Furnace

by Livia Llewellyn

  —Yes. My grandfather rose from the table, and started to fold up the maps and diagrams before my mother came downstairs. He didn’t have to ask me how I knew.

  ***

  My grandfather abandoned his maps not long after that. It wasn’t that he lost interest. So many incidents occurred, it became useless to record them all. All put together, the entire town became an incident, and the map drowned beneath the network of inky words and roads, until all that remained of white paper was the tiny dot we called home. I don’t think either one of us could bear to fill in that small, lonely white circle. We knew it would happen. My grandfather placed everything in the trash can barrel at the side of the yard one day, and we watched it curl into grey ash and float away in the sweet hot air. And after a while, no one remembered what day it was, or what week, or whether the season was fall or winter or spring. It was all the same season, the same day. I woke up to the same ghostly, lifeless images on the television as the day before, dressed for a school day I wouldn’t recall going to by evening’s end, when I sat at my desk, looking through books and papers for homework I never found.

  And then one afternoon, although which afternoon of which month of what year it was, I would never know, my grandfather didn’t come home. He left early in the morning for his job at the electric and water company as he always had, his soft grey fedora over his white hair, a thermos of milky coffee tucked into his briefcase. He kissed me on the forehead and told me to be safe, then drove off in the large car he had bought years ago when he became supervisor. I got ready for school, but I can’t say if I went or not. The day passed, like all the days, in a soft haze of warmth and numbing sweetness that festered into early evening; and then the sun was pushing long bands of shadow and sun through the windows, over the dinner table. My grandfather would never abandon me. He wasn’t coming home, I realized, because he couldn’t; and the shock and sorrow of it sent something cold and hard trickling through my veins, and for the first time in what seemed like forever, I felt I was awakening from a terrible, suffocating dream.

  —Are we going to wait for Puda? I asked my mother.

  My mother set the casserole dish on the table, and stared at me. In her face, traces of what I might become, in another time, in another town. Her eyes, bright and furnace dark. Unbearable and all-consuming; and in her pupils I saw the small reflection of myself sink into the road a million times. I knew her answer then, before she said it.

  —No.

  She poured me a glass of lukewarm milk, and sat down. We ate in silence. The shadows lengthened until there was no more sun, and in my mind, I saw my gentle grandfather filling in that one remaining dot of white on his map with ink as blue as his eyes. And then he, too, was gone.

  The next morning was not the same as all the other mornings. In the sleepy-sweet air, I dressed for classes I knew I had never attended, and never would, for friends and teachers I had never met or seen. Silvery thin men and women danced and fought in the snow of a television set that had long ago lost its cord. Images that did not exist. Everything in the world around me, a perverted misremembering, a suffocating lie. I put my schoolbooks under my bed, then changed my mind and stuffed them into the backpack. I had wanted to go, I had wanted to learn. I wanted to grow up. I had wanted the pale young man with the red-rimmed, pool-black eyes.

  In the kitchen, my mother folded the top of my paper bag lunch as I drank my lukewarm milk. She licked the palm of her hand and ran it across my hair as I stared at the empty surface of the table, where my grandfather’s hands had drawn rivers of blue ink over the map of my life. Her breath was whisper-cloying, as though I had walked into a web. In the distance, a train sounded out, mournful and low and long. I stared up at the ceiling, watching small spores detach like faint candle sparks and float down through the thick amber air, wink out as they hit my face, my skin, the ground. Everyone had known that the town had been dying, long before I truly saw it. The ground trembled and buzzed beneath my feet. I thought of my grandfather and the pale young man, and my face grew porcelain-tight.

  —I have to go to school, I whispered. Each word took a century to slip from my mouth, as slow as the dying spores.

  —No, you don’t. My mother clasped my hand in hers, hard, and I felt our bones shift and crackle, our skin cake and fuse together like velvet and mold.

  —Let me go, I said.

  —No, she said. —I don’t have to.

  —Yes, I said. —You do.

