The Stars Will Guide Us Back

by Rue Sparks

  Quiet. Then cold air as Ivory unravels from her side. There’s an apology on her tongue, but Ivory is there again, arms around her waist, face to face this time.

  “Tell me.” The words aren’t demanding but pleading. Ivory’s green eyes search Lena’s own brown eyes, freckled by the oranges and yellows of the fire light. There’s a warmth that has nothing to do with the fire that starts at Lena’s fingertips and ends in her chest, blossoms like a raging storm. Please don’t let this be what makes you leave.

  “I’ll tell you,” she answers after a moment, then licks her lips. Her mouth feels dry, and the words don’t want to form. “As long as you promise me something first.”

  Ivory runs her hands up and down Lena’s arms, sending goosebumps along the flesh, not blinking from her gaze. “Anything.”

  “Promise you’ll never ask me to call upon it.”

  Lena eyes the flames with what little self-preservation a six-year-old can muster — enough to keep her vinyl-lined jacket away from the reaching sparks and twisting smoke.

  Her excitement has dimmed since the words ‘campfire’ transformed from theory into practice. She wants the experience of her classmates. The smores, the scary stories, the starlit sky. But she’s never been so close to fire in her life.

  Now she stares at the dancing flames with a wide-mouthed expression, her curiosity a tangible thing between her gulping breaths. She kneels in front of the fire, the stick and marshmallow she’d begged for forgotten.

  “Are you going to cook your marshmallow or stare?” her mother calls out in amusement from behind her, sitting back in her folding chair. Lena doesn’t switch her gaze from the swirling miasma of flames.

  “How do they do that?” Lena asks and points towards the fire with her chubby fingers peeking through the overly large jacket sleeves.

  The conversation around the fire dims, except for a creak as Lena’s mother leans into her space and places a gentle hand on her shoulder.

  “Who does what?” she whispers.

  “The people in the fire,” Lena replies. “How do they not burn?”

  There’s a curse behind her, and Lena turns in time to see her father's chair crash back from the force of him standing, his form retreating into the shadows towards the house. She can’t make out most of the words beyond the odd swear and “hexerei.”

  Her fingers shake, and she inches away from the flames, which feel frigid and painful on her skin. When she looks at her mother's face, a cold fog of breath escapes between barely opened lips as she stares at Lena in horror.

  “Dochder, no. Not you too.”

  The faces, the hands, the eyes in the flames are always there after that. Candles, the flame on their gas-lit stove, and of course, the rare campfire are all host to whatever spirits can’t move on.

  It’s the gift of the matriarchs of the Kohler family. Her grandmother shares the gift, but it skipped her mother. When she returns that night, her grandmother promises to tell her of all the stories the flames tell her, of the nights spent communing with those who dance in the flames. She looks at Lena with pride, eyes crinkling to near slits as she speaks of how she will teach Lena the ways of the Fire Starter.

  The following morning, she comes down for breakfast, excited to speak with her grandmother, only to find her sullen and despondent. One look at her parents tells her everything she needs to know.

  Her father calls it a curse. Her mother watches her with thinly veiled fear.

  She learns to ignore the visions, the goosebumps whenever she is around a fire, the feeling of being called to the flames, that she is forgetting to do something important. She finds fire no longer gives off warmth to her cupped hands. Most days her fingers feel cold and achy, like she will never be warm again. She takes to wearing gloves around the house to her mother’s consternation, but when she asks, she only avoids her gaze.

  “Come to the fire,” her mother asks one autumn night, as if she doesn’t remember her daughter’s penchant for seeing dancing spirits in the flames. As if that is something easily forgotten. “You can warm yourself here and take off those gloves. They should be washed.”

  Now at eight, Lena likes to think herself grown up enough to sense danger coming when she sees it. She shakes her head and stuffs her hands beneath her armpits where her chair is turned away from the fire. The sight always leaves an aching in her chest she doesn’t understand.

