The Lanyard

by Carter-Thomas, Jake

  The sky began to take on the colour of those dark trees with the branches that seemed to reach across to the middle, becoming tinged with the same green, as if spreading with veins that pumped chilled blood, offering the prospect of blankness, of no thought, the kind of space that the soul inhabits in sleep, at least until the dream comes, until the threats of the day find ways to prod back. He took a step towards his father's tent but then held his feet, toes angled to push, but not continuing, distracted by a crackle from the campfire, which didn't appear lit, just a pile of wood that had begun to collapse. He walked closer to it, until colours grew at the base, cycling from red to white, small flames lifting their heads and bowing as he approached, as if they sensed his presence. He crouched close to the edge and held out his hand, letting the flames try to lap his skin with their invisible tongues, enjoying the gentle warmth.

  To the side of the fire was what looked to be some thick vegetable soup in a brass coloured bowl and a spoon sticking out. The surface had congealed, and on bending down to sample it his foot slipped from under him and the spoon flipped and rattled onto a rock. He froze. Nothing changed about his father's tent, the glow continued unaltered, become some sort of baby refusing to leave the womb, with its own mind and it's own purpose. That noise had probably not carried anyway, although he knew sounds like that, unnatural sounds, soft metal on rock, often did.

  He picked up one of the skewers that had been left on a stone by side of the fire, the sort they used to roast meat, still clean, unused. He dropped it on the rock after the spoon so that it too clattered and fell onto the ground. He left it where it landed. He kicked a pebble after it and it trundled along slowly and then skipped up and died.

  His father must have known he was back. He must have heard the footsteps, the movement, the sounds. Thus the only conclusion could be that he was angry, pissed off; perhaps rightly, using his patented silent treatment. It happened sometimes. It happened a lot. And normally it would take time to solve. That wasn't a big ask, but not so comfortable when they were separated out from the rest here and sealed off, when he had done something stupid like this, like rushing off into the forest with a girl he didn't know, holding hands, kissing, finding things out.

  Why hadn't either of his parents ever spoken of disease and giant pyres? Or if they had, why not to him. Maybe they thought it was better not to say. Maybe they fought. How his father had hinted about letting him find his own way, not telling him what to do, how to be. So should he ask? Could he ask? Perhaps as a way to break through, to talk. The fire seemed not to know, the warm glow only suggesting that there were indeed some things, some thoughts, best never to tell a loved one, a child. Things that were too hard to bare, too hard to stomach, too bright to observe on their own, set apart, like a star seen up close, like the sun, that needed to die down some.

  Could he imagine himself in that position instead? Were there things he wouldn't have told the girl he just met, even if pressed, like how he couldn't look her in the eye real good, but had forced himself? That he sometimes imagined there were others watching him too when he was outside, and was scared had come to life and embraced him?

  He sat by the charred logs and tried to compare the construction of the fire to the majesty of that stack of bodies he had seen, unsure as to why he kept thinking on it, reflecting on it, as if it was some pre-burned memory that would flash whenever he tried to forget, like the afterglow of the sun when he stared too hard, when she did, through the shadow shapes of the leaves, seeing in that stack a whole pile of desire to touch, to grab, to hold, to take it and set light, to let it set him.

  He held his hand to the flame at the camp and imagined it leaping onto his skin with its claws, disappearing as he closed his fist, crushing it into his skin, an orange fin swimming on his palm when he opened his hand, willing him to close his fingers again, to absorb it like a droplet of snow, take it with him, take it with her, always, together, in his heart, in his head now, running all the way back to the heap of bodies he had fallen for, that she had, to set them away, to see them burn, to burn him, to burn her.

  He wiped his hand across his shirt. It clung for a moment near his chest, as if sticky with sweat. Could the pyre light if he merely touched it? He shook his head. What if he used the lighter he had found not far from here instead? It had seemed a chance thing back then, but not now. Suddenly there could be a purpose to it, wondering how hard would it be to ignite if he tried -- a simple thing surely, what with all of those bodies full of fat like downed birds, which would smoulder at a push, would spit and crack with globs of white fire, in his head, in theirs, a storm of ball lightning rather than the yellow ribbons, dazzling like fireflies, like the sparks from hot metal crashing to the ground, like small bolts of lightning creating their own clap of thunder a million times per second.

  He tried to pull away from the image, found himself on his knees, head rocking close to the ground, staring at the shapes of spirits twisting and dancing like the head of a drill turning into the earth.

  Soon came the sound of scattered rain falling across leaves, the sound of the zip to the tent sliding open, tumbling down the line of teeth, the sound of someone struggling out of a superhero costume to prove they're a man, all sticky and pink with the sweat caused by pretending to be something else, hiding behind fabric, behind canvas, behind masks. That's what people would have said in the before, wasn't it? He had seen pictures, he had watched his parents behave the same way, stuck not with masks, not with costumes, not all the way, but half hats, half shirts, all of which mimic some long forgotten past, yet do not fully embrace it either, same way as hunters wear the skin of whatever they slay, while animals just eat.

  The boy didn't turn around. He continued to gaze into the fire as if he was trapped in it, in an orange jail that surrounded him on all sides, columns of white, pillars of salt, climbing up into the night.

