Celestial Bodies

“The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window.”

Please do not read this version, I am working on getting it deleted, which is apparently a several step process. Go to the same title/ picture below in the stories listings.

He always began it the same way. We would get a delicious shiver down our backs, warm our palms up to the fire, and settle a little deeper into the hard ground. The work trips began in early spring, and lasted to late fall, frost limning the tents in the slanting light. Between was an endless high summer, full of heat and long, lazy days spent swatting mosquitos and trudging up and down hills. My father’s job was identifying the tiny invasive insects that burrowed deep beneath the tree’s flesh, withering them bit by bit, until what was once lush forest hung skeletal hands up to the sky. It was a bittersweet one, bitter in its mission and unfolding story, sweet in the long cool draughts of clearest air, the vistas of frothing green, the simplicity of days kept not by clocks, but by the basic celestial forces that have ruled us far longer than any watch hand.

And, every dusk, the stories. He would smile, surprisingly white teeth gleaming under black stubble, grab a fat branch and stir the coals til they popped and sizzled, then begin.

“The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. Gazing into the muddied pane, a She wolf panted her excitement at the beginning of the hunt. She could see the fat children inside, soft rounded limbs so full of tender meat, and a small trickle of saliva rimmed the glistening black worm of her lower lip. What had brought them to this remote retreat she could not fathom, but their shelter was soon to be shattered, that much, she knew.”

We'd lean into each other, the three of us in our flannel shirts scratchy with a day’s accumulation of wanderings, cozy in our dread. The stories shifted each evening, spinning out in infinite ways from that first line. I have no idea how he came up with so many of them, our own personal purveyor of endless Arabian nights. They were never that long, and afterward, we would quickly tumble into our tent, rolling our sleeping bags as closely as we could together, arguing over who got to be in the center. Generally, I won, being the biggest, I could advertise the most space for them to warm themselves on. The stories were excellent at keeping us in our tent after dark.

We were not allowed out of our tent after dark.

We fell asleep quickly, to the soft hiss and crackle of a dying fire, our father’s shadow moving across the tent, banking the coals. We were tired and hot, skin fresh from our pre dinner douse in a stream, and sleep was an easy partner to find with no electric lights to keep her at bay.

I was usually the first one who woke. I liked it that way, the secret part of dawn, the only chance to feel truly alone for the day. Part of the duties of being the first to awaken was gather some fragile twigs, stir the coals up, and start the fire anew for coffee in an old, dented aluminum pot. I would nest the sticks in the ash and breathe, ever so gently, on them. I loved the fine feathers of smoke that drifted up, the flame so fragile and ephemeral, gaining strength, until it flared on its own, burning pale and bright, living without assistance, needing nothing but occasional fuel to continue for the morning. Water from a cold stream and a little black powder, some time watching the mist rise off the ground, and the coffee was done. Then it was time to wake up Father.

It was always the same. His crusted eyes would open, almost as though he had only been resting them a moment. He would look at me with no recognition. Then would come a shadow, flickering, just for a moment, and I would try to catch what it was. Exhaustion? Anger? Resignation? I could never quite pin it before his face would split into a grin and his hand would shoot up and rub the top of my head, knobby callouses I could feel through my thin blonde hair bumping awkwardly on my scalp. “How’d you sleep, tiger?” And I would smile and mumble something indefinite, because, the truth was, I never had any idea. Between when my eyes closed and I drifted off, and the sounds of the morning, there was no memory, not even a place I could call memory to be.

I don’t know why that night was different. I remember, for once, not being able to pay attention at story time. “The cabin in the -” He began, and all I could think about was the rock under my hip bone, and how it kept digging in, and how bright the moon was that night, glaring down at us like a scarlet spotlight. Dad had called it a super blood moon and said that it only came every few years. Sis (the youngest one) asked if that was because there was blood on it and Dad laughed and explained that actually it was because of an optical illusion, caused by the angle of the moon to the earth, and showed her a diagram with rocks and elliptical lines cut into the dirt with his forest blade. He called it that, and we never knew if it had another name. It had a beautiful dark walnut handle, inlaid with three silver crosses, and the shaft was stained red with sap from nicking a thousand cuts into the tree bark, to see if the burrowers lay beneath it. They liked to dine on that thin sleeve of life, just inside the bark, where all the tree’s life juice flows. For all the age and size of any tree, it is always only one thin membrane away from death. Or at least that’s what father told us. We would look along solemnly, older sis trailing her fingers around and around the rings of a giant stump, cut for houses or ships long since demolished, whispering quietly to herself. She was an odd one, always stuck in her own world, just as younger sis was always sticking her nose in other people’s.

