Other Words for Smoke

by Sarah Maria Griffin

  “Paul, the state of you,” she laughed, embracing him. Rossa’s father buried his face a moment in his aunt’s shoulder.

  Mae and Mam trekked towards the house.

  “Rossa, you lazy bollix, get up and help us with the bags!”

  “Don’t call your brother a bollix, Mae.”

  “But he is one!”

  “I know he is, but you’re not to be swearing!”

  When Mam and Mae weren’t arguing, they were play-arguing. It was nice to see, but it gave Rossa an ugly pang of jealousy. Mae found it so easy to slip into a friendship with their mother when things were good. He begrudgingly pulled himself up off the pavement and went to heft his case from the back of the car. It was heavy, jammed with T-shirts and jeans and markers and paper and books.

  “Rita has plenty of books!” Mam had scolded as he stacked his case.

  “But she won’t have my books,” Rossa had grumbled in reply: his crisp, neat sketchbooks, his charity-shop salvaged old anthologies of nature magazines, his favorite issues of National Geographic—he never got bored of them. He wasn’t about to adjust his taste along with his whole dislocated summer: at least he’d have portals to the places he wanted to go with him. His little paper hideaways.

  By the time he’d hauled himself up the driveway, his dad had detached himself from Rita, but she still clasped his hands in hers. Mae was making smooching noises at the cat, who had his eyes closed and was nuzzling into her hand.

  Now that he was up close, Rossa could see that the cat was absolutely the size of a dog. It was unsettling—little fangs poking from the corner of its maw making it look more beast than pet. Rossa would not be getting as cozy with him as Mae was anytime soon.

  “It’s good to see you again, Evelyn,” Rita was saying to Mam. “You look great.”

  “Working on it, Rita. And you’ve barely aged a dot.”

  They kissed each other on both cheeks, effortlessly sophisticated. Both acting. It was more than a little uncomfortable until Rita turned to Rossa and his sister. “Mae and Rossa, you’re only giants!” Her gaze was warm on the pair of them. “You pair and me and Bobby here will have a nice relaxing time while your folks are—”

  “Off gallivanting!” Mam cut her off. “Absolutely dancing it around the south of France!”

  Rossa despised the strange urgency on the edge of her tone: something was wrong. Why didn’t they just tell him? He was fourteen, not stupid.

  And Bobby was a stupid, stupid name for a cat.3

  Rita nodded enthusiastically, covering for herself. “Both of you be gone now. I’ve Bevan Mulholland from the other side of the house coming in to put the dinner on.”

  “Little Bevan?” Mam cooed. “I haven’t seen her in years. I’d say she’s gone real tall!”

  Rita smiled. “Lion of a girl. She’s mostly with me, now. Now away with ye, off to the sunshine. Make sure to drink lots of water and use factor fifty on your skin. I don’t want a pair of lobsters showing up here on my doorstep! Send us heaps of postcards!”

  Mae sprang up and squeezed Mam. “I love you, I love you!” Then she ricocheted to Dad. “I love you, I love you!”

  Rossa rolled his eyes. He hugged his mother, then his father—but for a moment longer. Dad’s eyes were wet, his mouth heavy in what was undeniably sorrow. His big hands rested briefly on Rossa’s back, and then he was gone.

  The green car revved with a familiar clunk, and their parents were away. The twins and their great-aunt waved at the door; then Rita ushered them and their cases inside.

  Something was cooking on the stove in the kitchen, and Rossa could smell it from the doorway. He was, quite suddenly, starving. His stomach had flipped nausea for hunger in that way a belly does when it realizes the world isn’t moving too fast for it anymore.

  Rita’s hallway was familiar in the strange patchy way that so many of Rossa’s relatives’ homes were. He’d been here before, once, twice—but he’d never noticed the statues. All of them were the Virgin Mary: her blue robe, her white face, her lips too red. A cluster of them stood on the hallway table, a tall one by the stairs. All in a little line, sisters in blue on a shelf above the radiator next to a bowl of potpourri and a cone of incense spiraling dense tendrils of gray. Rossa’s house didn’t smell like this.