  "Where the hell have you been?" his father said.

  The boy did not respond. A moment later there was a hard knock on the shoulder.

  "Hey, did you eat?"

  The boy shook his head.

  "Aren't you half starved?"

  "No."

  "I thought you weren't coming back. That something had happened...Where were you? I looked for you."

  "I followed the cairns..."

  "You got lost?"

  "Yeah," the boy said staring at the ground. He was glad of the escape offered by this route. He thought about how much he should say, how much he should know, or if he could forget, if he should forget all of the bits in between that tugged at the skin between his eyes, rattled around his head, busting to get out of him like a ghost trapped in a loft. He stared at the charred edges of sticks coming out of the fire, imagining a small version of him and her popping out of a tuft of grass nearby and standing looking up at this thing in awe.

  His father turned the boy around and narrowed his gaze as if half-thinking, half-worrying, trying to work something out of his head.

  "You shouldn't go off alone like that," he said.

  "I know."

  "You're just a child."

  "But..."

  "I know, all that stuff I said... but suddenly growing up overnight is not the best solution to being a child." He pushed his hands hard into his pockets as if to stop them from pulling at his hair. He turned away and took a step towards the dark trees at the edge of the clearing.

  "What's that supposed to mean?" the boy said after him.

  "That you maybe think we talk about things one time, and now you are on your own and that's that. Ready to take on the world."

  "I don't think that."

  "There's no rush."

  "But I don't think that."

  "I can tell you do."

  "Do not."

  "All that talk about never having the chance to do anything else. I get it, like I said. You should have checked with me first. You will."

  The boy shrugged.

  "Maybe your mother was right... What were you think
ing? Huh?"

  "I don't know... Maybe I just want to grow up so I don't have to keep wanting to grow up?" the boy said. He wasn't sure really what that meant. It was a thought that he began to release before it was finished, before it was ready, a thought that ran away from his head and found it had no way to go back.

  "You want independence?"

  "I don't know."

  "You just need to be slightly more careful."

  "I will. I was. Sorry."

  "I guess the best advice I can give is that you shouldn't exactly rebel against the world. Your mother said that to me, once. And maybe she's right. Rebellion implies you are trying to change things, but it's better to find a way to... well, cheat."

  "Cheat?"

  "Yeah. Because the best way is to live with things the way they are, but to do what you want without others finding out. I mean, I guess that's kind of what you pulled today. Difference was, I found out. And now there has to be consequences to that..."

  "Oh."

  "Or should be."

  The boy adjusted his position, uncrossing his legs and pushing them out behind him in a crooked shape. "But you said cheating was bad."

  "I know, I know. But this is slightly different from a board game or something, and it's different when you are playing against me, because then I am the authority and I don't want you to cheat, obviously."

  "So cheating is ok, from some points of view."

  "Yeah. It's something that everybody tries when they're young, without even realising it. I know I did. You try it to test whether it works. I don't even think it's a conscious choice, I mean, I don't remember it being. But I am sure that in some ways it's a natural response, and I know parents will say don't do it, don't cheat, but what they mean is don't cheat me, you know, that's what I am saying now. Maybe good parents should tell you to cheat. Absolutely. They should explain why you have to cheat, because if they are good parents they can probably have only got there by cheating themselves, not cheating you but cheating the system, giving you the chance to have the life you want. Because if you just submit to everything, you know, if you just follow the rules then nothing changes. And if you rebel you will be destroyed. So you evade authority. You submit to authority, but you try to subvert it. Does any of that make sense?"

  "Yeah... So how did you cheat?"

  He stopped and stared out again, at the barrier at the edge of the plateau where the trees became black and the black became trees, and the edges of needles seemed to push together and knit and weave a fabric that was no more real than space. He stared at it long and hard, until he stick he had pushed into the fire slipped and tumbled, glowed red and were consumed, turned into tubes of ash.

  "I'll tell you one day," he said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  To really learn to cheat he thrust his bag ahead of him into the young dawn then crawled out of his tent without pushing the zipper any further up than he needed to wriggle free on his back, facing the sugared black canvas of the sky, which had become clotted with light in places, with long swirls of white silk running through it, made from the disintegrated tails of comets that crossed the horizon and lay one on top of the other like branches in a fire, that pulled together and somehow diluted the sky down to blue, as if that colour had been present all along, highlighting the tops of the trees, like swatches across his eyes, as he twisted his hips out of the gap, sat forward to pull his legs through the hole and then fell back, letting the cold in the soil stick him in place, watching as the sky became sapphire cut.

  Yet the stars did not give way as the blue tide came over them. Instead, the little dots of light became the twinkles of a flawless gem flipped onto a mahogany table in a bar, diminished in the face of all the clenching teeth and crystal glass, part of a ring discarded from the finger of an old dame, who counted out the time she had left like devalued coins piled to buy a drink, like another scene in the hardboiled fiction he once read with his father. Once, before they slid apart the way the cold crossed his body, making the stars shimmer, as if casting their light through a haze that twitched, that awoke slowly from slumber, as he did, like the pain within his joints from the run back to the camp that he felt deep within him, and that called to him back, as if, once again, he had discovered the pains of growing up, as an old man discovers the bottle once more, one sip, one slip at a time.