  She hears a sigh from behind her, then the creaking of a folding chair. Too late, Lena tries to stand, but her mother with a surprising show of strength turns the chair she’s sitting in around to face the fire and grabs hold of both Lena’s arms. Her mother plucks a thick glove from Lena’s hand, and grasps at her fingers with hands heated by the fire. They feel overwarm and clammy against Lena’s, but glorious. She revels in it.

  “Ach du lieva,” she gasps, “your hands are freezing! Come to the fire; you’ll catch your death.”

  Lena stiffens and pulls her hand back and reaches for her glove, but her mother is quicker. “Give it back, Mudder,” she whines. “I want to go inside.”

  Instead, her mother grabs for her other hand and takes that glove too, putting them both in her apron pocket and pulling Lena up by the arm. “None of that, Lena. This is time for family. You always avoid the fire; it’s time you sat with us instead of pouting in the corner. Come. Warm up.”

  Lena digs in her heels, but her mother is stronger than her and determined. She drags Lena and the rickety chair closer to the fire with little trouble. She settles the chair next to her own before plopping Lena into it.

  Her mother gives her a hug around the shoulders and kisses her on the forehead, but all Lena sees is the swirling faces, arms, and hands of the spirits in the blaze as they reach for her. While once they had been dancing, now they’re tormented and anguished, their faces elongating in the flames into silent screams, fingers splayed and gnarled.

  Lena shivers and tucks her arms under legs, hoping to scavenge what little warmth she can. Wind emanates from the fire, a breeze that smells of burning plastic, acrid and unnatural.

  Above the flames, barely visible through the waving air and scattered smoke rising from it, Lena spies her grandmother, wispy-white, straggled hair thin and falling from its braid, staring under wrinkled eyelids into the flames, curled into a thick knitted throw. Despite the suffocating heat from the fire, does she also feel the cold pinpricks down to her bones? The disconnection from the fire a longing that permeates each cell?

  She feels the unfairness like a cold sweat that slicks down her cheeks and pools at the crook of her collarbone. When she looks back at the fire, in a surge of revolt, she locks eyes with one of the aching souls smoldering in the flames. It whirls in the colors that burn mirror images below her eyelids when she blinks. But she doesn’t turn away. The longer she looks, the eyes become softer, less jagged, less terrorized. Eyelids form, then a differentiation between the pupil and iris, and then she can see defined eyelashes.

  Sounds, unrecognizable as a word but repetitive, echo in her mind, and Lena chases it as the eyes fill her vision. She follows the pathways through a labyrinth, the name — because that’s what it was — one step ahead, until all at once, she reaches the center.

  Eliza.

  That was her name. Eliza.

  As if summoned, memories like photographs appear in her mind, scattered and jumbled beyond making any sense, and Lena’s breath quickens at the overload. There’s two children, a brother and sister; and then the brother is gone; a funeral for her brother, how can she go on? Then the brother is there again, but this time she stands in front of him, in front of their father, her mother crying, holding her brother’s urn; he will pay; fire, fire everywhere —

  There are burning tracks of tears on Lena’s face, and she reaches a hand towards the fire, as Eliza reaches a bony hand formed of fire and smoke towards her. She expects it to dispel, as they all had done before. But the fire reaches a long, hot trail forward, if Lena can only tell Eliza it will all be oka
y —

  “Abatz!”

  There’s a cloud of smoke and a loud sizzling sound before the world is sent into darkness. The first thing Lena registers is that her feet and part of her pants are wet as she comes back to herself, along with a ringing in her ears and the dull echoes of yelling. There’s someone in front of her, grabbing at her arms, touching her cheeks. There’s a face swimming in front of her eyes, that if she focuses, she recognizes in the dim light of the porch lamp as her mother, worry crumpling into her brow.

  “Lena? Lena, dochder, speak! Are you hurt? Did the fire burn you?”

  There’s a scuffle as her father pulls her mother back, grasping her to his chest by the shoulders as he looks at Lena with curled lips and furrowed eyes. “Hexenblud! I will stand no hexerei in my home!”

