Wildefire

by Karsten Knight

  He hopped off the long-board and scooped it up under his arm in one fluid motion.

  Rolfe walked up to the foursome and speared his board into the moist sand so that it stood upright, like a fiberglass obelisk. “Long-boarding regionals aren’t for another two weeks. Did you . . . did you all come here to watch me practice?” he asked hopefully. At least a yes would have simplified the situation and padded his ego at the same time.

  “Do you try to be a walking California cliché? Or is it genetic?” Raja asked.

  “Birth defect,” he replied.

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  “Oh, good,” a girlish voice announced from behind them. “I’m glad you all could make it.”

  Like a crab that had tunneled its way up onto the beach, Serena had materialized on the sand behind them.

  She wore a little white sundress and had her walking cane slung rakishly over her shoulder.

  “If we’re here because somebody is about to kidnap you,” Ash said, “then this time I’m going to let them.”

  “Maybe this time they’ll try to pull me into a motor-boat!” Serena giggled quietly to herself.

  No one else laughed.

  “I thought it was obvious why you’re here,” Serena said at last, as if the answer itself were tattooed on her forehead.

  Rolfe prodded his long-board. “Because this cove is supposed to get good waves?”

  “No, that’s not right at all.” Serena shook her head.

  “You’re all here because I told you to be.”

  Lily raised an eyebrow. “Mind control?”

  Ade snickered. “Raja coming to watch Rolfe’s surfing practice is more believable than that.”

  “Not by much,” Raja said, and rolled her eyes.

  Serena’s expression soured. Ash got the distinct impression she’d tried to explain this to somebody before and failed. “It’s not mind control. It’s more like . . . making suggestions.”

  “You’re a hypnotist?” Rolfe asked.

  Serena ruffled her hair in frustration. “No, no, no!

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  No. I reach out”—she did so with her hand to visually demonstrate—“and I tap you on the shoulder.”

  “Telepathy, then,” Ash said.

  Serena sighed. “Stop trying to categorize it. I don’t—I can’t—use words when I reach out. I just sort of give you a feeling, an emotion, a state of mind. In this case a general urge to meet me here.”

  Ash found herself thinking, What a kook. But, crazy as it was, as soon as she thought that, she studied Serena’s expression in case the girl could read her thoughts. Serena’s face remained impassive, but Ash decided to at least try to play along.

  “Then the next obvious question,” Ash said, “is, why us? Or are we the only people it works on?”

  Serena fixed a hand on her hip. “It works on whoever I want it to work on.”

  Raja smiled. “Then you must never be starved for male attention.”

  “I get by just fine using my natural talents, thanks,”

  she said. “Besides, it doesn’t work on the unwilling.”

  Ash scoffed. “So I wanted to run four miles through the rain to a cold beach to have another creepy discussion? Unlikely.”

  “No,” Serena said coldly. “But you did want answers.

  And that’s why when I reached out to you five, I broadcasted a sense of resolution, understanding. And belonging.”

  “Belonging?” Rolfe adjusted his wet suit.

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  “Yes,” Serena replied. “That night in the alleyway, I didn’t reach out specifically to you five. I didn’t even know it was you who would come to my rescue. I just touched on the frequency for anyone like me.”

  “You mean special?” Ash asked.

  Serena frowned. “Yes. Freaks like me. Freaks like us.”

  Nobody said anything, and Ash wondered what was going through the minds of the other four. It would have been easy to dismiss the blind freshman as a delu-sional psychopath and move on. But crazy was quickly becoming a staple in the life of Ashline Wilde. If she could run from blue flame monsters in the woods, and foil attempted kidnappings, and watch her older sister electrocute a sophomore for being catty, she was for now willing to entertain the confessions of a blind telepath.

  “I bet you all fit the same profile,” Serena said with confidence. “Adopted. Had something happen to you in adolescence that made you wonder whether you were fully human or if you were . . . something else.”

  “Maybe you do read minds after all,” Lily said softly.

