The Carving Circle

by Gretchen Heffernan

  “There are no seagulls in Illinois.”

  “Trapped seagulls then.”

  “I have something for you,” she said. She got up, went to her satchel hanging on the bedroom door handle, and pulled out a small cigar box. “It’s not for you exactly. Inside are my most precious possessions. I would like you to keep a hold of it for me, you know, in case Arlo does find out. In case something happens.”

  42.

  Elora has pictured the evening of the fire a thousand times. It was the first real day of spring. A dry winter had waned and left the fields a brown, dehydrated flat, but the air was warm enough for birds. The whippoorwill’s song had already begun.

  The seagulls were circling. All night they had called her, roused her from her bed, and she watched them from the window. They dipped and skimmed the river and perched on Jacques’s eaves. The spread of their wings, bright white against the off-white sky, like sheaves of paper with written messages she could not decipher.

  They were from him. She dressed, stuffed her camera, Callisto, a candle and matches into a satchel and walked out the door. Birdie kept a gallon of gasoline in the garage. Elora picked it up and entered Jacques’s house.

  The piano stood in the corner like a living beast. The rustle of a hundred seagull wings and feet meant the roof felt alive. She moved the piano into the center of the room where the lit rectangles from the windows joined. She placed Callisto on top of the piano’s lid and set up the photograph. She sat on the windowsill. The shadow of her body fell across the dusty lid. In the center of her outline stood Callisto. She sat still, photographing the light as it moved through the morning and afternoon like a sundial, circling Callisto, reshaping shapes, reshaping her.

  Birdie came and stood at the door, nodded, then walked away.

  When the photo was finished, Elora went upstairs to Jacques’s bedroom and retrieved her cigar box from underneath the bed. She put the box and a towel from the bathroom in her satchel, and then soaked the bed with gas. Then she poured gas all the way down the stairs, circled the piano, splattered the drapes, emptied the rest on Jacques’s chair and lit the candle. Dusk was hours away and the sun was behind the house. The living room was cold and the candle splayed a golden circle on the piano’s lid. Callisto stood behind it and she took the final photograph of the house’s interior and placed Callisto inside her satchel.

  She stood with the candle at the window and placed her palm on its glass, then dropped the candle in the seat of his chair and left the room. Behind her she heard the fire crack, like an old door opening, she walked down the porch steps. She needed air, distance, and scope.

  Across the yard, a low beam of sun caught the tin watering can and filled her eye. She turned away, the air was cool on her cheek, and then it was gone.

  The air was still, so still it polished trees, the dark shed.

  Dry grass broke underfoot, crunched like a shelled bug, she walked. She could feel the hard knots of earth underneath her feet, like jutting bones poking the undersides of her boots. Her feet slid inside her sweat. Her whole body had begun to sweat. She wanted to be clean, baptized. Behind her she could hear the house burning.

  She ran until she hit the road and the sharp grind of gravel, then she stopped, dust whirled around her, collected on her swelling tongue, soaked the wet from her eyes, pores. She turned off the road and entered the prairie’s hiss where the grasses rubbed against one another like a crowd of hands planning something sinister. A cloud of gnats rose from its soggy bottom and with them the smell of decay, she heard small animals dart out of her way.

  She moved through the prairie until she reached the creek. Roots from a few pine trees bent towards the shallow water as it twisted along its pebble and mud bank. Their shadows encased the pungency of pine and turned earth. The pines broke up an otherwise overcast blue sky, they needled the blue, needles spiked the blue, and she was thankful, for the sky was too big to look at, an echoing, sorrowful melancholy that fell too low and reached too far in every direction. So she followed the creek, carefully stepping over anthills and hedge balls, sticks dipped and raced on the shallow water’s spine, minnows and frantic water beetles nipped from tiny inlets where the water pooled a murky brown. She walked slowly, she cultivated solitude and after a while the birds resumed their singing.

