Rikki Ducornet - Brightfellow

He has been thinking that he should ask Goldie’s Rod how to do card tricks. He must do a better job entertaining his host tonight. Billy, a linguist with a special fascination for Romance languages, French above all. A language! Charter considers. Plucked as it were from the birds. Not only their voices, but their tracks in wet sand, the shapes of their beaks, the markings on their bellies and backs; a language painted on bark that looks like bird tracks (the birth of cuneiform? The tracks of bird feet on the wet mud by the riverside?); a people who cry out to one another like herons. . yes! He must make this island he is inventing really shine. He climbs the stairs to his study.

Asthma. Asthma in the glass! A grain of sugar in his eye. Today she is leaping around like a colt from the floor to her bed, bed to floor, floor to bed, then dashing through the house. Her feet are bare and her spare cotton dress billows like petals around her small frame. When he hears the front door slam he gets up to find and follow her. But when he hits the Circle she is simply in the front yard beside the beetle log, poking at it with a twig.

“So where are they, Brightfellow?” she asks.

“They live eventful lives.”

“They’re beetles, Brightfellow. They live in a log !”

As she speaks, Charter relishes the proximity to her skin, her little ears, her impossible eyelashes, a vague smell of piss, of violets. He thinks she is oblivious to her beauty, which is like a flame. He thinks, This is what angers Blackie. This flame. He says:

“There’s a labyrinth under that log.”

“No there isn’t.”

“There’s a treasure at its farthest end.” She looks up at him eagerly, expecting a story.

“Every lost ring, every lost earring, every lost button, each and every time a stone falls from Blackie’s sapphire brooch—”

“How do you know—”

“Because I see her wearing it sometimes when she walks over to Goldie’s for cocktails.”

Asthma snorts.

“Every time a pearl necklace comes undone and a pearl rolls under the piano—”

“They find it!”

“They find it and carry it between their teeth to their Queen.”

“Brightfellow.” Asthma furrows her brow and, folding her arms across her chest, says: “Beetles don’t have teeth. And she’s not a queen. She’s a Papesse. Don’t you remember anything? ”

“A Papesse. Exactly. She sits in her chamber bedded down in one of your lost mittens, surrounded by all the things that we have lost.”

“How boring is that ?”

“That’s not the end of it.” Asthma frowns and looks at him with a certain ferocity. She has a restless mind, and sometimes he wonders if he has met his match. “She craves far better,” he tells her. Asthma nods and moves closer. He notices how the sweet bones of her fingers come together as she hugs her knees.

“There’s a beetle. A green one. Named ‘The Finder.’”

“Because finders keepers!” Asthma approves. “He’s the one who finds this stuff!”

“Yes. He uses it for barter. The Papesse has no interest in Blackie’s fake sapphires.”

“They’re not fake !”

Charter raises an eyebrow knowingly and looks at her with amusement.

“How do you know they are FAKE?”

“Hush,” he says. “Asthma — I have my ways.” He continues: “The Papesse has no interest in silver dollars or wedding rings inscribed with the word Forever. ”

“Beetles can’t read. But what does she want? Tell me.” She pokes Charter hard in the thigh with her finger. “Come on, Brightfellow.”

“She wants a certain key. ”

But before he can say more, Goldie appears, wheeling toward them in platinum sandals, Pea Pod in tow, and they are formally introduced (Asthma’s words), and Asthma is being told to play with Pea Pod in her room for an hour or so because Goldie simply must get to town.

“I’ll look after them,” he says. “I’ll take them birding.” And he flashes his binoculars.

His pulse quickens as the three of them set off together into the woods behind Asthma’s house and into the little cemetery.

“Look, Brightfellow!” Asthma leads him to a spot behind a familiar pink granite gravestone, one that has in the past provided him many long hours of concealment. “I buried a mole here. Don’t tell Blackie. She says it’s. . I’m. . macabre. ” Turning, she points to an upstairs window. “I can see the exact spot where I buried it from my bedroom. It had fangs !” Charter shudders. They are standing just a foot away from one of his best vantage points in the gravestone’s shadow.

And then she takes his hand.

“Brightfellow,” she says. “Tell us about the key.”

“I don’t want to hear about a silly old key!” Pea Pod whines. He notices how her eyes don’t quite match up, her expression somehow skewed, but he cannot put his finger on what it is that troubles him. Only eight years old, he thinks, and the child is already coming undone at the seams.

“The beetles in my yard,” Asthma ignores her, “have a special key. Brightfellow has seen it.”

“That’s stupid.” Pea Pod is scratching at a scab. She works her scabs with diligence. The air around them swims with the sounds of locusts rising and falling and rising. .

“The key is to a laboratory,” Charter persists, “deep beneath the earth. And it is here, in this secret laboratory, that precious things are made and astonishing things happen.”

“Precious things,” Pea Pod muses, suddenly mollified. “Like dollies.”

“Dollies!” Asthma snorts.

“Better than that. Things like. . cinnabar. Which is a kind of scarlet sand you can find in the cliffs above the river. The ants love it — no one knows why — and grain by grain carry it in their jaws to a hidden place beneath their hill. Once inside, they grind the sand down to a fine powder and then they wash it in a copper bowl — copper, too, they manufacture, no one knows how — and then they wash it again.”

Now the air is charged with a vivid interest from Asthma and Pea Pod both. They are sitting on a large flat stone that leans out above the woods below. Asthma and Pea Pod sit side by side, at peace with one another.

“Then they go to sleep,” he continues. “And when they wake up the cinnabar has settled at the bottom of the bowl. They drain off the water and allow it to dry. It’s now a bright scarlet of great depth and beauty. The Papesse—”

“Is red !” Asthma chimes, wildly excited. “Pea Pod! She’s red !”

“Exactly so!” Charter musses Asthma’s hair affectionately. “How very quick you are, Asthma. So. . now do you know why she is so beautiful and why she needs the key?”

“Not really.”

“Here’s why. The ants knead the cinnabar with soft beeswax into a paste. .”

“I don’t understand what you are talking about!” Pea Pod shouts and, in a rage, scrambles to her feet. “I want to go home!”

“Don’t ruin it, Pea Pod!” Asthma cries, leaping up. “I bet the beetles wax her, Pea Pod! Like you wax a piano!” She doubles over with laughter. “Right, Brightfellow? They wax her ? They wax her !” she says, barely able to get the words out.

“But what about the key ?” Pea Pod cries, on the verge of sobbing. “What about the key ?”

“It doesn’t matter!” Asthma is out of patience. “Obviously they use the key to get into the laboratory to steal THE RED WAX! ”