  From the glum, haunted expressions of the others, Ash could tell Serena had hit a nerve. Nobody offered any testimony to corroborate her theory.

  Serena’s face brightened as she sensed the silent agreement among the group. “You all . . . can do things?”

  Their eyes darted from one to the other, reluctant to engage in this insane game of show-and-tell, but Ash 135

  could sense the confessions perched on the tongues of her schoolmates.

  “Do you want to be alone?” Serena asked when no one stepped up to the plate. “Do you want to walk the earth as aliens among men?”

  Still, the five remained silent.

  A light dawned behind Serena’s chrome eyes. “What if you didn’t have to say anything?” she offered. “What if we could all just see?”

  She didn’t give them time to protest or to process the irony that a blind girl wanted to help them “see.” Instead she stepped into the middle of the circle. “Come close around me until you’re all touching.”

  They grudgingly followed her instruction, crowd-ing around the blind girl until they had imprisoned her within a cell of flesh. Ash could feel the sweat-lined skin of Raja to her right, the touch jarringly intimate for two people who had never demonstrated much like for each other. Ade was to her left, his warm breath spiced with peppermint.

  “Think back,” Serena instructed them. She tilted her head up to the sky—and the world went black.

  The nausea lasted only a minute, but the confusion persisted long after Ash returned to consciousness somewhere in a world beyond this one—a world that once was.

  In the visions that followed, Ash would later remember feeling like a passive participant, placed as a passenger in bodily vessels that weren’t her own. She would remember experiencing every instance of pain, regret, 136

  anger, and fear, but her actions were set in stone, immov-able. The memories she bore witness to were foreign, but planted roots down in the soil of her own memory banks as if she had lived the experiences herself.

  And thus Ashline had her first introduction to the dreamlike periphery of consciousness known as limbo.

  ADE SAINT-CYR

  So this is what it’s like to be a rock lobster in a Crock-Pot.

  You’re hot. White hot. These sizzling Haitian summers are boiling enough to make you want to tear your skin clean off and jump into a bathtub full of ice cubes.

  Your stiff little cot hasn’t fit you right for three years now, and as usual, you wake with your legs sticking right off the end of the mattress, from your bony knees down.

  Your sweat-soaked sheets, tossed away during the night, are bundled on the hardwood floor.

  Escape. A flock of marble-size flies have the same idea. They buzz in frustration against the window—the one Mama nailed shut when you snuck out to see Fabiola again last week—and their fat, bloated bodies rap persistently against the glass. Tappety-tap-tap.

  You pull yourself out of bed, stretching, stretching, stretching until your joints click like castanets. Your elbows are still coated with the dirt and soot of last night’s soccer game, and your knees . . . Oh, if Mama could see you now.

  You slip out of the house. Pepe’s work boots are not 137

  on the doorstep where they should be. Two months since they last were, but you still check every day without fail.

  It’s too hot out to hate him today.

  The ocean waters had time to cool overnight, one of the
perks of living one rusty-bicycle ride away from the shore. You make your way over the rocky “beach,” if you can even call it that. It’s really just a narrow ribbon of stones, tumbled half-smooth by the sea. No wonder you have calluses on your feet, as thick as the hurricane mud. Twelve years on this beach, and you could probably walk on razor blades. Maybe walk on water, too. Like a Haitian Jesus.

  Big Flo is the only one around, sitting out in the shallows on her folding chair, which, as usual, looks like it’s about to collapse. A miracle of engineering, that chair.

  One day it’s going to give out and some poor grouper below’s going to catch hell. Just another victim of wrong place at the wrong time.

  With the aid of the washboard, she is scrubbing away at a pair of Tommy’s play-stained pants with enough force to exorcise them. She’s more likely to tear right through those hand-me-down knees before the grass stains ever come out.

  You ignore Big Flo, strip off your cargo shorts, and walk right out into the ocean, one water-slowed step at a time until you’re submerged right up to your eyelids.

  If anyone looked out from the beach now they’d see only curly dark ringlets and a pair of eyes. Voodoo, man.