  She followed the creek all the way to the pond and stopped on a flat dried patch of mud around which tufts of sickly grass were trying to grow. She undressed and walked towards the pond. The mud cracked all the way to the water’s edge, where she stood, as if she had reached the end of a map and had to step off into murky oblivion. She entered the water up to her neck. It was as brown as dark chocolate, though not at all silky, as there was a cool fine grit to its ripples. Pebbles lodged and dislodged between her toes, then she lifted her feet and did the breast stroke. Water bugs skipped out of her way, her head was constantly parting a cloud of hoverflies, her foot scraped against something hard, possibly the shell of a snapping turtle. She turned to look back at a row of snapping turtles sunning themselves on a nearby log.

  You can scare yourself silly swimming in a pond, a reed gently brushing against your leg can easily be exaggerated into a snake, a leaf clinging to your stomach becomes a leech. She had come here before, always when she on the edge teetering; the dark water challenged her body to reconnect with her mind. The dark water forced reason to emerge. She was not a strong swimmer, so it was necessary that she eased into herself and relaxed in order to remain afloat and usually this trick worked. In the early days of her father’s illness, miscarriage and Arlo, she’d come here when she didn’t have wounds the water could infect.

  Her heart had refused to slow despite her rhythmic and steady breathing. She swam until she was too exhausted to continue, then wrapped herself in her towel and sat on the bank. She could feel a thin residue of mud drying on her skin, later it would brush from her arms like salt. She sat on the cracked ground and pulled her dress over her head, the dress clung to her damp patches of skin. She untangled her hair with her fingers, lay on her back and fanned her hair across the ground to dry. Her hair soon felt and crunched like black straw, her heart beat quickly. In her mind played a succession of small bells, she thought of nothing, but could not sit still, so continued walking along the creek.

  She saw the chimneystack first, an unsupportable presence hovering in the air. She stepped away from the creek and out into the prairie to have a better look. A large oak hid the shape of the house, but the chimneystack was unmistakable, a brick finger pointing up.

  The house had silvered from the wind’s touch, a smooth bone. It’s back half had collapsed so that when you looked through the front door you saw the sky, splintered gray bones and rusty nails laying weed-gripped and scattered across the ground. There was no sign of glass as sparrows flew in and out of windows and eaves were stuffed with nests. Weeds sprung up through cracks and holes in the porch. As she approached, she heard a steady drone and saw, in the corner, an enormous hornets’ nest, like a clay tornado plastered to the wall.

  She stepped back and turned towards the tree. A barely visible fence had long ago broken under the weight of brambles, red stalks and green leafy heads of rhubarb were scattered across the yard like giant spiders, and patches of green onions sprouted over mounds. She sat down facing the house. The sun was beginning to set, its golden head was framed by the door and the house beamed with a rich internal light. Everything blackened against its gleam. Shadowed birds dipped in and out of golden pools and a breeze blew shadowed grasses and shadowed branches, hornets like black dots pinged inside the gold. Even Elora became a black mound that sharpened against the gold until the gold began to burn out, handing the world’s details back to her softened by twilight. With full eyes she watched the sun melt through a magenta sky, thick as a garment from which clouds, like plums, hung.

  Overhead a flock of seagulls flew north. She knew the house had burnt to the ground.

  43.

  Imagining herself start
ing the fire is now like reassembling a dream, blindness then fuzzy images, a glimpse caught in a mirror or a shop window, how you can look vaguely familiar to yourself, a nose, cheekbones, parts you recognize as your own, but then a certain slope of the neck, the way the eye is caught, something new, alien, what you do not know but adorn. His face, a reflection in the water, the form of a child, waiting. Jump, he says, jump. She remembers that there was an emotion that she waded through, as if hanging from a shaft of atmosphere.

  The fuming heat. The blinding sunset. A resigned evening. As if whatever change had occurred had been completely accepted by the twilight, almost casual, yes, the world seemed casual, suspiciously casual. She noticed no strain, but for a few tense stars dimly shining through the heat like small hearts trying to beat on the outside. It made them seem violent. Violent because of their delicacy. Brooches of light pinned to a pink neck strung with crimson, violent. Doves locked in a hot cave. No not that, rather the eyes of trapped doves glaring through a hot cave and out into a blackening night.

