Burning Like Ice

His brain lit up with the smell of chalk. School chalk. Blackboard chalk in Mrs. Dell's class. Mrs. Dell was standing by the board. It was covered with neat columns of numbers to add up. "They won't add themselves up, Mister." Her voice was like geese. Lost and lonely geese far away, just overhead. He was looking right at them. Their wings flapped, silent as snow.

He was cold. On his back. In snow. Mrs. Dell got mad that day. The chalk squeaked on the blackboard. He cried, but his body was winding down and would sacrifice only one tear. The tear burned like ice. He smelled a blanket. What did a blanket smell like? This one smelled like a fire. Smoky perfume. Sitting under a blanket with Ellen, invisible smoke from the fireplace touching the air around them, communicating with every hidden place.

He couldn't feel his toes. His fingers still burned. Burned like ice. His whole body was crying. A line of geese or airplanes tore through the milky sky. Unzipped it down the middle. A sound like fabric tearing. His head was heavy, but it felt like smoke. He was on his back. He had always been on his back. In the snow. The frozen pond was nearby. He could smell it. He could feel its vibration, the pain of the hole’s raw edges. Or was that his heart? He was being eaten by fire.

A sound like buzzing made him move his eyes. He tried to lick his lips. His tongue was heavy, like some newly dead thing. Mrs. Dell in her blue dress with the white flowers. She told him to sit down and stop wasting the class's time. He got confused, that's all. When the numbers added up to more than ten, he got confused, that's all. Here, in the snow, every time his heart beat, he thought, “And that’s that.”

Our Kind of Savage

He knew how he was supposed to feel about the Kolo tribesmen. He was supposed to think they were savages, but a step up from the savages of the plains. Savages with potential. This sentiment was practically an official chapter of the officer's manual.

He had heard the expression so many times from his superiors—Our Kind of Savage—that it had come to sound like law. He didn't dare—yet—tell anyone, but he was coming to see that the conventional wisdom re: the Kolo was quite incorrect. Not the part about their potential, but the part about their savagery. These were the same men who designated one among each party to club the timi fish they caught, so only one man would need to seek atonement. The same men who offered up a tenth of their omotu harvest to avoid war with neighboring tribes. Yes, when war came anyway, they were ruthless. But these were not savages. (His school mates had been ruthless too. How many bloody brawls had he witnessed as a lad?) These Kolo were citizens, as god-fearing and law-abiding, in their way, as any Englishman.

Conley knew this now, and the knowledge was interfering with his duties. Unclear to begin with, his duties—it had been suggested by his ever-helpful superiors—involved drawing the Kolo into line. Seducing them, as it were, with a vision of British salvation. Cooking pots, machetes, metal arrowheads, mass-produced sandals: the Kolo would have a near-endless supply of these and other goods, if only they would act as the King's emissaries and help the King claim the outlying regions. Everyone would win. A true bargain. No rape of the savage here.

Conley knew he wasn't the man for the job, his knack for the language notwithstanding. He knew the Kolo deserved every bit as much sovereignty as the British. They were not a people specially made for colonization. They were proud and upright. Allies, perhaps. Subjects, doubtful. Conley could not betray them.

Harlow Said

When Harlow said this stuff would unscrew your brain, he wasn't kidding. My brain was unscrewed. The skylight in my head was blown away—bang!—and the world streamed in screaming. I understood it all. The stars I couldn't see I could feel. I could feel all their orbits and apogees and zeniths. They were distant friends connected to me through prayer.

Perihelion. That's what I was experiencing. I had never been closer to the sun. Emotionally. Physically. My feet and legs were a memory that belonged to someone else. They kept going on their own. I emancipated them about an hour after swallowing my small, white disc, a galaxy you could balance on its edge. The world was packed into its machine-milled shell. Harlow said just let it go and I was just letting it go. All of it.

Driving was so subterranean. Dark and close. I bore through the air and left behind a curving, undulating tunnel shaped like my three-dimensional shadow. It was so clear now. I left traces everywhere, spawning miniature versions of myself. Geometrical clones. Fractals that kept growing as I sped by, fanned to glowing embers. They evolved and became a million future selves, each one bound to me and free to wander. Mother and child. The car stopped and parked and I seeped through the crack in the windshield. It pinched me as I was halfway through and shattered. There was a beer bottle involved.

The house was glowing with music. I had trouble walking, so I swam to the door. The music was a heavy buoying current. Each note was a distinct flavor. I bobbed outside in the current for a year or two and drank. I was so thirsty, and I drank the velvet night into me. The air was draped loosely over the world, and I held it in my lungs like a precious metal. Harlow was a magician. He was right about everything. He could predict the past. I didn't know how the blood got on my arm.

