Christophe stared longingly at the ceiling of the farmhouse, the beams, the white between them, the light of his last day wobbling through the familiar windows, a painful breath of color, the searing spectrum of what is felt, and the rot of actuality creeping like frost across a puddle. The blue is being taken from the sky, thought Christophe. Soon there will be nothing to raise my hands to. He squinted at the sun looming white above the playground. It was expanding. He could smell the fat green birdshit. It was everywhere in the dirt, on the green benches, on the swing set even. He could hear the splattering too. The pigeons were sick from the green fruit of spring, dropping oily shits from the branches of the chestnut trees. Even the supervisors were worried for their trench coats.
I warn you, Christophe. No future was built without hands. Idle time is a luxury even children cannot afford. But the sun came to take the blue anyway, thought Christophe. So maybe they were wrong after all.
The old man was dead by the time Lea entered the dining room. He sat drained of malice in the armchair, Sabine on all fours at his feet, her white palms pressed to the kitchen floor, fingers lost in a thick layer of stagnant blood, the legs of her jumpsuit black and blackening as the cloth slowly sucked the liquid upwards. Lea dropped the apples and they tumbled across the dining room tile. She bounded down the stairs and into the kitchen where her shoe struck the back of Sabine’s head, Sabine not resisting but instead exploring this new suffocation with curiosity, eager to discover what lay behind this final curtain of suffering, her skull with each kick crushed further along that path, through the old man’s blood and through the kitchen floor and into the dancing lights of the afterworld where no part of her soul had been extinguished.
When Sabine ceased her twitching, Lea hoisted herself into the armchair and sat on Christophe’s lap. She squeezed his hard face between her fingers, kissed his cold forehead, and wept. A series of agonized sounds could be heard echoing through the structure. Creaking, shifting, the petrified muscles threatened collapse. Through her tears Lea stared at the shoulder beams slumping beneath the heavy ceiling. Drained of flesh and bone, the mummified pillars could no longer hold the weight of the celestial spheres.
The great sweep was over. But tomorrow had not yet begun.
26.
Marc stood in the dining room and stared at his sister’s upended body, blonde hair spreading like sunlight through the pearled crimson, shoe marks in the uncombed strands, jumpsuit soaked in blood. He saw the corpse of the old man in the rocking chair with its legs like pale rods from which red drapes hung. Something was moving in its lap. The girl. Her eyes were bloodshot with grief as she looked up, hopeful at first that it might be the wild boy, then fearful as she saw it was Marc, her brown eyes and snot-caked mouth agape, the little murderous rat.
Marc slipped as he sprinted down the steps, twisting as he fell and slid through the dark liquid. By the time he was back on his feet Lea had already leapt up the steps and across the living room, fumbling with the door handle until she burst into the cold sunlight of the courtyard. Once she had reached the edge of the field she looked back at the farmhouse to see the red and furious face of the huntsman crossing its threshold. There was nothing to do but run.
The fields were yellow and green. The fields were yellow. The fields were dry in the summer. The fields were sparse and incomplete. Weeds grew between the meager stalks. The stalks parted for the gasping child as it ran towards the forest.
Lea caught sight of Florian as Marc overtook her. A lone shape emerging from the treeline, the boy’s mouth bloody as he cradled a sleeping rabbit in his long white fingers.
Note to Reader
Thank you for reading Fire Hides Everywhere. I have written two other books: Even the Red Heron (2014), And We Came to Find It Beautiful (2015). You can find both on Amazon. For more news about my work, both literary and otherwise, you can find me at julianfeeld.com, on Facebook going by FEELD, or on Twitter as julianfeeld.
Sincerely,
Julian
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