The Unfinished World

by Amber Sparks

  Cedric raises the flint knife. Set sees it coming, has always seen it coming, ever since the swimming pool he’s seen it, even when he tries not to. And now his brother stabs, rather theatrically, toward him. A gesture, perhaps, but still dangerous. Set twists away but not quite fast enough to avoid a slashed hand. There is a lot of blood, on the carpets, on the wallpaper, on his tan suit. There is blood on Inge’s pale cheek. No one speaks. Pru grabs for the knife, but Cedric drops it, already drained of whatever momentary frenzy has possessed him. Yes sir, that’s my baby, the radio warbles. No sir, I don’t mean maybe. The clock clicks loudly over the hearth. Even now, time refuses to stand still. Pru kneels next to Cedric, and Inge wonders what on earth Set ever thought she could do for him here. What this place could ever do besides draw life out of a person? This dark house, dead for years? It reminds her so much of her own childhood home, of memories and mourning and halls where the dead stalk the living. It, too, is full of rot.

  Set is crying, and she looks for something to bandage his hand. He shakes his head, and there is nothing ghostly about him now, a mess of earthly blood and tears.

  He tried before, he tells Inge. He doesn’t know quite what to say, really. What do you say about someone who’s saved and destroyed you, over and over again? How do you appease them? How do you live with yourself?

  Cedric is quite mad, says Inge. We need to go, Set. We need to leave this place.

  This place, says Set. It was Oliver’s, too. He stops then, just for a moment. Stops breathing, stops moving, stops his heart. Oliver’s. Still there is Oliver here, in the cabinets, the carpets, the stuffed owls and lyres and the lonely fireplace, unlit since he went down to Hades. Set’s eyes close. He can almost see it, Oliver’s shade in the darkness below, waiting for him. Waiting for his understanding.

  Then Set thaws, grabs her hand. Come on, he says, drags her up the little round staircase to his childhood bedroom. There is something he needs to find.

  As a small boy, Set wanted to be like Oliver, gentlest of all his siblings. So he started creating his own cabinet, making his own collections. Rocks, sticks, bird feathers, newspaper ads, kazoos and other plastic toys and trinkets, old coins, jacks, ribbons, smooth stones for skipping: he wrapped them each in rags and carefully stuffed them inside of labeled shoeboxes. He had shoeboxes, too, full of intangibles—these, he would have told you, came directly from his head and needed only the reminder of a physical space for storage. Empty boxes lined his bedroom floor, labeled “Clouds” and “Deserts” and “Dreams” inked in neat rounded letters. His siblings gently mocked the empty boxes, all but Oliver. When Oliver saw them, he smiled and said, Where is the one for spirits?

  Now Set digs through the wardrobe, pulling out box after box and scattering leaves and rocks and animal bits across the floor.

  Set, says Inge. You’re bleeding all over. What are you doing?

  Something I have to find, he says, and dumps out a box labeled “Stamps,” another labeled “Butterflies.” Bright paper-thin wing parts flutter to the floor. Where is it? Finally he fishes out a box with a different script, smooth and elegant and spelling “Spirits” on the side. Here, he says. He lifts the lid and then his face falls, his shoulders fall, he sits, childhood trinkets sprinkled over the floor like some kind of failed spell. Inge seizes the opportunity to steal a shirt from the wardrobe. She winds it round his bloody hand while he stares into the empty shoebox. She asks what he was expecting to find.

  I don’t know, he says. Something of Oliver. A message. Something left behind.

  Inge wipes the blood from his arm, rolls up his soaking sleeve gently. She has never seen him look so human, so present. She thinks of the burning manor in Larne, of the flames reflected in the face of her father. We all leave something behind, she says.

  Downstairs, Cedric is slumped on the rug, staring, surrounded by ruins. Pru has both skinny arms around him. Set loves and hates them both so much in this moment. Inge wonders wildly if Set will disappear when he crosses the threshold, turn to air or salt or sand. Are they all mad here, or is there magic after all?

  What was it Constance said? No flying back to the past? Not for Cedric, not for him, not for Inge, not for Pru, not for poor dead Oliver. No second chances.

  I won’t send him away, says Pru, and Set nods. Of course not, he says.

  Inge looks at the two of them, Pru and Cedric, in the dark surrounded by these dead things in cases. They look like a wax tableau. They look like something in a museum, something fallen from and frozen into the past.

  It is 1925, and no one has yet seen the world from above: that vast, comforting blue sphere, softly lit by the sun. But Inge wonders what it must look like to a god, telescoping with such a wide lens. Plunging into the blue of the earth’s atmosphere like a high diver, watching the land and water separate, watching the blur spread and shift and become trees, mountains, roads, deserts, houses. Hurtling into the artificial stars of a city, hurtling past brick and glass and concrete and down chimneys and into the hearts of a fractured family. She watches them for a moment, lit by their own strange love, and she wonders what it would be like to feel so strongly about anything you didn’t get to choose. She thinks of Albert and then she knows, of course she knows, her heart is bright and heavy with the knowing.

  Then, she and Set turn their backs, their heels grinding shards of flint and smears of blood into the green and garnet rug. Are they leaving? Will they be happy? Is anyone ever enough for the person they love?

  In the telling, it is always the same. In the telling, the lovers are mired in the past, or moored in the present. In the telling, the bear is always beautiful, the moon is always full above the burning manor, and there are never enough endings.

