Burntown

by Jennifer McMahon

“Great Mother?” Mama said.

  Miss Abigail smiled, held out her hand. “Come with us. We’ll explain everything. Just stay one night. Get warmed up and fed and listen to what we have to say. If you want to leave in the morning, you’re free to do so.”

  Mama and Necco followed the women to their camp, settled in a circle around a blazing fire. The women lived in shacks cobbled together from shipping pallets, scrap wood, driftwood from the river, and tarps. They ladled vegetable stew from a cast-iron pot into carved wooden bowls.

  Necco ate three bowls, studying these strange women in the flickering firelight. Miss Stella was young, twenty at the most, and Asian American. Her hair was buzzed on one side, but long enough to wear in a ponytail on the other. She wore black leggings and a wool poncho, and from what Necco could see of her body, she was decorated, head to toe, with piercings and tattoos. She took a particular interest in Necco, making sure her bowl was full and draping a blanket around her shoulders so she’d be warmer.

  Miss Coral wore thick, black-framed cat-eye glasses and had her dark hair pulled back in a tight bun. She reminded Necco of a librarian. Miss F was a tiny woman with dirty-blond hair and fierce eyes. She looked half-wild, like she was ready to tear your face apart with her teeth and fingers.

  “It was fate that brought you to us,” Miss Abigail said once they had finished with dinner. She was dressed like a strange cartoon character, with colorful shirts layered one on top of another, and three skirts with striped leggings underneath. “And fate will decide whether or not you stay.”

  Mama’s eyes were fixed on the black water behind the fire. “I’ve always hated this place. Ashford. I can’t believe fate would call on me to stay in such a vile, dirty city.”

  Miss Abigail smiled. “Everyone sees things through their own set of filters,” she said. “I look around this city and I see life, I see the past and present, I see tiny miracles every day. This stew we’re eating is made from wild plants gathered around the city. This place takes care of us, nurtures us, gives us all we need.”

  She pulled a small leather pouch from around her neck, opened it, sprinkled some red powder into her palm, and snorted it up her nose. She held out her hand to the other three women, and they all inhaled a small bit of the powder up their noses. In the firelight, Necco could see the red stains under their noses, the way their pupils expanded, and their eyes got glassy like dolls’ eyes. Miss Stella smiled at Necco.

  Then, Miss Abigail came forward, held the pouch over Mama’s head, watched it swing in a slow, steady circle. “The snuff has chosen you,” Miss Abigail said.

  “Chosen me?” Mama said.

  Miss Abigail opened the pouch again, sprinkled more out.

  “What is it?” Mama asked.

  “The Devil’s Snuff,” Miss Abigail said.

  Necco got a chill. Even though they had never been churchgoers or read anything from the Bible, Necco knew to stay away from anything with the Devil in its name.

  “What does it do?” Mama asked.

  “It takes the filters away. It shows you what you need to know.”

  “My past?” Mama asked, looking both worried and hopeful.

  “Your past, your future, your true purpose. The snuff shows you that it’s all connected.”

  “Will it show me what to do next?”

  Miss Abigail nodded. “It will show you everything you need to know.”

  Mama looked into the fire. Necco watched, thinking there was no way Mama would do it. She had only a glass or two of wine a year, never smoked—there was no way she was going to take some weird hallucinogen, even if it had chosen her.

  Mama’s eyes stayed fixed on the fire. At last, she smiled and nodded, leaned forward, covered one nostril, and bowed her head so that her face was over the old woman’s hand.

  “Mama, no!” Necco cried.

  “It’s okay,” Miss Stella said, putting a tattooed hand on Necco’s arm.

  “Child,” Miss Abigail said, smiling at Necco. “It won’t hurt her. What she’s about to do—this is her destiny.”

  With that, Mama snorted the bright red powder up her nose. And, whether she realized it or not, that one action sealed their fates.

  Mama closed her eyes for a long time and sat rigid, like her body had turned to smooth, pale stone. Necco watched, stomach tight, heart pounding, waiting to see what might happen. What if Mama never opened her eyes again—what if it killed her or made her go crazy?