The Dogwood

The kitchen was quiet. Except for the crackly hum of the refrigerator. And the intermittent drip from the faucet. How many times had she asked Art to fix that? That, and the table leg. It still wobbled. Sure, they all got used to it, like you get used to living on a rocking ship, but it was still something she had asked Art to fix maybe a hundred times. Every weekend for a while. She folded up a page torn from a magazine and shimmed it under. Then she forgot about it.

The cheerful green walls felt faraway and cool now. The clock was still slow. Another thing they just learned to live around. You adjusted. They could set it with the right time, but it was a lazy clock. It would lose time fast. It was careless with it.

Look through the yellow check curtains into the backyard. That dogwood tree was trying to squeeze out a blossom or two. Like someone squeezing out tears. They had planted that tree on Michael's first birthday. She could still see Art with a smile that was going to carry him away, up and over all the houses on Ballard Street. Art tore into the ground shoveling, getting carried away. How fast could someone shovel? Could you really shovel happily? She wouldn’t have thought so. But there he was. Couldn't wait to get Michael growing in the backyard, same as he was growing inside with them.

That tree hadn't grown an inch since they got the news about Michael. From that cop standing on the steps in the rain. His hat wrapped in plastic snapped over the top. Funny what you remember. The tree gave out. Same as Art. Art went away that night. Oh, he was still there in his corduroy chair every night for the news. He still took the car in every three thousand miles. But he was only waiting. Until he could leave too. Finally fall into whatever hole was waiting for him out there. People didn't believe her about the tree. Thought it was just psychological, what grief will do. But you could go out and measure. It hadn't budged since.

Unregulated Throughway 20-31

The road cut through the jungle like a smoking, black wound. Everyone thought so. In fact, the natives called the road officially known as Unregulated Throughway 20-31 "the scar." At first, the workers had followed their own handbook and ribboned the road around trees and hillocks. But as they looked at the maps and the surveyors' notes, and plotted the course of the road in their heads, they abandoned the handbook. They wanted to be off this detail as quickly as possible.

The jungle was hot and peppered with unnamed insects, and the men believed that each bite and sting could mean death. They had also heard about the natives' resentments for this project. The natives were widely regarded among the men as witches, or worse. Demons maybe. And more than one of the crew was kept awake by nightmares or insomnia, or wracked with intestinal distress. So they started taking shortcuts. When they discovered that following the original course plotted by men in air conditioned rooms would require them to backtrack to the tune of two weeks' labor, they improvised.

The foreman resisted. He thought of himself as a lieutenant, his general's representative, but faced with eleven men with machetes and fear in their eyes, what could he do? He agreed, and put off telling his boss about the decision. After that, carving up the jungle became easier. Even the foreman came to think of this as “adapting to on-site conditions.”

They no longer had any pretense of respect. If anything was in the way, blast it. The natives started coming around to watch the day's progress. They were silent, generally, and never hostile. That wasn't their way. But if they had had any magic, they surely would have used it. The workmen still worried about curses aimed at them as they tore at tree roots and laid down explosive charges, but they kept a revised calendar in their heads at all times. Only nineteen days left. Only eighteen days left.

The Pigeon Man

You could tell that sitting was painful. He was so old, so fragile, delicate like thin glass, sleeping was probably painful. And it wasn’t a nice day. The prickly rain, and the wind throwing tantrums. And still, there he was, sitting on that bench with his bag of seed. Reaching in every few minutes and pulling out another measured handful. Scattering it for the birds.

You looked at those pigeons—that invisible, ghostly murmur—and it was almost sickening. Unclean hands rubbing, rubbing together. A colony of rats running around might leave similar footprints in your mind. Or insects. Maybe it’s that they were like insects, of one confused group mind. But he kept tossing out the seed, and the pigeons filled the cement walkway in front his bench, and spilled onto the grass all around him, and sucked it up. He didn’t smile. (No one could smile against that wind. Saint Francis would be down here, with alms for the pigeons, trying to deflate that wind with curses and thoughts of getting the hell out of there now.) He didn’t smile, but he didn’t stop.

Joggers would jog right into the cloud of shouldering birds and send them flying, but he didn’t stop. He knew they’d be back. And they were, like the wind. They’d reconvene at his bench, the swarm reconstituting itself, and wait for the seed. The birdfeeder people you might have known—it’s like they’re performing a service. Looking out for the poor unfortunates during the lean times. And they get something out of the arrangement, too. It’s a partnership. The birds make it through the winter, and the feeder-tenders get to watch the spirited little songbirds scrapping over seeds. Their homes a beacon in the wilderness. And that makes them feel good. It makes sense. You look at a nice feeder, with beautiful, compact birds enjoying it and you think, “You know, I should get one of those.”

You didn’t think about buying a bench when you watched the old man with the bag of seed. You thought, “What does he see in those birds?” He must have thought those damn birds were beautiful.