Father wove us a tale that night, but like a child in church who is thinking about how many sandwich cookies they can smuggle off the tray into a napkin after the apostatizing is done, I wiggled and wandered in my head, eyes constantly drawn again to the moon. The russet tones had diminished as it rose, but it gazed down upon our fire as if it were waiting for something. It filled my heart with a sickly miasma of expectation. The dark alley that lures and frightens. Still, when the last story flourish had been sealed with the words “Resounding thud. And she realized, yet again, it was too late.”, I found myself yawning, and younger’s eyes were already half closed, and older sister was unzipping the tent. We lay there, the girls curled up on either side, and I stared at the patterns shifting like a silent movie upon the film of the tent. Nonexistent, impermanent were shadows. But still so real.

When I opened my eyes to the shock of darkness, I rolled over slightly, and realized one side of my human heater was gone. Younger sis was not in the tent. That which woke me had felt like a sound, but the night was silent. Her absent form was gaping, as though my arm were missing.

She was always in the tent. I lifted my head to look on the other side of older. She was not there. The light filtering into the tent felt like dawn, and I entertained the thought that she had, for once, risen before me. I carefully slipped out of my bag so as not to wake older and slid the zipper open, cold air rushing in.

Moon. Nothing but a bright distant dime of moon. The light cut the outlines of things with surgical precision. But through the trees, there was a faint glimmer. Warmer light, the familiar glow of flame. I kneeled in the doorway, weighing the terror of staying and not knowing where sister had gone, to the dual fear of exiting into the unknown. My bones felt infused with cold. Picturing her out there, feeling the same, I crept out. Perhaps she had been attracted to that light as well. The fire pit was out. Not even a slip of smoke. Ashes like craters on some distant silent planet.

The cabin was no more than an ink stain on black velvet, but the window where light shone through called to me. A lighthouse beacon, perhaps she had felt the same. I picked my way through unseen bracken towards it, small branches like claws snagging at my t-shirt. Even as I got closer, no definition manifested. It was a mother of darkness, with a thin creek of warmth spilling from the slightly cracked door. I could hear deep inhalations, and then fierce exhalations, within. Like an oceanic pulse, but urgent, the fast slap of waves before a storm. There was no handle to speak of, so I lay my palm flat upon the worn wood and pushed.

What I saw was not something I could comprehend. My father sat, spider like, crouched over on a three-legged stool. An unlit kerosine lamp sat next to a mottled candle, glowing golden on the kitchen table, casting deep shadows on the walls. A doll lay in his lap, a doll with no stuffing, a doll dressed just like younger sis. But no doll had ever been given that much detail. I knew, without needing to look closer, that this was indeed sister’s flesh. Flesh without bone, flesh without muscle, a limp, empty, bloodless sack of skin, folds of her nightgown engulfing it, hair spilling down like brown silk. He put his lips down to the small black hole that was her mouth and blew. He only noticed me as he raised his head.

And I finally got to see in full, all those expressions he so quickly wiped from his face every morning.

“You.” He sighed. “I should have known better than to think it was fixed.”

He rolled his eyes up to the rafters, muttering.

“No heavenly bodies are ever fixed”.

“What.” I said. “What did you do to her.”

I was infused with terror, and the worst part of it was a feeling of familiarity. Recognition, puzzle pieces falling into place even as my mind tried to scatter them. I was overwhelmed with the feeling that what was unfolding in front of me was not unique, but a larger story, a repeating pattern of wallpaper upon which the three of us were inscribed.

He glanced down, as if surprised there were any problem.

“I didn’t do Anything! Not to her, anyway. I’m trying to heal her right now.”

The cold in my bones deepened. I felt my insides, and they were beginning to feel… translucent. Shifting. Like quicksand. “What.” I gritted. “Did you do. To us.”

His face collapsed. Exhaustion won out.

“She would just never listen.” He spoke. Quietly.

“I would tell her and tell her and she just would. Not. Listen to how close that edge was, I was just trying to show her, to scare her a little, just enough to keep her safe, how was I supposed to know she would struggle? How was I supposed to know she would kick my shin, such a surprise, it hurt so much, and it was such a long fall, and then of course younger came and wanted to know what that noise was, what that heavy, crunching noise was, looking for her sis, and she is just so fast, the shale on the cliff so loose…”

His eyes pulled back and snapped focus on me.