  A century later or more, I pulled my hand from hers. Her fingers stretched like taffy, wriggled and dropped away. Centuries later, my other hand thrust my grandfather’s pen at the pulsing hollow of her throat. Droplets hung in the air, ruby and indigo comets catching the light as they orbited our wounds. Outside, the sun fell and rose as many times as the stars in the sky, and in that epoch my mother curled back her cracking lips wider, wider until there was only teeth and the volcanic black of her open mouth. With each step back from her and away, she bloated and burst, exponential in rot, pushing away the flimsy walls of our home, her veined translucent flesh pulsing with all the unborn variants of my life pushing outward to be free. In the molasses air, I turned, a millennium spent directing my terror and trembling legs away and up to the end of our street. If I cried, time looped back and ate the tears before they fell from my eyes. Only the pounding of my heart, a beat for every revolution of the galaxy, only the echo of a footfall with every dying star, only my mother always behind me, exploding, grasping, expanding, only everywhere the low dark roar of thunder and never rain.

  —They found a girl in the road, my grandfather had begun, in another universe. —Bones like deformed corkscrews, each bone fused from the skeletons of many smaller girls.

  Down the street, past the crosswalk and the thick white lines, and after that each step was quicker, and the centuries burned away. I never looked back. I passed myself, stuck in the blacktop a hundred thousand times, the giantess made of a hundred thousand girls, each one falling apart and clattering to the ground. And I ran to the edges of my northern town and past it and slipped beyond into the world, as all the cold bright skeletons of who I could have been swarmed behind me, plunging into the quivering moist mountains of putrescent flesh that had birthed us all, sinking her into the road where she lost me, all of them dying within her desire like little miscarried dreams.

  I never stopped running.

  Neither did she.

  ***

  I’ve lived in this southernmost town for many lifetimes now, having lived in many other towns, each further south than the last. But all of the towns of this world have succumbed, as I knew they would, and there are no more towns beyond this one. There is nothing beyond this one, except the vast southern ocean, fields of ice, cold skies, colder stars. Here, winter is a diamond-hard fist, and summer an impossible dream. Or so it used to be, when I first made my way here, centuries or eons ago. I feel her now, again, in the air, in my bones. The days have begun to blend into each other as they did in all the other towns, the minutes and months and years, and a numbing sweet languor warms and slows us down until we no longer know or care. Everyone has known that the town is dying, long before we could see it. But only I know the reason why. My mother is coming for her little girl, once again burning the world away until there is only us and the memories of us together, until there is only her memories of how it used to be, how it should have been. And there are no more towns left to hide in, no more versions or dreams of me left to fight.

  So I sit at the window of my apartment in that southernmost town, watching leaves turn red and gold that had only for the first time yesterday been green, watching the sun wax fat and throw off the late summer sparks I knew so well when I lived in the northern town, feeling the air grow camphor-bloated warm and sickly sweet. I sit at my window, turning the pages of schoolbooks I’ll never learn from, watching the buildings do what I have never done. They age, morph, change. They bloat, fuzz over, and release soft spores from fat cankers sagging off their rotti
ng faces, they malform and reform, they become more familiar with each calcifying day. The southernmost town is disappearing, and the northern town is rising, again. A steam engine howls in the distance as it gobbles up the miles, and so much more. The townspeople’s movements weaken, slow, stop. They fade and drift away like vapor. The face of the pale young man appears in the windows, sliding from the flickering edges of my sight into full view as the weeks pass: and then the day will come when he will stand in the street below, as he has stood in all the other dusty streets of all the other towns, his large black eyes fixed on me as the twin-beaked raven in his grasp grotesquely struggles to call out my name, all the names of the monsters of my mother’s memories. Behind and around him, behind and around me, the fully formed streets of my childhood soon will stand, birthed out of the ruins of the southernmost town like a still-born giantess, a puppet of calcified dreams and bone, pulled into unwanted existence by the strings of someone else’s desire. This, this is my mother’s endless suffocating desire, slowing time down around us, winding it back, back, until it becomes the amber-boned river in which I am always and only her little girl, eternal and alone.