  The Sleepers

  Ancient dreams cling like crumbs to the mouths of the sleepers. They mutter and twitch, chasing after phantom women, fragments of words, half-drunk goblets of wine. This is what the sleepers find outside of history: a weakness in repose for which there is no cure but dreaming. The dreams of men become akin to the dreams of all creatures, the dreams of dogs and horses and goats and pigs, rooting in the muck of the past and the possible. A sleep not death, but something close—a sleep like wishing for life.

  Since the first sleep of Cronus, countless sleepers have pulled the centuries over them like blankets. Frederick Barbarossa under the Kyffhäuser hills; Owain Glyndr in a secret corner of Wales; St. Wenceslas and his knights in Blaník Mountain; the Golem in the Old New Synagogue in Prague; Bernardo Carpio in the caves of Montelban; Bran the Blessed under the White Hill, facing France; Montezuma in the mountain; Charlemagne in the Untersberg; Merlin in the oak tree; and of course Arthur, alone in Craig-y-Ddinas, or with the three ladies in Avalon, or among the Eildons in Roxburghshire, or with his men among the stars.

  These dreams are rarely restful. The men who dream them knew nothing of rest when awake. Their lives were mad and glorious and they were pure motion, streaks of flame burning through their own eras, their brilliance blurring all down the centuries except for the fact that there was brilliance, there is brilliance still, lying dormant and deep under the dreams. For gold, yes. For love, yes. For lust, yes, for blood, for glory, for power, for country, for freedom, and sometimes just for the sheer dear pleasure of the fight, the fortune won or lost or defended.

  They are many, even in dreams more than most, their names tucked into the hills and tilled with the soil of the ages. Only the oldest stones remember their faces; only the tallest trees still look upon their figures. Their deaths could not be borne and so would never be; instead they folded themselves into a sleep as long and deep as legend. They became legend, their names dust in the mouths of their enemies. They became hope splashed across the stricken brows of their people, drunk greedily when all other waters had dried up.

  Buried deep in mountains or under the earth or in our oldest dwellings, they wound their way into ballad and verse. They began to appear in visions, dreamer and dreamed tied by the long taut rope wo
ven through myth and prophecy. You are coming, the seers would tell them, down the centuries you will ride until at last you reach us. You are coming to save us, they would say. And the sleepers would nod, and sleep on, and sleep on.

  They are now forgotten mostly, remembered in dreams and stories, through poems and song. They want to be forgotten, they need to be forgotten—for the consequences of waking have grown too great.

  Shut up so long in the same earth and rock, their stories begin to bleed together. They confuse themselves with their own chroniclers. And so, like Taliesin, they trundle out wild tales sprawling across the centuries and spanning many lands. The sleepers were mighty once, but now they have fallen into half-life; they are suits of armor stored in mothballs, cheated out of their final hours of glory. They linger in tragic, hopeful limbo and smell of ancient halls, of savage times and violent spirits, brought down by time and by the telling of their tales.

  Those who were made to take action will sleep for all time. They will sleep, because to wake is to quicken, to be roused and alert and alive. They will not wake, not yet, not ever, because with their waking comes the death of all dreams, the snuffing of all those flares in the darkness, the crumble and fall of those towers where men still wait for the sleepers to save them. Awake too late, in a sleep-deprived time, we dream but foolishly of heroes. We dream in vain, for with their waking comes the end of the hope of the world.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank yous are terrible for the polite Midwesterner, because one cannot possibly thank all of the people who deserve it—for the great gifts of time and advice and support and love needed to make art. Nonetheless, plunging right in: thank you to the first readers of much of this book. Matt Bell, Steve Himmer, Erin Fitzgerald, Robert Kloss—you have immeasurably improved these words with your much-needed advice and wise writers’ eyes, and I am so damned grateful for your friendship. Thank you to Karissa Kloss for being one half of the best team ever, Team Kloss, and being such a stellar supporter of the writers in her life. Thank you to Jacob, Victor, Ben, Lauren, and the team at Curbside Splendor for the early support and encouragement. Thank you to those who published many of the pieces in this book, giving them a first home: Nate Brown, Gabriel Blackwell, Lincoln Michel, Matt Bell, Randall Brown, Blake Butler, Jamie Iredell, Dave Housley, Roxane Gay, Joey Pizzolato, and Erik Smetana. Thank you to Mark Cugini and Laura Spencer for helping to create a real, welcoming literary community here in D.C. Thank you to the team at Liveright, and especially to my amazingwonderfulfabulous editor Katie Adams for believing in this book and making it a better book, the best it could be—and also for the excellent new parent advice. Thank you to Kent Wolf for being the kind of passionate advocate for my words that I dreamed of in an agent, and for having the best hair, hands down. Thank you to my mom and dad, as always, because without them there are no stories. And thank you, especially, to Christopher Backley, without whom the world would truly be unfinished for me.

  Copyright © 2016 by Amber Sparks

  Publication Credits

  The Janitor in Space (American Fiction); The Lizzie Borden Jazz Babies (The Collagist); The Logic of the Loaded Heart (Composite Arts Magazine); Take Your Daughter to the Slaughter (Stymie); Thirteen Ways of Destroying a Painting (Gigantic Worlds); And the World Was Crowded with Things That Meant Love (Matter Press); Birds with Teeth (The Collagist); Things You Should Know About Cassandra Dee (Atticus Review); The Fires of Western Heaven (Barrelhouse); The Process of Human Decay (Shut Up/Look Pretty anthology); For These Humans Who Cannot Fly (HTMLGIANT); The Men and Women Like Him (Guernica); We Were Holy Once (Granta)

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  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Sparks, Amber.

  Title: The unfinished world : and other stories / Amber Sparks.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015035414 | ISBN 9781631490903 (softcover)

  Classification: LCC PS3619.P3474 A6 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015035414

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