  He had even asked the girl after she'd shown him the pyre why some people liked to start fires, as a proxy for admitting that he had the urge. And she had shrugged her shoulders so that her hair rippled as if it was made of metallic sand. "I don't know," she said.

  "But you do know what I'm talking about?"

  "Maybe they are just bored?" she suggested.

  He rubbed his eyes as if there was already smoke in them, bits of soot attracted to his pupil, black sucking onto black. What was making him think this way? Something about that heap of bones was getting to him, digging inside him, reminding him of all of the flames that were contained within. Did this mean he was in the grasp of some sort of pyromania? Was starting fire all about the smell, the taste, or just the bright lamp it created? Did those same people who longed for flame go around staring at the sun all day until they went blind? Did they stare at the blue light, had they then to recreate it whenever the horizon blackened, dancing and romancing with the heat, letting it overtake their lives? But the light from inside a fires wasn't blue, it was red.

  "Maybe people who once did something they want to cover up?" she said. "You know, then the fire symbolises them burning guilt?"

  "I guess."

  "Well, it's the best I can do."

  "But why would someone build a fire if they didn't want it to burn?"

  "I don't know..."

  "Maybe we could..."

  "But it's not just bones in there."

  "Huh?"

  "What about all of the little insects that are living in there? Look at the size of it... I'd be surprised if there weren't mice and frogs and snakes. Remember the planks we found?"

  "Yeah, but..."

  "But what?"

  "".

  "Imagine you are Mr. Bug going to work in the morning, kissing goodbye to your wife and then heading up, the long commute, up and up, maybe right out of the top to come down and find food to take home, to earn your way."

  "Don't try and make them seem like people. They are not like people," he said.

  "...So Mr. Bug he goes off and maybe his wife is home tending to the little bugs when -- wait -- what's that? What's that smell? The heat? Seems to be coming from down below. Wasn't that where that nice mouse family lived?"

  He turned away from her.

  "See what I am getting at?"

  "I guess."

  "If you agree with me about hunting..."

  He'd dropped it then, and yet now somehow he found himself back there, unable to remember the journey, as if walking in a trance, lost within the fog of his thoughts, as if the route was seared in his soul and he didn't need to think to follow it, immune to the scratches of the branches, the sudden drops, the sinking clay, and mud swamps. He could almost smell it burning within him, he could almost hear the crackle and spits that would come, and feel the warmth. He would not look for life. Through the gaps between the bodies there was nothing but darkness.

  He imagined he had reached some sort of church in the woods, come to pray. He had reached a funeral pyre for the slaughtered. He had reached a library for the souls who could mix into the branches and soak up the world, the words. He had found a forgotten land, an ignored plain, built by hand uniquely, that would never be built again, angled limb by angled limb, impossible to plan that way, impossible to make quick. A maze for memories. A trap. Not a place of knowledge but a reliquary to be mined, or a tomb, stacked like a pyramid by a tribe who had no access to stone, just slaves.

  He walked up to the edge with the lighter. He put his thumb on top of the wheel of flint and ran it back to the button. Nothing happened. He tried to hold the lighter up to where the sun was
coming, where the sky hinted a blue-pink. He shook it to encourage the fluid to coat the insides, the top.

  What price for him now a book of matches to read through, snapping them from the stem and pushing each across across the strip of brown stoker, sniffing for the smell when they struck, listening for the sound, the sound of a dragon disturbed from slumber, a hissing snake with fire in its nostrils and a lava tongue, the sound that brought the little world at the edge of the wooden stick some heat, a planet become a sun, burning bright, a rip across space. So that he could hold a flame, cradle his hands around it, make his fingers into a sail. He began to fear that this pyre burned not with heat but was rippled instead with invisible fumes of cold, like an old aerosol can expunged and pressed to his head. Was it not the same to burn or freeze, to stretch out a finger and touch hot or cold, to lose skin, to feel a part forever trapped in time, become dust?

  He refocused on the lighter and tried to get lower to the pyre, to somehow use the pile of bodies as a shield, though there was no breeze he could discern. He willed the mechanism to work. He thought hard, telling himself he could make that fire appear. He could bring it to life, this tangle of bodies interlocked like fork tines. They had good marrow. They could burn. They were meant to burn. He could turn all of them into elongated suns, spitting like old candles, talking again, like angels sweeping back into the sky and circling. Right here, right now. He could bring flame. He could capture it. He could embrace it. He had it within him. The universe may be mostly void, with small pockets that could mock it with warmth, but he had life here. And he had the lives lived, fattened up with hope, with defiance, and he could set them back.

  He blew into his hands, crushed them around the lighter, sucked on the plastic end of it to warm the fuel, whatever it took. He turned the flint more slowly, more assuredly, and then quick as he could to keep a grip on it, like his father starting the car. The wheel seemed stuck for a moment. He forced it in one more snap, and at last saw a spark the size of a tongue thrust out from him into the air before it dropped away and bounced against the nearest body and then died.