“I thought I was over with,” Yoth Begail says.
“I thought so too,” says the man who was Weran Root. “But you’re not, and I’m not, and here we are, in the dark, without the devils.”
“The rifle’s with the Kid,” says Yoth.
“If I were still a praying man and not this, I might pray,” says Weran Root. “He’s going to shoot till he’s done. That’s his notion. It was written all over him. But we have a wish too. I planned for this. We don’t let boys bring down the universe.”
“We?” says Yoth Begail.
Weran Root opens his hand and reveals a bullet, the creature it contains still singing from inside it.
“I took this one years ago,” says Weran Root, with the peaceful Missouri certainty he’s always had, from long before he was a djinn. Weran Root never worried, even when love took him over and remade him. When he was changed from flesh into smoke, the love continued, blazing through Yoth Begail’s lonely life, making the entirety of it bright. Yoth looks at his husband, and feels his own heart beating. He takes the Priest’s hand in his own.
“The legends lie. Wish granters are not only makers of palaces full of beautiful girls, and of forests in the desert,” Weran Root says. “Wish granters sometimes reverse things.”
THIS IS THE beginning of this story.
Backward in time, a thousand years. Here’s a girl in the desert, enslaved to a sultan. She wanders in and out of the shadows of a roomful of oil lamps, stepping on a stool to reach the highest ones and bringing them all down at once for polishing.
She knows what they are. She knows what she is and is not supposed to do with these lamps. She doesn’t care.
She sets everything free at once. Why should they not be free? Why should she not? She frees herself from the job of story. She’s been the girl who tells tales nightly, the girl who memorizes the histories of every star and whispers them into the ears of the sultan in hopes of keeping herself from death. She frees herself from the job of guiding men through the dark.
Forward in time eight hundred years, that same girl, now a woman, walks the woods of this part of America. She runs into a trapper, wearing a blue blanket stolen from his last wife’s people. He’s drunk, and he’s been traveling alone too long. He’s a man in a pile of pelts, bear and wolf, beaver and mink, all the heat of their fur divorced from their blood, and she has no use for him.
“I need a woman,” he shouts at her across the snow. “My woman died.”
“I don’t need a man,” she says, and keeps walking. Deep snow and snowshoes, leaving tracks like she’s two flat-tailed beavers walking side by side.
“You need me,” he insists, but she keeps walking.
He runs up behind her and grabs her by the hair, pulling the braid away from her skull, tearing the roots, and she feels her own blood sizzle on her cold skin.
That’s all he gets from her. Her heart is a copper lamp, and inside it is black smoke.
She made a wish a long time ago, and it was granted. She walks in safety.
THE HUNTER’S EYELIDS are marked with the trees from a smoke tower, the place she sees if she looks over the woods and watches how they turn to words written on white snow slates. Everything is written somewhere, and all the languages of the world are here, in the bird tracks and the wolves dragging bloodied rabbits.
She should have buried her captives when she needed to sleep, not pawned them, though the old rules said the pawn should have kept them safe. She should’ve left them alone in the metal house in the woods, far from anyone, but last place like that, she found empty. A thousand years of searching for the wishes she set free, and now she only wants to find the last of them. They don’t stay caged in copper.
She wonders. Maybe the things she hunts, if she left them to their own devices, perhaps they’d carry the old to their beds and the dying to their graves. She’s been hunting too long to tell if the world is worse without wishes than with them. She’s seen some wishes made, though. She feels guilt for her part in history, and so she hunts the djinn, trying to bring them back into captivity.
The Hunter rides past the site where the expedition ate itself. There they were, their hands full of blood, their mouths full of bone. She rides past the reactor she didn’t keep from melting down. It wasn’t her fault. She was sleeping, and she didn’t know what was living inside it.
She’s behind a truck now, on the highway, her motorcycle whining, the monkey’s paws twisted in her hair. Rifle rack on the back of the cab, and the Kid’s driving on the wrong side of the road.