  The carpet, sun-bleached maroon scattered with gold, was soft under his sneakers. The pattern looked like it had once been flowers, now abstract from age. There was a shabby grandeur about the house: a small glass chandelier presided over the hallway, reflecting scattered prisms here and there. Rossa was unsure he would ever be able to be comfortable in a place like this. Even though it was quiet and still, the place felt busy, somehow. Like there was no room for him.

  Bags abandoned in the hall, the twins were ushered into the kitchen. It was a long, bright room, cupboards painted eggshell blue, renovated so the ceiling was almost all glass, facing up at a sky barely dappled with summer clouds. Two huge double doors were flung wide onto a patio facing the manicured back lawn, a green stretch.

  “It’s more of a sunroom lately, isn’t it, Bev?”

  The tall blond girl stirring a pot on the huge wrought-iron stove nodded. “I like it better this way. It was too dark before you had the roof put in.”

  Rossa blinked at her. How were teenage girls so tall?

  “Bevan lives in the other side of the house—ye’ve met before, though you were probably too young to remember. She helps me with odds and ends of the business. Her ma, Imelda, moved away, so we keep each other company, don’t we?”

  Rita didn’t explain what “the business” was, or where Imelda went, or why. She pulled a spindly chair out at the table. The table felt almost too big for the room, a little too tall for the seats and wearing an oilcloth covering, patterned with prints of lavender and oranges. Rossa wasn’t sure how anyone could eat off something so ugly but supposed he’d better get used to it. He wanted to go home. He wanted to run out of the house and chase after the car and go to France with his parents and make them tell him what was wrong, why Dad was so heavy in the face, why his eyes were so red.

  Rita produced a slim white cigarette case from under her shawl. She lit up and drew heavily, a satisfied breath.

  Mae was on the floor, the immense purring cat in her arms. She stared up at her great-aunt a second. She blinked, then couldn’t contain herself.

  “Are you sure you should be smoking, Rita?”

  Rossa glared down at her—she could be so blunt. And she looked silly, still holding the cat. It was almost like the cat was holding her, the proportions all wrong.

  Thankfully, their great-aunt did not seem to take the remark seriously, and laughed through a silver plume. “Let me have this, child. I’ve no vices left at all.”4

  Mae shrugged. “Dad’s back on them again.”

  Rita raised her penciled eyebrows and tapped some dead gray into a crystal ashtray, silent a moment. “They’re an impractical and dangerous cure for stress, but we take the small things while we can still get them.”

  “You won’t let me have one,” quipped Bevan, her back still to the room, grinding black pepper into the huge, bubbling pot. “I’m stressed sometimes, I’d like to be cured.” The kitchen at home was all stainless steel and practicality. Bevan’s pot was burned orange and ceramic; it looked ancient. Rossa wondered if it was clean. It sat on top of a massive black stove: he’d never seen anything like it in real life, only in illustrations in books. In the core of the beast, a fire burned bright behind thick scorched glass. Was that safe? He shifted in his seat.

  “Sure what have you to be stressed over? You’re not made for this poison.” Rita exhaled a cloud and Bevan gave a dismissive “Yeah, yeah . . .”

  Rossa thumbed the sleeve of his hoodie. The two girls and old woman were at such automatic ease with each other. He thought about asking to be excused, or where the bathroom was, or could he go and unpack. He thought about texting his parents, promising that if they came back and took him along, they’d n
ever even notice he was there.

  But he didn’t. Instead he opted for politeness. It was rude just to leave so quickly after arriving. His opportunity would come along, he’d just have to wait. He let a numb swathe of boredom wash over him as his sister, aunt, and new neighbor, or housemate, or whatever Bevan was, chatted away to each other. This feeling of being slightly outside of things was what the summer was going to be. It filled him with a gentle sort of dread, and when the soup—bright squash and thyme—was placed in front of him with fat wedges of soda bread, he couldn’t even manage a single bite.

  Chapter

  Three

  When you finally get away from the visiting children, you call upon him again and he comes quickly, almost without ceremony.