  Her mother grapples with his arms and turns in them, grasping her hands lightly at his neck. “Oscar, liebe, please. She knows not what she’s-”

  Her father shakes her mother, spittle hitting her mother’s cheeks as he shouts in her face. “That is how it starts, Ana! You think because she is only a child that we are safe! But her blood is tainted by your cursed mother. I will not have this hexerei in my home.”

  Her mother tightens and loosens her fists in his grip, searching her husband’s face. “She is our dochder, Oscar.”

  He pushes her back, and she crumples to the ground, grabbing the side of Lena’s chair as she falls. She immediately goes to her knees and kneels protectively in front of Lena.

  Her father looks at Lena with dead gray eyes. “She is your dochder. I will take no credit for this hexenblud. She can stay, but if she is to call the fire again, I will call the Hexenbischof myself.”

  Lena feels her mother’s fingers tighten on her side and arm as she inhales. “You would turn to the People only to turn over my only child?”

  “I will return to the People the curse they called upon us when we left. If turning to them is what it takes to avoid damnation, that is what I will do.”

  Lena turns away but can’t drown out the screech of the screen door in the distance as her father opens it to enter their home. She looks up to the fire, and sees a shadowy figure stirring the smoking remains with a stick, searching for any embers and using the water in the bucket to wet it down. Her grandmother, who must have been the one to douse the fire upon seeing it reach for her. The betrayal stings, until the memory cements in her mind. What was she thinking? What was Eliza trying to do?

  If only she could ask her grandmother.

  “Dochder.” The voice of her mother is near inaudible next to her. “You will not call upon the fire again.” She stands with her back to Lena, running her hands down her skirt to swipe off the dirt, avoiding her gaze.

  “But Mudder-” Lena starts, but her mother’s reply is automatic and forceful.

  “I will not hear it.” She starts folding up the chairs and leaning them against the side of the barn, ending the conversation and leaving Lena to stare at the smoking remains of the fire, emotion bubbling into her throat like a spring.

  “Eliza meant no harm, my schwallem.” A tingling crept up her scalp as the brush pulls at the strands of her hair, raking through the clumps held in her grandmother’s hands. The clock ticks the seconds away in the quiet room, the scratching sound of the brush and the swishing of fabric of their clothes the only other sound as Lena lets herself pretend she doesn’t hear the words.

  “The fire is eager. It wishes to speak to you, through you,” her grandmother carries on, ignoring the tension in Lena’s shoulders. “It doesn’t understand how complicated being alive can be. Not anymore.”

  “We can’t talk about it, Grossmudder,” Lena whispers under her breath, not moving her head, as if doing so will summon her father. “We’ll get in trouble.”

  Lena winces as her grandmother tackles a particularly troublesome knot, going over the spot several times before she moves on, satisfied. “Your father is not the Almighty, he does not know all. He is in town. The walls do not have ears.”

  As her grandmother continues brushing her hair — far longer than is necessary, but Lena says nothing — there’s a question that grows like a seedling on her tongue, sprouting and flowering before it bursts from her mouth unbidden.

  “What are they, Grossmudder? The people in the fire?”

  The brushing stops, and Lena startles at the sound of the brush being set on the side table beside the bed, despite the calmness by which her grandmother had done so. Her grandmother twists her shoulder slightly, beckoning her to sit beside her on the bed.

  Her grandmother takes her hands and gently pulls off the gloves. When their hands touch, bare skin to bare skin, Lena startles to feel the iciness of her grandmother’s skin. Her grandmother pulls both of their hands to her cheeks, cupping her hands above Lena’s to try to warm them on her cheeks. Her eyes are a light gray, hypnotizing her with their endless depths.

  “Lena, mei kinskind. The question is not what they are, but what they are meant to do. What they are is a bridge between the broken spirit and the savior. They are a prayer. We ask, and they do the things we aren’t strong enough to do ourselves.”

  Lena bites her lip, pulling at the skin until it peels back, and she tastes metal. “But what do they do? And why did she try to hurt me?”

  Her grandmother blows warmth between her cupped hands, and Lena sighs at the feeling of the warm air on her fingers.