She can hear the radio, the Kid playing loud to drown out the noise as he heads toward the high school floodlights in the middle of the field, the peeled paint coming off trucks like onion skin, the smell of metallic sweat, sleep and chemistry labs, the smell of the reactor’s effects continuing into the future, each generation on fire, brightness continuing through them, turning the children into something other than children. Now she knows that wishers are everywhere.
The Kid turns in at the high school. As he does, he looks to the thing in the back of the pickup truck, and makes a wish.
THERE ARE REACTIONS and reactors and spills in the river, there are trees growing up out of white dust, and children born dazzled, with hearts full of black smoke. There are wishes inhaled in first breaths and exhaled in final ones.
THE KID HAS barred the door of the high school with an axe handle, and no one knows it yet. He is walking into the cafeteria, his denim making the rustle of rough animals brushing against one another in a pasture.
But outside the cafeteria, Weran Root, a priest made of wishes, cracks open the casing of the bullet, releases the djinn inside, and makes a wish, calling a reaction from the reactor.
In the woods, there’s light around trees, and heat steaming from the earth. There are three black wolves, and with a howl and a leap they fling themselves into the sky and become birds. Out of the reactor emerges a djinn, hidden in this place for a hundred and fifty years.
The Kid is walking toward the girls. They’re seated in a row of shining ponytails and for a moment he thinks he’s walking toward a stable, and then –
Girls on their backs, girls on horseback, girls in horsehair. Old stories from an old expedition. Stories he’s told himself about happiness, all of them failures, all of them involving being lost without a guide, wandering helpless and hopeless, lonely forever.
I need a girl to look at me, he tells himself. That’s his wish. It’s a wish many have made before him, and it’s never turned out well.
The cafeteria is, in an instant, full of wild horses, snorting and prancing, galloping, chestnuts and dapple grays, blues and reds. The Kid stands in the midst of all these girls who are no longer girls.
There’s only one real girl left in the cafeteria, and the Kid, despairing on his mission, his legend shrinking, raises the ancient rifle, and balances it on his shoulder. He’s surrounded by horseflesh, the smell of horses wearing drugstore perfume, horses with hairspray in their manes, horses stepping around him and treading on him, rearing up, neighing.
The girl has tattooed eyelids and a monkey in her arms. She looks at the Kid. He’s crying. He has his finger on the trigger. The Kid is somebody’s wish, somebody’s son, with his hardening blood and brightening bones.
“Come over here, now,” the Hunter says.
Around him the horses of the high school spin, about their own business. The Kid is constituted of despair. He aims the rifle, shaking, at her.
A cloud coheres, standing between the Hunter and the Kid.
The Hunter looks at the smoke, her old companion.
“There you are,” she says. “I heard you melted something down. Heard you made some things.”
This djinn, the first to emerge a thousand years ago, has been lonely a while.
I heard my son was up to bad wishing, says the smoke.
The Kid looks around, bewildered as the smoke wishes him backward in time, sends him back to his childhood, to h
is mother, to the mosaics in the yard made of bones.
He flickers for a moment, in his denim and misery, and then he’s gone.
The room is full of stampeding horses and then the room is full of stampeding daughters, and then the room is full of the children of this part of the mountains, all of them made of magic, all of them the drift that comes of wishes falling from the sky like snow.
“Come with me,” says the Hunter to the smoke. “At the end of every story, there’s another story. I’ve been looking for you a long time. This is the story after the hunt.”
The smoke regards her.
There’s a world inside every wish. There are miles inside every lamp. There are places in these mountains where everything may dwell at once, guarded by wolves.
The two of them, old lovers, old stories, a Scheherazade and her secret, leave only a scrap of paper, a ticket exchanging one thing for another, and a little monkey that springs up and drops a handful of copper casings on the ground as it departs for the forest.
