Light Boxes

by Shane Jones

  Thaddeus

  I opened the door to February’s house and saw a girl with long black hair sitting at a desk. She was smiling and said, Please come in and take a seat. I declined. I asked her where February was. She said he had gone out to collect firewood and berries. The inside of the home was furnished in a way I had never seen before. Lamps and tables and chairs designed from another world. I noticed a fire burning low against the wall and columns of worn books stacked to the ceiling.

  Who are you, I said.

  I’m his wife, she said.

  February has taken my wife and daughter and is destroying the town, I said.

  I’m sorry. We, too, feel an overwhelming sadness. We, too, cry more than we laugh.

  The girl stood up and walked over to me at the front door. She smelled of honey and smoke and when she got close enough images of cornstalks and birds and muddy salamanders crawled from my eyes. I felt dizzy. I grabbed her shoulders so I wouldn’t fall. My body boiled to a blistering heat. Sweat poured out of me like lead.

  There, there, Thaddeus, she said, embracing me with arms that reminded me of Selah. Don’t worry about February. You can’t control February.

  My legs turned to mud. My knees hit the ground. My arms were around her waist now. Honey and smoke, honey and smoke, honey and smoke. .

  It was blurry. Then everything went black.

  When I woke, I was sweating. I was sitting on the floor near the front door and the girl who smelled of honey and smoke was sitting at the desk, writing something on parchment paper.

  Oh, you shouldn’t see me writing this, she said. Just pretend you didn’t see me writing this.

  As I started to leave, I heard a man’s voice and turned around to see, but it was only the girl who smelled of honey and smoke waving from the desk. When I stepped outside I took a deep breath and my lungs filled with warm air. The soil was soft and worms twitched in puddles. Birds flew from branch to branch. Flowers were sprouting up around the oak trees where squirrels fed. The sound of owls was so deafening you’d think something was wrong.

  War Effort Member Two (Missing His Bird Mask)

  Thaddeus was walking in our direction, waving his arms, whistling. A yellow bird mask next to me commented that Thaddeus was wearing a shirt without sleeves and pants torn at the knees.

  A tactic against February, I reminded him.

  We have lost the tips of our fingers and our toes are black inside our boots. Our beards are brittle with ice, our skin hard and red and cold.

  He’s going to freeze to death, said the War Effort member.

  When we came upon Thaddeus, he laughed and gave each of us a great big embrace, patting us on the backs and kissing our faces. His arms had black spots where February had attacked, and his legs had ice for skin. When he placed his arms around me he felt like a thousand pounds.

  Victory is ours, he said.

  You killed February, we asked.

  No, said Thaddeus. But look around. I didn’t look around. I didn’t need to. I didn’t have to see the trees burdened with snow, the skies stuffed gray. Instead I stared at Thaddeus as the snow fell on his bare arms.

  What, said Thaddeus. Why is everyone looking at me like that.

  War Effort Member Number Three (Purple Bird Mask)

  Thaddeus talked of spring like it was blossoming around him. Where we saw snow and felt cold air, he saw crop fields and shielded his eyes from the sun with his hand.

  Here, I said, handing Thaddeus a stack of papers detailing the children’s war against February.

  He read each page. He told us that if he had known that children were living underground with this kind of War Plan, February would have ended on the tenth day. Thaddeus then threw the papers into a pile of snow left yellow from a war member.

  Call it off, he said.

  The war members looked at each other until I retrieved the parchment papers and tried explaining to Thaddeus that February was still continuing, that the last week had been the worst yet.

  Complete nonsense, said Thaddeus. We should get back to town and begin the spring harvest. Tell the underground children to come up and be children.

  One War Effort member whispered into another’s ear until it circled to the end, where I stood and heard, Go to the Professor for help. I nodded back around the circle to each member. We nodded. Thaddeus laughed.

  The Professor’s Report on Thaddeus Lowe

  Thaddeus Lowe believes that the current season is spring. On more than one occasion, he left my home to pick vegetables, which he pretended to cook over the fire I normally use to boil potatoes. To see this behavior from Thaddeus breaks my heart and I can only conclude that this is the cruelest of tricks from February.

  Thaddeus laughed uncontrollably when I put the light box on. He slapped it off my head, knocking me from my chair and onto the floor.

  Thaddeus asked several times why I was wearing a sweater and scarf.