  Ah, doesn’t your skin feel so much better for his presence, your bare legs folded on the floor, your hands resting on your knees, symmetrical? You didn’t even have to give him a feed tonight, just called his name soft, and out he came, coaxed easy from the paper.

  Something like delight uncoils in your chest as he arranges himself amongst the fawn roses of the wallpaper. His beak, so white and sharp, seems more smiling today—if bone could smile. His feathers twitch and shift and he opens his eyes. They are huge, buttercup yellow with slit pupils like pure obsidian. Near your feet, at the sideboard, his marble claws protrude: they are teeth without a mouth. The air hums a little like sickness, a little like sex—but mostly like magic.5 He is a parliament of one.

  You are scared.

  He knows.

  Your scalp feels tight, your eyelids too, and silently your corkscrews of mad yellow hair grow, become thicker. You laugh as the spirals twist low below your elbows—an inconvenient waterfall, a rush of curl.

  “Stop!” You are playful, and he laughs, and the air is charged electric from the sound of him. A current runs through you, your fingertips thrum, and your nails grow an inch, sharpening before your eyes. You have never seen anything alive change so quickly before: this body doesn’t feel like your own. His laughter is a night animal and a man and a storm. Yours becomes distorted in the air.

  “I’ll have to cut them, James,” you whisper, watching your fingertips extend, talonlike, curved.

  what if you couldn’t cut them, he rumbles, and there’s pressure then, crushing heat, like trapping your hands in the steel door of an oven—heavier than that, even, trapping them under a brick, a whole building, a mountain. Your scream is caught in your throat as you stare. Your flesh glistens away into something else. Your nails are diamond, your fingers are diamond, long shining rocks—sharp and glinting and impossible and full of fractals, casting tiny prisms as the summer day pours iced-tea light into your room.

  “Thank you!” you gasp.

  again, he says.

  “Thank you!”

  good, he says, and you are relieved. You wish he would speak more, his voice so enormous, so great.

  You sit there in the quiet for a while, watching the movement of his feathers and bones, glowing with your new gifts. He’ll turn your fingers back to normal soon, won’t he? Of course he will. You’ll have to cut your hair and burn it so no one notices it’s happened, but for now, you are magnificent and strong, a baby monster at his feet, growing from his power, the fear ebbing and flowing in you like a cosmic sea.

  He pulses in the paper, blinks long and slow.

  bevan, there are children in the house.

  “Yes,” you reply. “Two.”

  are they of the crone’s blood?

  The crone. A terrible name for Rita. Rita loves you, doesn’t she? You love her too—or you think you do. But Sweet James can call her whatever he wishes. Rita who’s minded you since you can remember, who let you stay when your ma walked away. Rita, your other mother. Rita who teaches you how to read cards and how to listen to the strange static channel in your head that hears car accidents in the city an hour before they happen. But Sweet James, you are sure, is the one who gave you the coordinates to that frequency in the first place. Before he was huge, when he was just a strange rustling of leaves and petals on your wall. When you were a child, before he truly showed himself to you—he taught you how to listen. Rita just about raised you, but Sweet James made you whole. You owe him so much: this gorgeous nausea, this vertigo between fear and joy.

  “They’re her great-niece and great-nephew. Twins,” you say.

  your closeness to her does not please me.6

  “But . . . but I live here. It’s her house. . . .” Your gut drops. You knew he didn’t like Rita, but hearing him say it is rotten fruit, is foaming mold.

  it is my house. you know this, and yet you still tend the fire, and the fire keeps me from her.

  You do. You stoked it minutes before you came up to your room. You raked over the flames, fed it turf and kindling, watched it swell and purr and crackle. You feel that pressure again in your hands and you look down—your nail beds still shine, but they are blackening. They sear and sing with pain and bright heat.

  there are children in the house and i am hungry.

  “I can get you all the bones you like. Gus—Gus likes me!”

  i do not want bones. i want pieces of the children.

  “I can’t do that!” Your hands, your arms, the ends of your hair, your eyelashes are in flames.

  fire is a terrible thing, isn’t it?

  You can’t speak.

  this is how the fire in the crone’s kitchen makes me feel. i am so hungry, bevan. the fuller i am, the stronger you will become. the things i will show you . . . make me stronger. bring me pieces of the children.