  You see, even though she had yet to understand how the world hints, she remembers taking notice of those stars, which is why she must recall them exactly. Even though she did not heed their warning, instead left them, barely flickering, too pale to shine and penetrate her thick chest of understanding, even so, they caught her attention. Then nothing seemed as important as living membrane thin against the earth and open. How else? How else to receive clues? Look. The clues are everywhere.

  *

  She followed the creek back to the house, the roots were more twisted than she had remembered, so she had to plan where she placed each foot. The trees shadows were thicker, the mud thicker, mosquitoes whizzed small jet songs past her ears, the sound of crickets turned the darkness into a single animal. She could hear the earth opening its pores to the night’s cool touch, she loved the solitude, she accepted the night, welcomed the night. She ate the night. She ate and ate until she was only night covered with a transparent skin; to look inside of her one would see stars. She was nobody. Not even rabbits seemed shocked to see her.

  She couldn’t take in exactly what she’d done. Alteration is as simple as a flick. The mind allows only what it believes the body is capable of managing, it is a censor with the ability to disconnect, to foresee, predict, conclude, long before the body realizes how it has changed, why it has changed. Then it filters out our lives and gives it to us in chunks small enough to swallow.

  She saw the hill glowing, then the fire whipping out and up through his house with orange arms, red arms and black bursts of kicking. It was kicking. It was pounding.

  Birdie came running across the field, shouting indecipherable words. Birdie grabbed her and held her close, sobbing.

  “It’s over now,” she told Birdie. “It’s all over.”

  Something died and this was just the finale, the sacrificial burning of a body, hollowed and done.

  *

  A heart does not admit, cannot dismiss what is seen, could never say that stars do not exist, that what is seen is a remainder, a bright remnant of light, left, left burning a dark sky, left to prove a body of fire that once existed, that had died, too soon, perhaps, so that it decided to leave a bit of its presence behind: a flicker, a lantern, the lighted window of a distant house, as if to say, I was here, I was here. What we wish upon is only a memory, what we wish upon is gone.

  *

  Without speaking they watched. The smoke burned the back of their throats, they were too close, yet could not move. Their eyelashes, their cheeks seared, yet they did not blink, could not blink, could only stare and stare at the flames arching uniformly towards the sky. A raging tulip, beating, eating, disintegrating the house back to nothing.

  When the fire brigade arrived, the house was mere embers. Birdie saw them charging through the field.

  “Get in the house and hide!” she pushed Elora through the door and shouted to the fire brigade. “Leave me! I wasn’t inside, I’m not hurt, go away!”

  They put out the fire, Elora watched from the window, but she does not remember seeing any water. Only the smoke, billowing, billowing smoke, clouds of smoke, mountains. The moon was high in the sky. Seen through the smoke the moon grew small, so small it became a pupil and the sky was an eye that glared at her.

  A weak star, that’s what her child was like, she was like, no, not stars, but constellations. Untouchable because they had been punished, burnt out.

  She had found a way to own her body, celestial or not, she took up her camera and photographed the burning house. With the camera in her hands, she had found a way to feel.

  44.

  What happened inside Elora when she started the fire:

  Listen. I asked myself a couple of questions. What is death? The sacrifice of a body. What is life? The sacrifice of a body. And love? The sacrifice of a body. The answers are all the same. Then there was a battle. How could I fear what had always been present? Loss has been present, has constantly grown inside of me, silently as hair, as fingernails. It has grown so long that I can feel it snarl, scratch and cut.

  I can hear it. The seagulls. Were his. How do I make this skin mine?

  I sound very similar to coyotes. Every evening I wait for them to come close. They use the field the child lives in to scope for prey. They paw, back and forth, the night. Out of the window the sun is low and I hear them coming.

