scattered like dry leaves in an October gale, she first experiences loneliness. Foster care is not entirely unkind to her, though; she emerges a bedraggled butterfly, split-winged and shuddering, from smeary toxic years of caterpillar hell. 

Selene.

They laugh at my watchspring hair, snicker in my constant shadow. One day I'll put my foot down and tell them. You all need to back off, I swear to God.

***

It's daylight but tarnished, like some golden thing showcased by morning, lit by a tentative new sun, and found wanting. 

"Way too fucking real to recognize itself."

She speaks a name. "Helios. Helios. Helios. Helios."

"Girlfriend, you talkin' to yourself agin?"

Won't answer. Can't answer. Let the new moon dream of a perfect sky, and return to me this tale entire. Envision my kinsfolk in unison. No longer am I so desirous of its telling.

***

Selene is alive, and every time she feels the hot-coal blare of her ferocity, she loves herself a notch or two more, the reciprocating world a notch or two less. 

***

A time arrives when Selene becomes embroiled in an ugly clash with someone named Salome somewhere in the world. All she is, a collection of pixels and surly, pitiless text, but that's enough. Salome and Selene. Ironies laid in fault lines through the geology of lives.

***

Which gods moved what sign? Whose deities transgressed? 

Whole neighbourhoods feel their way into mercy, the men and the women, the bewildered children milling in squares, lost pets meandering, ruffled treetops, a glaring moon behind breakneck rags of cloud, snatches of vapour, the abraded cough of grey and white, all so harsh and well, Kali fucking Loki in avid silence, each grinning maniacally as their zealous crotches lock and they converge on Vienna to dance.

Two ways. Will you walk into the Danube, my love? Or is this bacchanal insatiable?

Nothing but an interlude in a story whose momentum is manifest.

***

Salome is a troll hunched beneath a digital bridge. All she knows is the hurt of Selene's dismissal, a disregard however mild requiring recompense. Dogged, she will gather her patient ordnance. Which she one day sends like the heart's own poison darts.

"My girl Selene, I hate to tell you this"—she loves to tell her this—"but you killed your mother. You rested some plastic toy on the element of a stove, and it melted and dripped, catching a towel alight, spreading quickly. Three people in the floors above were burned alive, two more succumbed to smoke, along with your own mother. It was you, Selene. You killed them. It's time you knew what you did."

Selene's mind says no, but her mortal heart knows. Fragments of memory suddenly make sense. She could search the records, but she already knows what she will find. She is like a theatre without actors or audience. A shamefaced ghost within a bad dream. The silence at the centre of a hurricane. She haunts the streets like someone condemned. 

Then one day she hears it. The screaming of someone in peril. She sees windows aflame like the eyes of madmen and the astonished O-gape of a door and she hears the screams. Of whom she neither knows nor cares. A tiny child as she was, perhaps? A young mother, even. This is her moment, her brief opening to fashion from an ending a beginning, to make of her life a ceaseless loop. Arms spread, she walks into the furnace, smiling.

Push Bar To Open

This is not a story.

***

After cancer took him the same year Elvis died, when I was young, I've seen the face of my grandfather most days since, in my dreams or projected onto my inner eyelids when I stop for a moment and rest and allow memory's fluid, capillary reach breach the dam of me.

***

This child: "I made a snowman today."

"It isn't snowing." 

"Snow is just extra cold water, and it's raining."

"But—"

"It's there. You just can't see it. The rain keeps washing it away. If the rain would stop, you'd see it."

***

I was in the office that day when they brought the five children in, spanning age two to age fifteen. Even the administrative staff were vibrating with empathy and sorrow, while the three social workers called on all their training to help pacify the kids, whose shrieks and wails once they'd gleaned how fractured their family now was echoed like waves of cetacean grief.

But who was I?

*** 

Have you ever risked anything? 

No. Never.

Why the fuck not?

***

"The appaloosa is sometimes called the damnation horse. Beware, cowgirl." 

"Sir? I think you got your words mixed up."

"Yeah. Probably. But truthfully, death ain't so bad. Although dying sure is."

***

First day of school, I made a puzzle. Black-and-white cows and a barnyard. Summer blue sky and verdant grass. I sat beside a boy, John Simpson, as anodyne a name as possible in central England in the nineteen sixties. And his dad was a fireman, and I wide-eyed believed him—because why wouldn't I? In that classroom I was completely happy. The middle of England in the middle of a decade. I have no memory of the teacher. Or the other kids. Just a puzzle and a boy, and both were good. I didn't miss anyone. 

***

Her fingers were spatulate;

I asked, "You gonna capture that?"

My heart went all Montague and Capulet.

***

He was one of those sports bros, those hockey dudes, who only articulate the last syllable of a name, as if begrudging full agency: the 'Nucks, the 'Lanche, the 'Gers. We got in a bar fight once when I called him a 'licker. He had no sense of humour. Not much of a fighter either. Shame. I liked that bar.

***

Neon is the shout in the throat of the street. It hollers "Vogue!" and coughs "Orpheum!" into the smeared wet night, and our quailing hearts respond by shrinking. We are impostors, thirsty for sound. This is a broken boulevard jerry-rigged from busted dreams and only for monarchs, and we are pretenders, inadequates, vulgarians, slipping away in the sudden carpal reach of fog from the inlet. This is an ending we'll never get back, grey and mute and dead of eye. You blink, you fucking miss it all. 

***

Are you holy? For now I am winter. So lonely. Such fury. Would I sacrifice twenty more solitary years for a single year's touch of a woman's silk, of the tips of her spiderleg fingers? Yes. Probably yes.

Roll down your windows and crank up the songs. 

You ask why I never ran. It's complicated. How about this? Watch the lynx stalk a snowshoe hare and maybe you'll have an inkling, and then maybe we can talk. 

Or answer this: Chandler or Bergman? The Big Sleep or Winter Light? Do you actually think we are the good guys?

I bring comfort, a soft accommodating blanket drenched in smallpox. Nighttime, driving down to Memphis with you, all foolish pride and futile trepidation. Let the morning break like a bloody egg, the best girl I ever had lying by the quiet roadside, waiting in the muffled grey silence for the sirens and the ghouls in their important livery. And I still can't remember anything at all. Not one single thing. 

Goddammit, yeah. You can look. 

Just don't touch me.

I said don't.