  “Mama?” Necco called. She stood up, started to walk to where her mother sat, but Miss Abigail stopped her, dropping her arm down like a railroad crossing gate.

  “Wait, child,” Miss Abigail ordered.

  Mama’s eyes popped open, and she took in a deep, gasping breath, like a drowning woman desperate for air. She gazed into the fire, pupils dilated, transfixed, like she was watching a movie no one else could see.

  “In the beginning,” Mama said, her voice loud and sure, “the Great Mother laid an egg and that egg became our world.”

  The other women cooed, said, “Yes,” in low, droning, singsong voices.

  Miss Abigail snorted more powder, smiled wide at Mama. “You, Miss Lily, are the one we’ve been waiting for,” she said. “Our missing piece. The fifth point of our star.”

  And Mama did not question. She nodded, like she, too, believed it was the Great Mother and fate that had pulled them together.

  The next morning, she and Necco began work on building their own shack in the camp of the Fire Eaters. Over the next months and years, Mama learned to inhale the Devil’s Snuff, to tend the secret patch of berries they used to make the snuff, to see visions, eat fire, and talk the snuff talk. They stayed at the camp by the river most of the year, and when the weather turned cold and the Fire Eaters scattered, Mama found them shelter in tunnels near the old mill—the Winter House—to hunker down and await spring.

  Mama called the city Burntown, reinventing it, the way she did so many things. As if, by giving it a new name, she could turn it into a different place. And it was a different place. They were living on a different side of it, anyway, the underside, the fringe, the places most of the city residents didn’t even notice. Up top, where the college was, where people went to work every day at the paper mill, that was Ashford. But down here under the bridge where the women did the snuff, saw visions, and ate fire, this was Burntown.

  In time, Mama started painting again, making pictures of the visions the snuff gave her. She’d paint on paper shopping bags, plywood scraps, birch bark. She made her own paints from berries, leaves, roots, clay, sap, and even blood. Necco would watch her paint, see her get totally lost in it, the way she used to in their lives before, and think that in these moments, her mother actually seemed almost happy.

  The longer they stayed with the Fire Eaters in Burntown, the more snuff Mama did, the farther away their old lives became, the more Mama turned into a completely different person. A woman whose paranoia seemed to creep after her, everywhere she went. She was sure that they were being watched by librarians, cops, bus drivers.

  “The Jujubes are especially bad, Necco,” Mama said, using her own special nickname for the cops (the flashing lights on top of the cruisers looked like candy to her). “They’re looking for us, too. If they find us, we’re done for.” Whenever they saw a cop, they crossed the street, ducked down an alley out of sight. Necco always thought doing this made them look more suspicious, but there was no arguing with Mama.

  “There is a man, Necco, who can take all the light out of the world. He’s a walking shadow, a black hole man. And he has such power, he can do things you can only imagine. They say he can fly. He can come spying on you in your dreams. He’s the King of Liars. A jackal-hearted man. He goes by many names: the Chicken Man, Snake Eyes…And here’s the worst part of all: he’s the one responsible for the Great Flood. Other terrible things, too. Like what happened to your grandparents.”

  “My grandparents died in a car accident,” Necco reminded her mother, irritated. Some
times it just exhausted her, trying to sift through her mother’s stories and pick out what was real and what wasn’t. It was like panning for gold, picking through all the mud and sand, trying to find the nuggets of truth. “And how can a man be responsible for a flood? It’s not possible.”

  “Oh, but it is. It is for Snake Eyes. He’s the one who killed your daddy and Errol. He meant to drown us, too, baby girl, and he’s real unhappy we got away from him. He’s searching for us even now. Every day. Every night. He’s on our trail like an old hound dog, or a shark that’s tasted blood. He won’t rest until he finds us. We have to be on the lookout. Ever vigilant. He’s sneaky, this man. He can change his face, his hair, his clothes. He can look like a businessman or a greasy-haired biker.”

  “Right,” Necco said, exasperated. “And if all that’s true, Mama, if there’s really a human chameleon after us, how are we supposed to even know it’s him?”