  I place the blue pen at the small pale circle of my throat.

  I can stop time, too.

  The Mysteries

  1

  It is that unnameable time of a late December morning, that nighttime hour that bleeds into tired dawn. My great-great-great-great grandmother sits in the living room, in the dark. I hear the rustling of her ancient newspaper as she turns each delicate page. The furnace has shut down after its daily muted roar, and a distant tick sounds through the walls as the metal ducts contract and cool. Other than the paper’s whispers, it is the only sound in the house.

  In the same dark, around the corner, past the foyer, I stand in the middle of the hallway, in my stained nightgown and robe, the ones I left behind some fifteen years ago when I left this place, my childhood home. My mother’s house, so lovely and modern and clean—before The Grand moved in and took over, like she takes over everything. The outline of my overweight body hovers in the large black-stained mirror at the end of the hall, by the always-locked front door. A distorted Pierrette with a marshmallow body and mouthless face. I raise my hand. A second later, the creature in the mirror reluctantly moves. I can’t blame it, I know why. The Grand can’t see me, but she knows I’m there. She reads in the dark. She outlines her lips bright red in the pitch black of windowless closets. She embroiders tiny, perfect stitches in absolute gloom. Even during the day, the curtains in all the rooms are drawn, the lamps turned off. —This is how it used to be, she tells me over and over again. —When I was a child, we didn’t have electric lamps. We didn’t have radios. There were no televisions or computers; we weren’t compelled to entertain ourselves all day. We were self-contained. Everything we needed came out of ourselves, out of our own family. This is how it was in the world. This is how it will always be for me.

  I open my robe and pull the nightgown up. If there is a demarcation between fabric and flesh, mercury and air, the creature and me, I cannot see it. I search for the familiar black triangle between my legs. Even that has vanished. I am no different than the bare, cream walls around me. Outside of us, nothing can be seen. Yet within—a carnelevare of the numinous, waiting for release. Everything I need will come out of me.

  —What are you doing? The Grand calls out from the living room. —Are you up? As she speaks, I hear her sniffing me out, and my blood runs peppermint hot and cold. She likes it like that.

  I let my nightgown drop, and shuffle and squint my way around the corner. Morning presses against the thick curtains, to no avail. Everything glows, but dimly so. Against the far corner of the couch she curls, a fragile mound of bones and skin dressed in soft, flowery clothes. The open newspaper obscures the upper half of her body. I see only legs and knife-sharp fingers, the leaves of dark print flapping back in between. Her feet are small and perfectly formed, with nails like mother-of-pearl. She hasn’t walked in a hundred and fifty years. She hasn’t needed to.

  —Give your great grand a sweet breakfast kiss, she says, floating up from the cushions. The newspaper flutters to the floor.

  2

  —It’s time, my sister said. Her voice poured out of the phone like poison.

  —No. Not yet. No.

  —The Grand is sending for you, she continued over me, as if she couldn’t hear my voice.

  —I don’t want to go.

  —You don’t have a choice. Check your email—I sent the plane ticket to you already. You have a month to pack up and say goodbye.

  —I have a life here.

  —I had a life, too. And now I get it back. But only if you come. You know what happens to me if you don’t. She’ll use me up until there’s nothing left.

  —You know I’d never let that happen. But why so soon?

  —She’s tired of me. I don’t please her anymore, or so she says. At any rate, I’ve done my time. It’s your turn now.

  —This is wrong. You know that.

  —It doesn’t matter. We can’t change it. This is why we were born.

  It was late summer, back then, and my city was a volcano of bright life. I took her call at work, in an empty corner office. I gave an obfuscated answer that pleased us both and hung up. Outside, day was racing down into the shimmery fires of night. Twenty floors down, clogged streets were transforming into long-running strands of rubies and diamonds, winding around buildings slick with coruscated light. I pressed my hand against the glass. Hard and hot. When I took my hand away, a thin film of perspiration remained, outstretched against the avenue as though trying to grasp it. The ghost hand of a ghost girl. Within seconds, it disappeared.