“You were the only one who was not an accident. I would never have done it on purpose, I swear. But the way you looked at me, I couldn’t have that. You wouldn’t have been happy without them anyway. And my knife is very sharp, you know that. I always know just where to find what I’m looking for. There are so many special spots where the arteries come close to the surface. Any basic biology dissection will-.” He stopped and gazed through me, his expression sharpening.

I step back, only to feel the bulk of older sis behind me. She must have woken too. We have both, finally, awoken. Does she know? Yes. I know it without turning. I can feel the heat of her rage through the back of my shirt.

“I knew where this cabin was, found it on an expedition with your mother. I thought I could pull up the floorboards, dig deep. Deep under. Replace them carefully. It would not have been the first time. And family should stick together. It took so much work to pull your bodies here. By the time I arrived, it was dark. The moon provided some light though. A blood moon. But when I brought you inside, this flame, this candle on the table, it lit by itself. I was terrified of someone seeing us. I lay younger on the table and tried to blow it out. It wouldn’t die. It just. Kept... blowing Into her instead. And then and then… when her little breastbone lifted, I knew we were saved. I knew we were all saved. I had been forgiven, and rescue had come. I revived every one of you, but you were all in a deep sleep. I wasn't able to wake you. So I brought you all back to the tent. Wrapped your bodies with your bags to keep warm. And when the sun rose, one by one, so did you.”

He pauses, searching our faces, as though looking for understanding.

“There were some sacrifices, of course. I don't know why, but none of you could remember more than one day. Every morning, you would reset, with a full expanse of memories of before, (except for the night of the blood moon, that the flame kept from you), but because you were so fully in that time, you never noticed. Only I knew time was still marching its regimental soldiers forward... it was lonely, but it was enough. Because I had you. I had all of you. I invented new stories for us, every night, to punctuate the days. And for some reason, you could remember those. It was a way of growing you.”

A memory crosses my mind. Early spring, Dad coming to get us out of school early. He and Mom had gone on a solstice honeymoon, before she left on her big dissertation residency. He had returned and begun planning for the spring trip. Our departure was sudden. Exciting, free from class once again, special, luckier than the rest, stuck there with their brown paper bound textbooks and Mr. Granz with his small moustache and halitosis. The endless highway north, trees blurring past. It was just a few weeks ago, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?

He continues- “And then, I thought that was it, that I had saved you” I savor this irony, but he seems oblivious to it. “But the next morning, your bodies were nothing but wilted skins, deflated balloons holding no life again. I realized, I needed to blow the flame into all of you, every single night. I thought, I'll light our campfire with it. Too difficult to drag your bodies back every night, once they were full again. After I lit it, I could not find the cabin again. One day there, the next, gone. But it didn’t matter. As long as I kept this fire going, I knew I could keep you. Every day a new blessing, a new forgiveness. I wasn’t sure what would happen, this time around. There had not been another moon like this after the last. And tonight, no matter how much I blew, your bodies stayed empty. Then I saw it, the cabin, the candle. It had come to us. Again. I brought you in first. I figured, if anything went wrong... well, anyway, it didn’t. You were the first. Now it’s just her left, just her, just give me a little more time, I’ll make it right, I’ll make it right for all of us. You all just need to feed a little more from the flame.” He rocks slightly, agitated, and younger’s flat glove of a hand sways gently, hanging off his knee.

I can feel the weight and heat of my sister, pushing us forward.

Whatever it is that has happened here, I know it has to stop. We walk towards him, and as we do, I feel another presence. Like the breath of my mother, after she has kissed our foreheads at night. There is a filmy curtain, hiding the window behind him. He is frozen as we approach. The terror in his eyes is satisfying. I grab the lamp and it sloshes promisingly as I hurl it toward him, toward the flame, toward the curtain. A brilliant spray of ignited oil lights up the room, shimmering like an imploding chapel window. The fire spreads quickly. I gather up the collapsed flesh of my younger and reach out to Father. I hold him, a tight embrace. Older sister understands. She helps me, wrapping her arms behind mine. Together we are strong, He cannot struggle forever. Younger sister’s soft, flimsy skin flops over our arms like a blanket. It is warm, but it is not her. She died a long time ago. I feel nothing, no pain, as he writhes and screams, trying to stab at me but I cannot die again, I am already expanding, we are spreading outwards, released from false comfort, alive in the blaze, relinquishing to the fire.

It is a new forest, a new sky. There are many of us here now, in this flame. The door crashes open, a woman enters. She’s wearing a cream silk blouse, untucked, the hem has dark stains. She turns and begins dragging something heavy in behind her.