  “His mark, Necco,” Mama said, sounding just as irritated and frustrated with Necco as Necco had been with her. “He has a pair of dice tattooed on his left wrist—both with a single dot on top. You see that mark, that pair of snake eyes staring back at you, you run. You run as fast and as far as you can.”

  Maybe, Necco told herself, it was easier for her mother to have someone to blame; a mythical monster who was responsible for all the bad things that had happened to them, who lurked in the shadows of every alley. Easier than believing that sometimes truly terrible things happened for no reason.

  The events of the flood—losing their home, Daddy, and Errol—had broken her mother in some profound way. The snuff just continued to fill what was left of her with tiny hairline cracks, making her fragile as a porcelain doll.

  And eventually, that doll shattered. Mama’s paranoia and frightening snuff-induced visions got the best of her, and she threw herself off the Steel Bridge. That was back in the spring. It’s been months, but Necco misses her each and every moment, wishes she could turn back the clock and find a way to stop her.

  If Necco closes her eyes now, she can picture her mama so clearly, hear her voice as she talked the story-talk down by the river after doing the snuff, the underside of her nose stained red as she told how the world was born like she was right there, seeing it for the first time. Sometimes, Necco imagined her mama to be the Great Mother, eyes big and bright as planets, greenish brown ringed in yellow.

  “In the beginning, the Great Mother laid an egg and that egg became our world. A bright and blazing orb, spinning through space.” Mama would light the torch: a wad of cotton wrapped at the end of a straightened wire coat hanger, soaked in camping fuel from a red and silver can. It burned like a newly formed planet.

  “Imagine it,” Mama would croon, voice hypnotic, as she waved the torch through the air, swooping, doing careful figure eights. She’d put her fingers to the flame, pulling at it, teasing it, cupping the fire in her hand, making it jump, do tricks. She was that good.

  Necco would be sitting, cross-legged on the ground watching. She’d lean closer, smelling the dirty brown river that raced behind Mama, and the thick, fuel-laden smoke that drifted from the torch. She could hear the cars roaring over the bridge above them. A whole other life going on up there, a life she and her mama were once a part of: a life of trips to the grocery store in the car, going to museums, visiting her daddy in his office at the college, doctor and dentist appointments. It all seemed so far away.

  Mama would sway in her thin cotton dress. It was one she’d worn in their other life, one with sunflowers on it that Daddy said made her look like Queen of the Garden, and they’d dance as Mama stared into the flames with total focus, in a trance. There were blisters and scars around her mouth, her ragged red hair was singed, her eyelashes burned off. And if you looked in just the right place, you could see the outline of the little revolver Mama kept strapped under her dress, just in case.

  “Imagine the world as it first was—nothing but fire,” Mama would say, eyes glassy, nostrils red, lips blistered, her voice almost a song. “Then, things cooled. The rains came down. It rained and it rained for days and nights, season after season. There was water, one great ocean covering the whole planet. And the creatures! The creatures had fins, gills—that was life as it was then. Eventually, the Great Mother created land and the creatures learned to suck air into their lungs, to slither and squirm up out of the water onto the muddy banks and shores. They had webbed feet, damp skin. They hopped. They sang. They were our first ancestors, long before the monkeys with their sticky little fingers.”

  This part of the story always reminded Necco of the science lessons her daddy gave her and Errol; how he said all creatures shared one common ancestor once upon a time. She’d imagined, back then, a creature like her mama described now, part fish, part frog, flopping its way out of the water, getting that first gulp of air.

  Mama would raise the torch, continue on. “Life on earth is constantly evolving. The Great Mother sees to that. There is fire and water, water and fire. Destruction and life. The flood we lost your daddy and Errol in, that was only the beginning. The world is changing. There is danger all around.” Here, she’d open her eyes, look right at Necco, face serious, tight with panic. “I have seen him in my dreams, Necco. I know he’s coming. That’s why we have to stay here, we have to stay hidden. But one day, he’ll find us. One day, there will be no more running. No more hiding.” At this, she would touch the gun under her dress, just making sure it was still there.