  I said my goodbyes at work without telling them I’d never return, and bought boxes on the way home, just enough to ship a few piles of books and clothes. My small room in the SRO building didn’t hold that much, anyway. I’d always known this moment would come, and so my decisions had already been made, years ago, how I would live my life and how I would defend it. I was more prepared than my sister could imagine, and more ruthless than The Grand could ever be. Desperation made me so. In a way, I was no different than her.

  The next morning I settled my account at the SRO, made a stop at the post office, then walked twenty blocks south, down through my beautiful city. Past blight-tinged gentrification, past markets and parks and coffee shops and wide bustling avenues; and then west, over to the edge of the river, to block after block of monolithic warehouses and factories, moldering in shadowed silence and brick dust until their moment in history came again. It was like I’d walked this path just yesterday, even though a decade had passed. —When you’ve made your decision, be it tomorrow or a million tomorrows from now, you’ll find us, he had said with his yellow-teethed smile as I looked over his exhibits and wares. —You won’t ever need a map.

  3

  She leans into me in the queer morning light for her kiss, and my mouth slackens and my head lolls back. Every day is the same, and night no different than day. Darkness, rain needling against the rooftop and windows, wind thundering through distant trees. She never sleeps. Her need keeps her running hot and constant, a nuclear reactor of hunger that can never be shut down. —It’s not so bad, my sister said, the few times I spoke with her until she stopped taking my calls. —She takes from you, but she gives you something back, in a way. It’s almost an even exchange. —What does she do, what is she, how can she be? I asked over and over again. —Is she a vampire? A ghoul? An insect? Why do we submit?

  —I don’t know, my sister always replied. —Who can say?

  Sometimes, at night, I awake in the dark and feel her hovering over me, a weight and emotion I sense but never feel or see. Paralyzed, I breathe all my damp terror and fear into the emptiness of my childhood room. Above, mote by mote she sucks it in. Sleep itself is no refuge. In my dreams I rise to the ceiling, my skin brushing against the faded outlines of spiraling galaxies my mother painted for me
long ago. And then the ceiling, the stars, soften and yield—her arms are around me, mouth against mine, while in the waking world, my body moans and shivers, ten feet above my bed. The days are worse. I can’t hide in my room forever, and so I venture out into the house, wandering like a restless ghost of myself through the still rooms. Everywhere, vestiges of the life I had before, of my sister and me as children, of my mother and the father I too briefly knew. Cobwebbed tableaus of toys and dishes. Photos of distant summers, succumbing to speckled mold. A faint scent of my mother’s perfume rising like a tired ghost from a dresser of musty clothes. Old folders of school homework, boxes of books my aching eyes can no longer read in the ever-dim light. And I, always never knowing where she is, in what room, squeezed into what tight corner or closet or crack. Never knowing when she will ooze out and ignore me, or play with me, or pounce.

  —You’re different, she says this morning, her vulpine face hovering just above my head. —I don’t like it. I smell animals. I smell fire and sugar and rust. The words wash over my face like gasoline fumes, and tears dribble out of my eyes into my mouth. My flesh grows heavy and prickly-numb. Her face is an amorphous stain, a blur. I open my mouth to speak. All that comes forth is a burp, loud and wet. Bile dribbles down my lips and chin. It tastes like rotting grapes.

  The Grand recoils. —You’re sick, she hisses. She hates any hint of illness or disease.

  —No, I’m not, I garble. Thin pine needles slide out of my running nose and onto my tongue. —It’s the carnival.

  —You’re delirious.

  —It’s coming.

  —What are you talking about?

  A slow, long tremor erupts throughout my belly. My tearing eyes shut tight, and I smile. I am horrifying and new. She leans back into me, curious. Lips and breath against my cheek, mouth open, seeking, seeking. —Tell me everything, she whispers. —Fill me up with everything.