YOTH BEGAIL IS driving out of the woods, and beside him, covered in a cloak to keep him in shadow, is Weran Root. Yoth’s eighty-six years old and recently dead. Death doesn’t bother him. He’s smoking a Cuban cigar brought out from someone’s humidor, a pawnshop perk.
“Remember when I was the Priest?” says Weran Root. “Remember when I held the word in my hands and tried to put it around your finger?”
“Yep,” says Yoth Begail. “I remember.” He passes Weran Root a brooch made of blood and bone, and the old man made of smoke causes it to appear and disappear in his fingertips.
“What did you wish for?” Yoth Begail asks Weran Root.
“No one tells their wishes,” says Weran Root. “Those are the rules of this kind of story.”
They are two old men in love, freed of their obligations, in possession of every ticket for everything left in their keeping. They are driving out of the mountains, and toward the sea.
THE KID IS wished into another story, a hundred and fifty years before the beginning of this one. Now he’s a newborn baby found in these woods, the forest bending to look down at him. He’s the child of a dead woman, and his father is a freetrapper, but none of this is his pain.
Someone who will love him picks him up. She carries him away from the ice and into the green mountains, holds him beside a fire, sings him a song that tells a story about spring. Now he’s raised with love instead of fury.
The wishes in this story are wishes built the way wishes are always built, and the way bullets are built too, to keep going long after they’ve left the safety of silence. Each person is a projectile filled with sharp voice and broken volume, blasts of maybe.
The hands outstretch, the hearts explode. The chamber is the world and all the bodies on earth press close around each bullet, holding it steady until, with a rotating spin, it flies.
Everything living is built to burn, of course. After the close, dark chamber comes the cold, bright world.
And after the world?
After the world is a cloud of smoke, and in the center of the cloud, a whispering flame.
A Tale of Ash in Seven Birds
Amal El-Mohtar
WE FALL AS cinders, scattered on the wind. We fall as leaves, a bruising brightness – land lightly on foreign shores, foreign ports, foreign parts. Our shapes unseamed, our mouths untongued, we swallow our burning into new bodies. We break space around our hearts, keep our memories nestled in the hollows of bones built from the outside in.
There is room left over.
The shores, ports, parts, they challenge us to battle. We are weary; we surrender. Nations are great magicians; they pull borders out of hats like knots of silk. Here, says the wizard-nation, here are the terms of a truce: be small, be drab, above all be grateful, and we will let you in.
We bow our heads, and change.
Sparrow
YOU KEEP YOUR head low. You are small, but you are fast; no moment, no movement is wasted. Work, work, work, work, work: forage food, busy yourself with branches, sing in sixty languages the wizard-nation does not understand. The wizard-nation only has one language, and all its words for you are ugly.
You fan the spark in your bones, build your fire, pour it out of you into an egg. But the wizard-nation stalks your nest in cat-shape, grooms itself in studied nonchalance. It wants you small for a reason; wants to fold you into the sac of its stomach, wants to build its muscle from your meat. It chooses its moment.
So do you. As it closes its mouth around you, you hatch from your egg, larger, fiercer, sharper, darker, and croak the wizard-nation’s language until it yowls away.
Crow
YOU SUCK THE light into your feathers, fly fan-tailed into the sun. Your darkness makes the wizard-nation nervous. Because you speak it, the wizard-nation changes its language; it teaches itself to read ill luck in your appearance, teaches itself to despise the gloss of your wings, the sound of your voice. It hates, above all other things, when you speak to other crows: seven, it hisses, for a secret, and you are not allowed those.
The wizard-nation stalks you in eagle shape; it flies above you, keeps you in its shadow until you lose all sense of the sun. But there is water beneath you, and outwith the eagle’s shadow are sparks that remind you of being born.
Angling its wings, the wizard-nation swoops in to hang you on its talons’ hooks.
You breathe deep, sleek your feathers, furl your wings tight against your body, and dive.
Cormorant
THE SHORELINE IS a difficult place.