  Voodoo.

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  The bay breeze on your face. No barking village dogs.

  Two hours of bodysurfing, just floating free and naked in the blue. You should be still in bed like a normal twelve-year-old, but you’ve chosen sweet, cool freedom.

  It’s even tempting to swim along the ocean floor and grab Flo’s leg underwater. Maybe pop out of the water draped in seaweed. You’ve got the muscle and the lung capacity to pull it off, but Mama will hear about this, and morning swims will probably be a bit difficult when you’re dead.

  Now back to the house to see what chores are waiting for you. As you open the front door with practiced stealth, the sink glares at you. The dishes have been fes-tering there since Thursday’s casserole. You’re going to need the tough sponge.

  This is the first time you find Mama with the pastor.

  They don’t know you’re there, that the cat has pawed the door ajar in his search for food. They don’t know there’s anyone around to hear their laughter, to see Mama’s hand playfully come down on the pastor’s knee as she says “Oh, Albert.” Funny to think that a man of God has a first name.

  And to think for a second you actually thought it was Pepe, come back for you. But there are no work boots on the doorstep, just the last remaining table scraps of your hopes for his return.

  You lie in bed. All that sweat cleansed during your trip to the water has been replaced with a slick new coating, courtesy of the climbing afternoon sun. Between the 139

  simmering heat and your restless turning, you might as well be a pig on a spit. Even as the window-shaped box of sun slithers its way across the floor, the whispers and the giggling from the other room don’t quit.

  It is a small house.

  It’s when you hear the first pop of the wine cork—

  Pepe was saving that one—that your village trembles for the first time. Nothing catastrophic or destructive, just tremors from the restless earth, a digestive fit as though it doesn’t like what it ate. And still you lie there, your eyes fixed on a crack growing in the plaster ceiling, even while you hear Mama shriek with laughter in the kitchen.

  The pastor calls on Mama three more evenings before March roars to an end, and the tremors come with him every time, each one a little angrier than the last, but never enough to break more than a dish or two. And each time, you watch the fissure in the ceiling stretch like a wicked smile, plaster dust raining down on you as the rift grows.

  Over the course of the next week, you overhear some villagers call them “the shakes.” Some say it’s a volcano blossoming offshore. Some think Jesus is announcing the Second Coming and he’s chosen Haiti for the maiden port of his voyage. Big Flo says, “That the devil coming for my son.”

  But you know better.

  Maybe Mama thinks the pastor’s love for her is so strong it moves the earth. She won’t find you out until the pastor calls for dinner on Friday.

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  The three of you sit around the crippled table in the kitchen. It has one leg shorter than the other two, and wobbles every time you pass a dish or sneeze. You’ve considered on more than one occasion that Mama might have sawed the third foot off herself, so she could glower at you the moment you, God forbid, put your elbows on the table.

  It takes a lot to curb your appetite, but the griot pork on your plate hasn’t been touched, and the corn fritters are cooling. The pastor asks a lot of questions about school. School’s out for summer so there isn’t a whole lot to say. The pastor’s collar is damp. He makes a habit of slipping his finger in between the cotton and his neck to let in the air. You imagine a hissing sound every time he does, as if he were a teakettle releasing its steam.

  Mama doesn’t drop the bomb until she brings out the beyen for dessert, still sizzling in the pan. “He’s not going to replace your papa,” she’s saying while spooning the beyen into your bowl, as if fried plantains could soften the blow of a statement like that.

  But you tune her out, focusing on the heat rising off the plantains. Your ears are so hot, they might as well be smoking themselves. And the earth trembles.

  Lightly first. Then the floor shifts sideways, bucking hard, like God is pulling the tablecloth of the world out from under you. The beyen dish, perched precariously on the table’s edge, crashes to the floor in a big pan-fried tropical disaster. The cheap plastic chandelier, the one Mama thought added a touch of “class” to the kitchen, 141

  snaps off the fishing wire hanging it from the ceiling and collapses onto the tabletop, right onto the corn fritters.