  The ground beating underfoot.

  My heart. It is true, true –

  My heart has not allowed his words.

  His yes or no.

  My heart has not allowed false words.

  They took him, her, they took them away, beating underfoot, beating.

  And he made me again. I drip them into my black dollop, fill it like an empty sack. They drip into my black. Pit. Fall. Hit and fall through my black, black. Where song once hid.

  They took the song, all of it. Now.

  This tongue is a dead snail. A locked flower. A fist that cannot open.

  But it is not silent. What I mean my body infers:

  Look at me, moving from ice to fire. It is the moving that matters.

  The photographs like an ice covering.

  Beneath my ice, a river of shiver, I shiver and bones. As if they were full of cracks. Underneath my surface I see his face. My face. Frozen. Icy eyebrows like white splinters. Her small human shape. His mouth echoes my name. Erodes the blue flesh preserving me. Thaw, he says, thaw, she says.

  And then. A flame. A way to extinguish.

  The enchantment before the burn. Fire melt me.

  The burning escape. To drip until I run, my wax dreams run. We run. It is what humans do. They ran him and he keeps running.

  There are places where he feels alive, brings life, can bring her back

  and in them, in me, an army gathers drive.

  I point my finger towards the disease. Prepare to attack this disease, I say. Here. It flicks in the eye’s corner.

  Red. Red. Watch him go.

  I run with my body as a shield. Towards victory.

  There are horse clouds alongside me,

  alongside the blue,

  bugs fly out of the grass like rockets

  and the coyote in my chest howls as though it’s cheering.

  Everything is red rimmed, meat around an eye and him running.

  Underfoot, they beat.

  Pound through the timber. Snap twigs, stamp mud.

  Pound through the prairie. Break stalk, bend grass.

  They howl. They howl like someone wanting out.

  In need of a place to enter. In need of a place to exit. The answers are the same, remember?

  I light a candle. I wait by the window. Come here. This way.

  I speak to who I am now. This is the way. In the window my golden face quivers just beneath a black pool. It does not look like me at all. But another woman, a watery glow, a light behind muslin. She reaches her hand towards mine. Our fingertips touch cool glass. Why have I not seen her before? Beautifu
l, muted, a bubble rises from her lips. A reflection. A photograph.

  The candle on the curtains, the candle’s in his chair.

  And the fire crawling like red spiders crawling across the wall,

  like blood spilling,

  soaking up through the curtains,

  like an idea –

  the idea that it could die,

  all of it, could die and live again.

  I let the fire burn.

  Without the fire she would have vanished. Our fingers were touching. The glass was so cool between our fingers. Together we slowly placed our palms against the window.

  I set the house on fire.

  so that the part of me hanging,

  the only part of my life,

  of my person that the world could see,

  the disgusting bit that hung,

  limp and oily like fatty gristle from the meat of my soul,

  could sizzle, writhe, wilt and die. I want to be. Again.

  Quiet. Quiet. So quiet that birds land on me.

  45.

  The morning sun rose as the bust of a dead fish floats to the surface of a still pond. Ash, ash, ash like silver fish scales coated everything, her face, leaves, grass, bushes, the river’s edge. Ash collected in droplets of dew before running in clear lines down the shed. Pale bronze in the morning sun, it was early, the moon still bold in the sky, the clouds thin in the brown sky like white plastic bags floating beneath a watery surface. Elora walked to the pile of smoking wood, wind blew the ash in visible currents down the hill and above the prairie, they were being scattered, thrown, given back. Using a stick she searched through scarce remains. Like an insect on bone, looking for things to keep, a way to digest what had happened, meat, anything, anything to sustain her.

  She grabbed a gardening spade and walked to the grave of their child.

  She dug a small hole, placed a blue cornflower inside it and filled the rest with ash taken from where Jacques’s house once stood. Fire, they say, replenishes the earth for re-growth, yet there was nothing left, save a suffocating flower.