It, like you, is many things at once: a border blurred, a body ambiguous. You swim, you fly, you walk along it; you skirt its dangers, feed mostly on fish. Your diet is varied because you are always hungry. You never take more than you need.
With each dive you bite the river-bottom, carry mud in your beak, break the surface. You try, where you can, to build beaches: bit by bit, a place to rest, a place to nest, a place the wizard-nation can’t drive you from.
(Cormorants: you get the job done.)
You make an island. Saplings grow on it, bind the mud together with roots. Here is a home, now, for gulls and ducks and sandpipers, creatures who are many things at once, whose languages are amphibious.
The wizard-nation is furious. It stalks you in raccoon-shape, makes meals of your eggs. You cannot nest safely; you dare not hatch chicks, though the spark of you burns, flickers, longs to spread and give heat and light. The raccoon washes its hands in the river while watching you, for the wizard-nation is nothing if not fastidious, is nothing if not next to godliness.
When you are wearied and miserable, when your neighbours have all fled the wizard-nation’s teeth, you feel the raccoon’s shadow smother your own. In the seconds before it tears feather from flesh, you fold yourself inward, swallow your languages, turn yourself inside out.
Swallow
YOUR TAIL SCISSORS ribbons from the sky. You remember mud and roots, build sturdy clay nests. You are dark above and bright below, and you wear your spark in iridescence. You are fierce in flight, swift and agile, and you are a knife defending your eggs, swoop and sweep unflinching into faces, strike fear into your foes. Your wings are scimitars. You will keep your children safe.
The wizard-nation stalks you in cuckoo-shape.
It mimics doughty sparrowhawks, throws its voice, sows confusion among your kind. While you fight the air, search eagles to mob, the wizard-nation slips into your nest.
Did you lay that mottled egg, you wonder? Could such a thing have come from you? But it is in your nest, and you must protect it, you must hatch it, and when you do the wizard-nation mewls for your protection and succour. Me, it says, look at me, love me, give everything to me and I will love you back, while it thrashes and smashes your eggs to bits.
Your heart breaks with them, and you change.
Hummingbird
YOU SPLIT YOUR tongue in two. You learn to fly backwards as well as forwards, straight up and down – you can stand on anyth
ing, even air. You have made yourself small and fast, and your eggs are tiny, your nest too small for a cuckoo to hide inside. Your mouth is a needle and a sword. You shine, still.
And the wizard-nation seems to love you, now, at last. Perhaps you have found the right balance of beauty and fierceness, size and speed? You are at home anywhere, you cannot be said to take anything from other birds, for you have learned to drink strength from flowers.
The wizard-nation stalks you in mantis-shape.
The wizard-nation is pious. The wizard-nation is holy. The wizard-nation makes a flower out of the dead bodies of ancient creatures and fills it with red sweetness for your sake.
The wizard-nation stands still, lies in wait.
When you see the flower you think, how generous. When you see the flower you think, how kind. You approach the flower to sip – hardly even out of hunger, but out of deep, genuine gratitude for this gift, this effort expended on your behalf – bend your head to the bloom.
The mantis preys. Its arms fall like scythes into the flesh of your impossibly small bright body. It stills the throbbing shimmer of your wings. It pulls you close enough to kiss.
You are so, so tired of being eaten.
You stab your beak through the wizard-nation’s face, and change.
Great Horned Owl
YOU ARE AN apex predator. Nothing can hurt you now.
You have embraced silence. Your wings make no sound. Language is for prey, for what the wizard-nation hunts. You are not prey, not anymore.
Sparrows, though. Crows. Cormorants. All these will fill your belly now, and it’s their own fault. All their own fault for not choosing a shape the wizard-nation cannot hurt, their own fault for being small or loud or trying to build communities of which the wizard-nation disapproves. You have learned the wizard-nation’s way, and you will be able to stay, now, forever.
The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories Page 10