  “What’d you bring today?” Necco asks Hermes later that night, following him into the backseat. They’ve filled the space between the backseat and the front with cushions, making one large bed. “The nest,” Hermes calls it, and she likes to cuddle up there with him at night, burrowed under the blankets, imagining they’re creatures deep underground; rabbits in a warren, snug and safe.

  Necco has added the latest gifts on the shelf above the backseat to the other treasures gathered there: candy, the jar she uses for making sprouts, pretty rocks, Promise the doll. The knitting needles and yarn sit next to the one thing of her mother’s she’s kept: a gold locket with her father’s picture inside. But it’s a funny photo, because it’s Daddy as a little boy. Back before Mama even met him. In the photo, her daddy is a scrawny, dark-haired boy dressed in a Robin Hood costume, holding a homemade bow, a quiver of arrows strapped to his back.

  “Did you get my necklace fixed?” she asks. She has a charm she wears around her neck—a little brass elephant that belonged to her father. He’d given it to her for her fourteenth birthday, just a few weeks before the Great Flood. The chain broke last week, and Hermes took it saying he’d get it fixed. He knew a jeweler, someone he took stuff to sell sometimes. This guy could fix the broken clasp.

  “Not yet,” Hermes says and frowns.

  “Well, what did you bring, then?”

  “News,” he says, looking away for a second. “I have something to share with you. Something big. And it’s going to change everything, but it’s going to be good in the long run. I really believe that.”

  It almost sounded like he was trying reassure himself as much as her.

  “What is it?” she asks, the worry making her throat ache.

  “I can’t tell you yet. Not now. I have to show you.”

  “Show me? Well, when can you show me?”

  “Tomorrow. I’ll take you tomorrow.”

  “Where?”

  “You’ll see.” He strokes the hair away from her face, kisses her forehead, and pulls her into an embrace. “You’ll understand everything then.”

  She leans into him, sees there’s a string around his neck. She reaches for it, pulls out a funny-looking key. The shank of the key is a cylinder with little teeth jutting off the sides. The head is coated in bright orange plastic and has the number 213 engraved on it in black.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s part of what I have to show you.”

  “But what—”

  He puts his fingers to her lips. “Be pa
tient,” he tells her. “Tomorrow. I’ll show you tomorrow.”

  She stares at the strange little key, watches him tuck it back inside his shirt.

  “I can show you this now, though,” he says, smiling, reaching into the outer pocket of his backpack. He pulls out a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese, and two apples.

  Necco is ravenous, but as soon as she gets one whiff of the cheese, her stomach does a flip.

  “You okay?”

  She nods, swallowing down the watery feeling in her mouth, trying not to throw up. “Fine,” she says. She takes deep breaths.

  She’s been throwing up a lot lately, but hasn’t told Hermes. Pretty soon she won’t be able to keep her secret from him, though. She’s been mulling it over for weeks now, trying to figure out how she should tell him. She looks over at the knitting needles, remembers sitting at her mother’s feet with Errol in the warm living room, the comforting click-click-click sound. If Mama were here, she’d say those needles the girl brought were a sign, a symbol. Mama was a big believer in signs and messages. She had been even way back in their lives before the flood.

  “I have a surprise, too,” Necco says.

  “Yeah?” he asks, ripping off a hunk of bread and cutting a piece of cheese to go with it.

  “It’s a big one and I’m not sure you’re going to like it.”

  “What is it?” he asks, setting down the food.

  “Well, the thing is—” she says, stalling like a coward. But she’s no coward. She’s the Fire Girl. “I’m pregnant.” She lets the words fly out like sparks, watches the shock of it roll over him.

  “Are you…are you sure?” he stammers.

  “I wouldn’t tell you if I wasn’t.”

  “But we’ve been careful,” Hermes says.

  “Not careful enough, I guess,” she tells him.

  “Holy shit,” he says, eyes wide. “A baby? How long have you known?”

  “The past couple of weeks.”

  This seems to shock him more than the initial news. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I needed to think. To figure out what I want to do.”