  She must see the way your hands so wrathfully grip the wooden armrests of your chair, how your body trembles just as the earth trembles, how your head jerks convulsively just before the big quake roars through the house and the village beyond.

  There is a silence at the table, the eye of Hurricane Mama passing you over. But her expression slowly puckers with the first wrinkles of horror, cascading down into seething fury, and suddenly she’s staring across the table at you like you’re no longer her son but a cancer, some leper who barged in on her dinner, on her life.

  Then she’s got you by the ear, yanks you so hard you come out of the chair, down onto your knees. Her pin-cers close even tighter as she drags you to the door. The shakes aren’t the vibrations of the pastor’s love. They are the echo of your disgust.

  Out in the dusty road leading up to the church, you’re partly stumbling and partly being dragged through the dirt. It’s starting to drizzle. Mama’s words still resonate through the village—sharp words, horrible words, hateful words. “Got the voodoo in you,” she repeatedly mumbles, and, “No son of mine,” followed by strings of curses in Creole and English and every language in between.

  The pastor follows, a little ways behind, his hands impotently by his sides. You catch his eyes flitting side to side as the townspeople come out of their houses, summoned by Mama’s shrieking.

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  On the stone stoop to the church, Mama stops in the silhouette of the steeple, but doesn’t let go of your ear.

  She twists sharply so you drop to your knees. The Pastor is quiet. He looks almost sorry for you, like he wants to intervene.

  Everybody’s watching. Even Fabiola, beautiful Fabiola with the long braids and that smile like sugar cane, is gawking at you like she’s seeing you, the real you, for the first time. The past is already gone, run off with Pepe’s work boots, but now your future is slipping away too as Fabiola backs into the protected shadows of her doorway.

  You release a hollow scream, letting the hate froth and bubble out of your belly.

  The church trembles, and you hear the first crack.

  Then the second. The shadow of the steeple distorts, blossoming, growing.

  The pastor has time only to look up before the steeple comes down
on him, the same steeple that Pepe helped build five years ago, one shingle and one two-by-four at a time, with his hands of love, his hands of faith.

  LILY MAYATOAKA

  It’s cool here. Not the cold of a cloudless winter night but the processed cool of two goliath industrial air conditioners, breathing lukewarm air in, breathing Freon-chilled air out. Knowing Dad and his architectural genius, he probably has those AC units masked and soundproofed in some faux gazebo outside.

  Like all of Kyoshi Mayatoaka’s other creations, this 143

  new indoor arboretum is a masterwork of steel and glass, an amalgam of crisp lines and twists. It is a miracle of modern structural engineering—not a pillar in sight. Just light and sun and glass walls and sterling “perfection.”

  The investors your father is addressing in Japanese as you tour the arboretum—which you understand perfectly, because you’ve spoken Japanese your entire life—love the design and seem ready to move into the adjacent luxury condominiums themselves, with or without their families.

  You hate it, everything about it. The eco-friendly façade. The way it begs for some sort of architectural innovation award, recognition it will most likely receive.

  The way the trees are spaced evenly in three ruler-straight lines, identical in height and pruned into matching orbs, like a row of golf balls, teed up and ready to be driven.

  He’s attempting to replicate nature in modernity. Instead he has only caged nature, omitting the glorious overgrown perfection of it. This arboretum rips the “wild” right out of “wilderness.”

  It is later that evening. Father opted to stay in one of the model condominiums for the night, and you’re along for the voyage. You want to take the metro into the city, but Tokyo is no place for little girls, says father. Tokyo may itself be a testament to man triumphing over nature, but at least it doesn’t pretend, and at the very least it’s not boring. Nothing says fun like watching a muted tele-vision while your father crunches numbers and scours a blueprint or two.

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  You wait until he’s asleep. It’s the fault of his own flawless engineering that the door is as silent as death as you slip out into the foyer. The elevator offers only a disapproving hiss as it ships you down to the bottom floor.