Julian Feeld - Fire Hides Everywhere

This went on until the food ran out. The old woman, having no recourse due to her worsening injury, threw herself more fully into drinking. Milk now thickened into grape plasma that no longer contained any nutrition and Lea began to starve as well. With this growing hunger came fear. One night the old woman, now restless, stood over the child, knife in hand, a now-flameless darkness swirling about her polluted mind. Paralyzed by inertia and alcohol, Lea gazed at her with two wet eyes like those of a cornered animal. Finally the old woman collapsed again into her chair, and Lea fell asleep. The next morning, the old woman spoke for the first time in days.

Wake up my fat little one.

Lea did not move. Her eyes darted to and fro beneath their lids.

You listen to your mother now.

The old woman swung her legs to the right, lifted herself, stumbled on her bad foot, straightened out, and walked around the room lighting candles.

Help me with the candles. You help me with these, she said.

Lea did not move. Shades of gold wobbled up the walls and extinguished at the edge of the skylight. The old woman sat cross-legged beside the child and tugged Lea’s shoulders until her head was resting on the old woman’s lap. One by one she undid the buttons of her own dress, elbows jutting outwards, until it fell around her wrinkled shoulders and the old woman sat bare-chested with the child’s cherubic face upturned towards hers. She pressed one dry breast to Lea’s mouth and kept it there, her nipple between the child’s lips, waiting for her to awaken and begin suckling.

Having sobered considerably, and with a generous headache now, Lea awoke to the old woman smiling down at her. Finding strength she had thought long lost, the child scrambled away from the old woman and crouched naked in the corner of the room, knees pressed to her chin, sniffing her hair and whimpering loudly. The old woman rose. Her brow was knitted and her breasts hung from her opened dress.

You’re too good for milk are you, you fat ungrateful beast. I’ll wring your little neck. After all I’ve done for you. After all I’ve suffered through, to raise you, without so much as a helping hand.

The old woman rushed forward and tripped on the edge of the mattress. Her right hand struck the wall first, and her torso swung inwards, unhalted by her left hand, which refused to drop the bottle, wine spraying in a semi-circle until the old woman’s face struck the wall and made a muffled sound against the concrete. The bottle shattered and wine burst onto the mattress and wall and onto the old woman’s dress. Lea jumped to her feet and tumbled down the staircase, screams echoing from the upper room, kicking bottles in the darkness as she sprinted towards the door shrieking continuously. She pressed her shoulder to the metal and leaned with all her weight and momentum against the door.

The naked child emerged from the concrete silo, reeling and holding her hands out to protect herself from the blinding light. All she could see was a white mist in which black dots throbbed. She fell to her knees and twisted around, waiting for the old woman to appear in the doorway and fall upon her, but this did not happen. Soon she could see the dim outline of the towering cylinder, a black shape against the bright white sky, and her bicycle leaning against the side of the building, right where she had left it. She pushed it onto the road and mounted it, water dripping from the seat and down her inner thighs and legs and around her ankles and from her bare feet, and the slope did most of the work, but Lea did not stop pedaling, down a hill, up another, and onwards, naked astride the bicycle, with her hair whipping behind her, clenching her teeth, alternately holding her breath and gasping for air. After several hills the road began to level out, and Lea regained feeling in most of her body. Her throat was dry and wounded. Her arms and legs throbbed with excess blood. She could feel her stomach quivering and empty, calling for nourishment, even if just a morsel.

She turned her head to look at the road behind her, careful to maintain her balance on the bicycle, never to fall, and saw the woman’s shape in the distance, black and dense and waving wildly, a black flame leaping over the hill and eddying forward, with two eyes surging from this smoke, opalescent, possessed. Lea snapped her head back and forth. The road ahead still clear. The old woman in pursuit, gaining ground, disappearing behind a hill, reappearing closer than ever. Lea squealed and pedaled desperately, body feverish, glacial, sweating profusely and galvanized by fear. This state of panic lasted for many moments. When finally it began to ease, Lea found herself able to turn her head for longer and observe the apparition more calmly. Slowly the jumbled images became clear in the child’s mind. It was only her own black hair, tossed by the wind, and the glistening roadside puddles of rainwater reflecting sunlight.

Lea pushed rigidly forward through her hunger, along the departementale and towards the farmhouse. She thought of Florian and his long sleep. Brightly in her mind an image appeared, his face very close to hers as she woke him with her mouth pressed to his.

Sunlight around the clouds in brilliant coronas, the shrinking clouds, visible behind the girl’s eyelids as great discs of light in the red darkness, the sky a vivid blue, sun loose of the clouds now, warming Lea’s skin as she drifted, standing on the pedals, the naked downhill, without fear, without sadness, the cooling wind between her legs, buoyed in movement above the rushing earth.

Marc’s pain was like the bottom of a rotten fruit, brown and putrid, with crystalline bristles in a white colony around the edge. The boy pressed his hands to his testicles as it reached the center of the fruit where the pain festered in the stone. Sidewise now and close to the ground, Marc saw naught but pulsating black in the creases of Sabine’s tennis shoes, very close now. A rim of mud around the soles, and a long row of stitches, one of them exploded like the tip of a wick. Mud fissuring and detaching in wet chunks as the boy rolled over and groaned.

Sabine looked at the sweat forming on her brother’s forehead. His pain was like an unreachable itch beneath Sabine’s skin. She had enjoyed watching him collapse, but after a time she grew annoyed by the sound of his groaning and wanted it to stop. Sabine pulled at Marc’s arm but found it unyielding, his muscles tensing and relaxing as he massaged his groin. When Marc’s pain finally subsided she pulled him to his feet and with one arm wrapped around his waist helped him hobble away from the window. They made their way across the courtyard and towards the comfort of the grain piles where in the darkness he could lie down comfortably.

When Christophe’s wife returned, it was on some borrowed bicycle: he could hear the sound of its deflated tires from a street away. The old man dropped his book and leaped across the room, leaning his head out of the apartment window just in time to see her shape disappear into the building. She was wearing a flowing gown of shimmering flesh-toned material, hair loose and brown or black, now behind and beneath him and hopefully free of harm. I will be kind and gentle to her, he thought. It is my fault we are still in the city, and she deserves better than my outrage. Without respect for my wishes or compassion for my anguish, she disappears mid-morning into a collapsing city, and expects me to maintain my cool upon her return. I will maintain my cool, thought the old man, but within reason. He stood in the doorway, listening to her footsteps in the gravelly stairwell, waiting for her to show her treacherous face, that he might calm himself and explain his love in the simplest of terms. I will tell her I love her, thought Christophe.