  “She did not want to hurt you, my schwallem. She was confused. You do not know how to use your powers, and you confused the veil. You saw what happened to Eliza and wanted to help her, didn’t you?

  Lena nods, remembering the red faced, freckled red-head standing before the imposing figure of her father, protecting her younger brother.

  “But that is not your place to protect them, kinner. That is theirs, to protect us.”

  Lena scrunches her nose and rubs at her cheek in frustration, remembering the heartache, the fear, the loss from Eliza. “Why not? She was hurting.”

  Her grandmother is rubbing her hands now, and Lena pulls them away at the realization. Suddenly, the warmth feels stifling. Her grandmother sighs and starts fiddling with Lena’s gloves in her hands. “They know things we will never only know when it is our time, we mustn't ask of them what they are not meant to give. It is not the way of things, Lena. You will understand one day.”

  Lena swipes the gloves from her grandmother’s hands, struggling to get them on her chubby, shaking fingers as her pulse quickens, chest heated and eyes watering.

  “You’re just like Daadi. You don’t care. She was hurting and I wanted to help. I don’t understand, and I never want to.” Gloves on, Lena stomps towards the door, throwing it open and only glancing back long enough to see the betrayal in her grandmother’s eyes before slamming it shut behind her.

  “Grossmudder and I never spoke of it again after that. She tried. She’d get me alone and bring it up, but I’d leave the room or make noise until mother or someone came. She passed away a few years later. I’ll never forgive myself for what I missed.”

  They’d separated midway through Lena’s story, and Ivory is curled into the sherpa blanket, staring into the fire, head tilted back, but not showing any signs of sleepiness. The distance between them feels like a frozen lake.

  “Ivory? Say something, please. You’re too quiet.”

  There’s a moment before Ivory sits forward and looks Lena in the eyes, head tilting, expression curious. “I don’t know what to say to be honest.”

  “Anything. You can say anything at this point, and it would be better than complete silence.”

  Ivory hums, then inches closer to Lena. When she drops her head on Lena’s shoulder, every bit of tension drains from Lena’s muscles.

  “It’s not that I don’t believe you. I honestly don’t know if I do. You see people in the flames? Do you see them now?”

  Lena’s throat clenches, and she struggles to get out the air to say the words. “Yes. Even now.”

  Ther
e’s another hum, and Lena’s mind swirls with thoughts, questions, and reprimands. She tentatively encloses Ivory’s waist in one arm and relaxes when Ivory places her own hand on Lena’s gloved one.

  There’s a chuckle. Lena freezes.

  “I did wonder why you always wear gloves. And why you’re always so cold. So, it’s because all the warmth of fire is drained from you or something? That sounds sad. Not sad as in pathetic, but sad as in … you know.” Ivory pulls Lena’s chin down and drops a peck on her lips. “I wish my warmth was enough.”

  Lena leans forward and smiles against her lips, letting her eyes fall shut. “You’re the only thing that warms me.”

  There’s that chuckle again, and somehow Lena’s chest feels like a knot has been untied from around it.

  Ivory pulls back then, leans her head back down on Lena’s shoulder. “Is that why you didn’t want to tell me? Because you feel guilty about what happened with your grandmother?”

  There’s a numbness in her words as Lena continues.

  The bang of the slamming screen door startles Lena from where she is hunched next to the fire. She meets her mother’s gaze across the flames, and she sees the fear and the sparks from the campfire reflecting in her mother’s eyes. They follow what must be Lena’s father moving closer to the flames, and Lena has only a moment to prepare before she is pulled forcefully from the chair by the arm.

  “Geh zum, how dare you show your face after what you’ve done!” He begins to pull her backward away from the fire, but Lena’s legs give out, dropping her to the ground.

  Her mother rushes around the fire, disentangling her father’s grip from Lena’s arm and shielding her from his sight. “Oscar! What is going on? What has she done?”

  “This child, this deifel! A teacher found her in an embrace with another child, a girl at that school. That place has ruined her! First the fire, now this? This is no dochder of mine.” He spits onto the ground at Lena’s shoes, mouth in a snarl.