  The heat cools. Your arms and hands restore as if nothing ever happened and all those sensations had just been a too-tangible hallucination. Then the owl does something you have never seen before. You’ve seen him almost every single day since you were a little girl, and you thought you understood all the ways that he could scare you, bargain with you. But before your eyes, he shifts himself into a door. The physics of your bedroom defies itself, makes space for something new, and your eyes struggle with it for a second, like your optic nerves can’t translate what is happening before you. He is an owl no longer then, and a volt of fear runs through you as the wooden rectangular door unlocks itself and swings open wide, revealing a room that cannot be there.

  You are shaking.

  You step forward.

  Chapter

  Four

  Neon. That’s all you can take in at first, the ugly electric hum of something too gaudy for the indoors, too big. A fairground. A billboard off the motorway. You rub your eyes, knuckle white disturbances against your eyelids, and then look around, hard.

  The room is empty and long. Twenty feet ahead of you there is a wall, and in the center of that wall there is another door. It is closed, though you can see it has a handle. The walls are pulsing with veins of that neon light, a galactic juxtaposition of star bright against void dark. The floor is glass, and just beneath, black water rushes below you. The air smells of it too, the water. Not salty or fresh, like being by the ocean. More like rain, like wet earth, though there’s not a trace of earth in sight. Maybe, you think, this room isn’t even attached to the planet. You’d played in caves by the sea once or twice as a child, waves rolling slow at your feet as you’d scoured rock pools for small, sharp animals to collect as souvenirs. This feels like that—like a mouth to someplace else.

  You look over your shoulder, and the summer light of your bedroom, cream and clean and ordinary, is just a few steps behind you, framed in Sweet James’s door of paper and bone and owl and wrong. You take a few steps forward, your bare feet padding against the glass floor, which is uncannily warm. How is it so warm? Not warm like the sun, or like a fire. Warm like a body.

  “Sweet James, is there anything . . . does anyone live in here?” you call, your voice strangely dull, as though the room is eating the sound of you.

  there are things you will find out for yourself. His rich and terrible call comes down on you from everywhere: as though yo
u are inside him.

  You exhale, trying not to protest his unhelpfulness. You’re lucky he’s given you this much, this taste. You walk about, cautious at first. But the place is so empty. You look up: a ceiling—or rather, no ceiling—stretches out above you, blacker than black, abysslike.

  Perhaps the strangest thing about the room is how indistinct it is. There aren’t any chairs, or tables. There aren’t any shelves by the walls, just all that sick neon tubing. No signs of life. Nothing to do but roll in the uncanny of it.

  You pace back and forth. Without meaning to, what must be quiet feelings of disappointment leave your body in a deep sigh.

  you are ungrateful, he snarls, before the thought even crosses your mind.

  “I’m, I’m not, I just—”

  i show you the first link in the chain of the other world, and you are bored by it?7

  “I’m not!” Your voice is getting louder than you can control. “I swear!”

  you are lying, and i can tell. you can hide nothing from me.

  With that, a sucking gust pulls you from your feet and you are launched with roaring velocity back into your bedroom, your shins almost burning as you skid along the carpet. You are whiplashed from the force, winded. Sweet James erases the doorway in the wall like a mistake drawn on a piece of paper. You cry out, “Please no!” and he says, ungrateful, and you are weeping, pleading with him to let you back in. It was too quick. It’s not fair.

  Your bedroom is too bright now. Too ordinary. The reek of those god-awful air fresheners your mother used to hide about the place is almost scorching in your nostrils, the longing for that water smell rises in you like something terrible. You just wanted a little longer to look around—what if something was hiding in there? What if you missed something, the most important thing—what if you missed the whole point? You didn’t even get to touch the next door.

  “It’s not fair!” you wail, pounding your fists on the carpet, the ordinary carpet. The carpet of your bedroom, of your world—while another one lies there, just beyond the wall. What if you never get to see it again? Your stomach rolls and you feel your face crumple—how could this be it? What if that was all you’d ever get and you barely had a second, barely a moment, to touch it?