Thaddeus doesn’t know who I am. He is oblivious to his surroundings.
I believe he has been poisoned, or spelled, or hypnotized by someone. It is difficult for me even to write this, for at this moment Thaddeus is standing outside without a shirt, commenting on the sun. In fact, it is a blizzard.
Thaddeus asked me twice if the children’s war has been called off. I told him that yes, I believe it has been.
I also told him about my rearranging of the paper that fell from the sky, but he cartwheeled away in the snow.
Bianca
The only people I was able to convince that I wasn’t a ghost were the underground children. When I told them that the body found near the river was a fake, they said they already knew that. They said they knew the many tricks of February.
The children had developed an intricate maze of tunnels beneath the town, illuminated by hanging lanterns. At each junction there were little wooden signs with an arrow pointing up that said what part of town, what store, or what house was directly above you. I found my home and climbed up and shifted a floorboard to one side. My father was there talking about flying a balloon again. He was having an entire conversation with himself about how sweet the air tasted at a specific height. He described wind gusts by waving his arms through the air from side to side. He described the balloon ascending into the sky by stretching his arms to the ceiling and making a noise with his lips that sounded like the flame.
Before I went back down into the tunnel, the floorboard I had shifted to one side made a creaking noise. My father looked. He ran to me. He said I shouldn’t be living underground. He didn’t recognize me. I told him I was his daughter and I wasn’t a ghost. He told me to call off my war and instead spend the next day swimming in the river where the water was like warm silk on skin. I told him that didn’t make any sense.
It’s me, Bianca, I said. I’m your daughter. Look at my face.
I rubbed the dirt from my cheeks. Made sure my face wasn’t coated in snow or ash.
Bianca, I said. Don’t you recognize me.
I wrote each letter of my name on a scrap of parchment and slid it across the floor.
My father moved the letters around. He spelled A CABIN. Then he came back to BIANCA. He looked at the letters, the name, then at me. He kept doing this.
Eventually I think he smiled.
Thaddeus
Something is wrong with me.
The Girl Who Smells of Honey and Smoke
I will help you and the town.
FEBRUARY GOES HOME. FEBRUARY waited in the woods before heading home to the girl who smelled of honey and smoke. He opened the door and handed her a sculpture of an owl with a cracked skull. He bought it cheap from a depressed sculptor. The girl who smelled of honey and smoke cried and hugged February. She whispered in his ear that Thaddeus Lowe now believes in spring and that given time it will infect the entire town.
Maybe we can live in peace, she said.
It was a solution to the war against him. February had suffered through their fake smiling faces, water-trough attacks, sticks thrown at the sky, prayers and War Hymns. He had seen them covered with moss and endless layers of gray. He had seen them saddened with over nine hundred days of February, and he had been blamed for it.
Very well, then, said February. And he sat down in a wooden rocking chair and folded his hands on his lap.
I love you, said the girl who smelled of honey and smoke. And I love you, said February, feeling a little sad.
Note Written by February
There is a house builder and his wife. Name the house builder February and refer to the wife as the girl who smells of honey and smoke.
After Thaddeus called off all wars against February, the town’s sadness reached a new depth. Two members of the War Effort flung themselves from the blacksmith’s ship. Another cut his wrists open in the middle of the street, and dead vines poured from his body, grew through the street and covered a cottage. Shopkeepers wept through the night. The beekeepers had their bees sting their necks in order to stop their crying. Snow mixed with ice and a sheet of lightning fell from the sky. And Thaddeus Lowe could be seen walking through town wearing nothing but cutoff burlap pants, commenting to his neighbors about the beautiful weather.
Remember to trim those hedges, he yelled to a shopkeeper who was sitting on a pile of dirty snow, his knees pulled up to his face as he rocked back and forth.
The underground children came up occasionally to watch the town fall apart. They thought of rebelling against Thaddeus on account of his madness. They held meetings and argued into the late night. They discussed the War Plan given to them by a girl who smelled of honey and smoke, seeing now the consequences of proceeding without the support of the War Effort and townsfolk. Their confusion swept through the underground tunnels.
Thaddeus dreamed and ignored everyone in town telling him that February was still occurring. Squares of parchment tied with blue ribbon had been placed throughout his home. Each one had a different style of writing, each from a different person from town or the War Effort. They said things like how February had been the cause of his wife’s death, his daughter’s and Caldor Clemens’s. They pleaded with Thaddeus to remember the days of flight, and one parchment had strands of balloon fabric sewn to the fibers. Thaddeus didn’t touch any of these. It was Bianca who began sneaking into the home each evening, placing the squares of parchment around the house as her father drove a tractor through the imaginary fields. When he ignored them, she began unfolding the parchments and placing them in the bathtub, on his bed, sticking them inside cabinet doors with candle wax. Thaddeus started to read them and nailed them to the walls of his home until they covered each room. He studied what they said and thought that he should go back to the home of February in the woods and the girl who smells of honey and smoke and ask more questions.
The girl who smelled of honey and smoke wanted to be with a man who had the following characteristics: (1) Gets his hair cut. (2) Has a respectable income. (3) Wears nice clothes that fit him. (4) Acts like a man. (5) Looks healthy. When she looked at February sitting on the floor, occasionally writing something, she saw none of this. His hair hadn’t been cut in over six months. It was a mess of brown waves and curls, a dingy mat growing down the back of his neck that embarrassed her when she brought him around her friends. His job at a local store, where he had been working for over two years without a decent raise, was going nowhere. He didn’t own a vehicle like other men, because he couldn’t afford one. Instead he rode his bike to work each day and didn’t object when the girl who smelled of honey and smoke’s parents offered to buy them a vehicle. He couldn’t afford an apartment, so he lived in his parents’ basement, where the girl who smelled of honey and smoke lived also and was now planning an escape each day she woke to the sound of someone’s piss spraying the toilet water above her head. His wardrobe consisted of underwear his mother had bought him over six years ago when he first went away to college, a half dozen faded T-shirts and three pairs of jeans that were Christmas gifts from the past three years. When February would spend hours writing a story he wouldn’t discuss because it had gotten away from him months before, the girl who smelled of honey and smoke told him that other men do things like take their girlfriends out, buy them flowers and candy, surprise them with picnics. A man, she said, doesn’t hide some make-believe story that he can’t even finish. And lastly, when she looked at February in the shower, or when he was dressing, she wondered if he was dying. His skin was pale, his arms and leg bones lacked the muscular frame that she believed was sexy. He was six foot two and weighed 155 pounds. Except for the two-mile bike ride to work, he decided against an exercise routine. Occasionally she’d see him in the bedroom, struggling on a third push-up, and she’d notice the uncombed block of hair, the tubelike body trembling, the dirty clothes piled up, the bicycle leaning against the drywall, and it reminded her of what she didn’t have, the possibilities waiting outside those dark walls.