  Thaddeus laughed and shook his head each time I explained to him that it was February, that it had been February for nearly nine hundred days.

  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.

  FEBRUARY HELD A BEARD TRIMMER. He reread the list of characteristics the girl who smelled of honey and smoke sought in a man until the anger turned to sadness. He stretched his arms out in front of him. He inspected their thinness. He ran his hands through his hair, the thickest part at the back near his neck, a puffy mess that now embarrassed even himself. Then, flipping the plastic switch, that row of rusty little teeth sawing back and forth, February raised it to the front of his head and in one long stroke began shaving off his hair.

  When the townsfolk looked up, they believed that it was snowing but as the locks of hair fell down upon their shoulders, lashing them across their cheeks, curling around their ankles and holding them to the streets, sticking to their lips and suffocating their breath, they realized that it was another attack by February.

  Look, said Thaddeus to himself. Some summer vines are falling from the clouds. How unusual.

  It’s February, said a war member.

  Thaddeus, please, it’s February from above causing this. Can’t you see that.

  I’m going off to see February at the edge of town again, said Thaddeus.

  Thaddeus, it’s a trick. February doesn’t live at the edge of town. Look up!

  Thaddeus was off.

  Thaddeus walked back through the woods and to the home of February and the girl who smelled of honey and smoke. When he opened the door, he saw a man in a rocking chair cutting his hair with a pair of large sewing shears. The girl who smelled of honey and smoke was sitting on the floor writing on parchment paper, which she folded into tiny squares and bound with blue ribbon.

  The man, thought Thaddeus, was February. He wore faded brown pants and a dark blue sweater with holes at the elbows. He cut his hair in odd angles and took a few snips from the chin of his beard.

  Thaddeus closed the door.

  February dropped the sewing shears. The girl pushed the parchment papers under a bearskin rug. They glanced at each other and looked back at Thaddeus, who was still standing in the doorway.

  Well, come in, said February. Don’t let the cold air in.

  Thaddeus was puzzled. His ankles, beneath his socks, were sticky with sweat.

  The girl who smelled of honey and smoke approached Thaddeus and placed her arms around his shoulders. I’m glad you’re back, she said. Come in and sit on the floor with me.

  February stayed in his rocking chair. He folded his hands in his lap and rocked back and forth. He looks scared, thought Thaddeus.

  I thought you were dead, said Thaddeus, looking at February.

  February shook his head no.

  I’m not dead, he said. As a matter of fact, I don’t know who or what I am anymore. Everyone in town is terrified of me. They blame me for an endless season where all it does is snow and the skies are gray and everyone is filled with endless sadness. They blame me for the end of flight. Did you know that I had visions that you were coming to cut my throat, Thaddeus. Just awful. I had to sl
eep in an empty cottage at the edge of another town. The weather was warm.

  Thaddeus didn’t know of any other town within walking distance.

  February continued. I ran away from the possibility of you killing me to another town that appeared to be abandoned. The weather was warm, the homes newly built, but there were holes in the ground that appeared to go to the center of the earth. It looked like tunnels underground, and inside them were lamps strung like holiday lights.

  The girl who smelled of honey and smoke got up to make tea. Thaddeus said yes, that he would drink tea only if the bottom of the cup were stuffed with mint leaves.

  I don’t understand, said Thaddeus to February.

  Neither do we, said the girl who smelled of honey and smoke.

  The two holes in the sky, February said, they hold the answer. We believe in a Creator. We believe that the Creator is up inside those two holes in the sky. We believe that the cause of this endless sad season is directly connected to the Creator.

  Thaddeus took the teacup from the girl who smelled of honey and smoke. But you’re February, he said. You’re the cause of it.

  I’m not February, February said. You and everyone else including the Creator call me February. I don’t even know my name. I’m a builder of houses, I know that. I built this house by myself. I should be called House Builder. Most of the homes in your town, I built with my bare hands. That is, before I was driven away. I hate February.

  But you kidnapped the children and buried them, said Thaddeus.

  I wouldn’t do that, said House Builder, kind of laughing.

  The girl who smelled of honey and smoke sat so close to Thaddeus on the floor that their knees were touching.

  He loves children, she said. He wouldn’t do that.

  February the Creator kidnapped the children, said House Builder. February the Creator is responsible for this endless season of sadness.