Julian Feeld - Fire Hides Everywhere

Then came the squeaking of knuckles wiping moisture from the window in three black strips, a hand knocking at the window for Christophe, somebody’s shape wanting to speak to him. Roll down the window. But there was none. Christophe found himself sitting in the burnt-out husk of a vehicle. Only the barest of structures remained, mostly black ash, the gearshift like some black mushroom, the dashboard filled with caverns, his seat a twisted wire of soot, the acrid smell of burned plastic and metal intensifying. As its people, so the city. It had become a daily occurrence now, the burning of cars, their cordoning off and removal, which sometimes took weeks. The removal workers in their suits and masks, and the trucks piled sky-high with blackened debris shifting like toxic sand in their beds. Driving it where.

Christophe’s hand pushed through the white car door. It disintegrated into a chalky ash that clung to his skin. The animals had burned his car right under his nose, on the block where he and his wife had been living for years. He stood in the street observing the gutted hood of the old Peugeot like a dormant volcano, a gaping hole of woven ash and shredded parts, turquoise and yellow, black and grey, fused in the fire and utterly unrecognizable. Ash-white cars were parked up the block in both directions, like soap statues crumbling to reveal the twisted viscera of their burnt-out interiors. Christophe wiped his hands on his jeans but the soap refused to fall away. Where was that damned knocking coming from. Like the beating of a drum.

Lea stood fearfully at Christophe’s bedroom door, wet feet on the cold tile floor, thinking of the belt, the old woman, the woman in charge of the orphanage, the wild boy, the slap outside the door. All of these she kept suspended in a dim chamber of her mind, the place she used to house disappointments. When finally she heard Christophe’s footsteps Lea stepped back and looked up to the part of the door where she expected the old man’s face to appear. It appeared a good deal lower.

Where is your mother, Christophe asked her.

Nnnnnnnnnhhh, said Lea, and began to cry.

The old man swept her up into his arms and explained with no emotion in his voice that her mother would surely be somewhere close, all the while looking over the little girl’s shoulder at the mechanical carcasses lining the sidewalk. A charred corpse sat in the driver’s seat of one of the vehicles. There would be many more lost children if things continued. Surely he could not care for them all. But this girl needed him. She was helpless in a way his wife would never allow herself to be.

Florian found the first baby bird on the linoleum near the sofa, its yellow throat opening and closing, a twitching pulp covered in soft grey down. Carefully he scraped away the bloody shards of glass, wiping his hand on the sofa, and pushed the bird into his mouth, squatting with his elbows propped on his knees and chewing the bones and cartilage and sinew.

The second bird was harder to find. It made no noises, skull crushed in the fall, and was lying a good distance from the lamp, beside a large piece of broken glass near the front door. Florian swallowed it also, eyes aflame, mouth and fingers bloody, using his tongue to clean his fingers of the coppery syrup.

The boy searched for a third corpse but found none. Glass split the soles of his feet as he clambered around the room, pawing the couch cushions, displacing chairs, finally crouching to peer under the furniture. Florian’s hunger had abated slightly. It no longer manifested as pain, just a fluid emptiness in his bones, like water running thinly along the interior of a pipe. The birds had been easy prey. Out there in the vastness where the snakes slithered through the grass, there Florian knew he could find more blood, but not before he had exhausted these safe hunting grounds. Florian examined the streaks left on the floor by his own bleeding feet, then looked around the room for some new stimulus. He pushed open the door leading to the master bedroom and crept cautiously inside.

Grey light bled through the sheer cloth of the drawn curtains. The room had once borne life, that much was clear from the ripe musk of sweat and skin and hair sloughed off and smeared into the unmade bed with its twisted sheets and pillows crushed out of shape. Florian pressed his face to these, and their familiar smell conjured up the placental soil of rutting holes, subterrestrial places where the germ of raw life belched forth to purulate in the sunless heat. Rabbit holes, boar dens, mole burrows, the treehole where he had kept Lea’s underwear. Again Florian felt his groin flooding with warmth, his prick stiffening uncomfortably against the mattress, until he began with neither shame nor restraint to grind his pelvis against the bed, the room an unmoving cradle for the pale writhing flesh of the boy on the mattress. A metronome of suffocated grunts could be heard and soon Florian’s body collapsed inwards and downwards and the boy screamed in terror, thinking his spine was being pulled from him like a worm from the soil.

In the aftermath of his ejaculation, basking in a mixture of dread and pleasure, Florian looked with fascination at the small amount of semen his body had produced unto the mattress. He did not touch it, but instead pushed away from the bed and spun around, only to be faced with another unbelievable sight, a full-length mirror propped in the corner of the bedroom, framed only by plain strips of lacquered pine. It was the first time Florian had seen himself entirely, and he looked first into his vacant eyes, allowing his neck to bend slightly from right to left, examining this full-fleshed phantom standing at the center of the mirror, and understanding in that moment to whom it belonged, that somehow this image was an inseparable part of his being and not just a temporary manifestation. He watched his thin ribs bending inwards and outwards like the yellow throats of baby birds, like flowers at dusk and dawn, in rhythm with the endlessly heaving wilderness, and rickety legs sculpted by grime and shadow, mouth panting, narrow ears throbbing red, mouth crudely painted with bird’s blood, stiff black hair like the bristles of a primitive broom, skewed genitals, eyes black and brown, filthy fingernails, swollen belly aquiver.

Me, thought the boy in his abstract language.

And for the first time in his existence Florian experienced his own wretchedness as it appeared through the eyes of others, and a new feeling washed over him. Shame.

The swallow returned to the vacated room, drifting through the broken window and flying in circles along the ceiling’s edge. It perched momentarily on what remained of the lamp, head moving in saccades to survey the room, black eyes inscrutable, and then it disappeared again through the broken window.

No she was not beautiful. One of her eyes hung lower than the other and lay deeper in its socket, where due to the shadow of her brow it took on a darker tone of blue. This eye, her left eye, drifted sideways when she was tired or distraught. Her face too was affected by this gravitational pull, jowls hanging from the sides of her thick lips, flat-tipped nose pointing downwards, doughy chin flowing into a smooth and corpulent neck.

Beautiful also the way her skin was singed a dark olive around the eyes and at the edges of her mouth, partly from the exhaustion caused by her many sleepless nights as a teenager, and some as an adult, but mainly because this trait had been passed down to Isabela by her Spanish-Hungarian mother, who in turn received it from her own Spanish mother, all three women prone to the same alternating bouts of irritable languor.

Yes and the way their hair fell dark and wild into the crook of their backs, a camber spotted with birthmarks arranged in mysterious shapes like some mangled alphabet, and leading to their buttocks where a crisscross of cane scars marked each side of the dark bisector, from which black hair escaped in wavelets radiating from the pink center of a soot-covered mountain flower.