We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire

by Joy McCullough

  come not from what

  we’ve chosen to consume.

  My servant, my sister’s

  bones and muscles, sinew, skin

  weigh little more than air

  and yet the crushing weight

  of soldiers laughing

  trousers around ankles

  armor shielding them

  is still upon us both.

  The grand staircase

  is a battlefield.

  Zahra must rest

  every few steps

  but sitting exposed

  is worse than

  the throbbing pain

  of constant motion.

  No audience

  for our descent

  except another maid

  huddled behind a table.

  She joins us

  without a word.

  There are no words.

  We search each nook

  where Helene might hide,

  find two more women

  streaked with blood

  and grime and horror.

  Finally the kitchen

  castle epicenter

  source of sustenance.

  The servants are at home

  but I’m on foreign soil.

  And still without Helene.

  Betsy holds court

  wielding a massive knife,

  hair a wild halo, avenging angel.

  The head cook tenses

  at our arrival then

  slumps back down

  at the sight of us

  half rising when

  she notes my presence.

  Betsy, have you seen

  Lady Helene?

  No, mademoiselle.

  Formality, titles feel absurd

  when all else has been wrenched away.

  But perhaps the structure of our stations

  will be a scaffolding

  on which we all can cling.

  I think some tea

  might do us well.

  The clink and clatter

  as Betsy moves about

  a horrible echo

  of sword on sword

  and barricades breached.

  Breathe, remember,

  her aim is tea

  not carnage.

  My parents who brought me

  into this world

  are dead.

  Helene with them

  in a place with no tea

  or carnage.

  Perhaps Philippe too

  for I find no comfort

  in the thought

  of what lies beyond

  these blood-soaked walls.

  I may be the

  only

  one

  left.

  The fire blazes

  tea scalds my tongue

  but the chill up my spine

  pays no heed.

  Gathered around the table:

  Zahra, shattered, faithful,

  the slightest color

  warming her cheeks,

  grip still tight on my arm.

  Betsy of the perpetual scowl

  who once brained a petty thief

  with a cast-iron pan

  for stealing fresh baked bread.

  Three more women

  gathered along the way.

  Two whose names

  I barely know.

  The third, Matilde,

  old as the stones

  that witnessed the slaughter

  witness to my mother’s birth

  now nearly blind

  retained because Mother

  is severe, but she is not

  without a heart.

  Was not.

  What am I to do,

  responsible for

  all these women?

  Motionless now

  the ragged edges of the horror

  reach out

  snag upon my skin.

  An easy target,

  doe lapping at a stream

  inviting the hunter’s arrow

  and yet

  I cannot move.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I am sprawled on the couch when Mom arrives with takeout, which is the first sign something’s off.

  “Where’s Papi?”

  “Hello to you too, my darling daughter.” She dumps the bags on the kitchen counter and stomps back to their bedroom.

  I get up to investigate the food. When Mom wants me to know what’s wrong, I’ll know. Plus the smell of Gordito’s wafts from the bags. They have these burritos that are literally as big as a baby. The restaurant has photos on the wall of infants lying next to these monster burritos for comparison. We used to get a single burrito and split it four ways for the whole family.

  Inside the bag I find three separately wrapped foil packages.

  When the door slams, I wonder if Mom slipped out her bedroom window to come around and make another pissy entrance. But this time it’s Papi. Who also has takeout bags.

  He doesn’t slam them on the counter like Mom, though. He stands frozen, staring at me in confusion. “Is that . . . for you?” He chin points at the three burritos I’m putting onto plates.

  “For . . . all of us, I assume? Mom brought them home.”

  That unfreezes him. He drops his bags on the counter and stomps off to their bedroom. There’s no way to avoid their rising voices in our tiny house. Plus, I’m kind of curious. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard them yell at each other.

  Papi’s bags contain Korean. I start transferring the food to bowls.

  “I said I’d get dinner!” Papi says.

  “You said you wouldn’t have time to make it!”

  “And that I’d pick something up!”

  “You were being sarcastic!”

  “Why would I be sarcastic about that?”

  I whistle at Chester to follow me so he doesn’t sneak any food off the table, and we march to their bedroom. I knock on the door, but open it without waiting for a response. They both turn to me in shock.

  “Jess is coming over in twenty minutes,” I inform them. “Their parents have actual reasons to scream at each other in bedrooms, given the bitter divorce and all, so they get enough of whatever this is. There is an abundant multicultural feast getting cold on the table, so whatever this is? Maybe it can wait.”

  With that, I return to the table, where I start serving myself bibimbap. This could go any number of ways. We’re all sort of spelunking without a headlamp here. After a shocked silence, they both explode in laughter and I breathe a sigh of relief.

  They give explanations for their short tempers over dinner, even though the real explanation is we’re all fried down to the last wire and could spark at any moment. They ask questions about Jess’s home life, and I remind them of Jess’s pronouns when they mess up. Papi ponders how to handle nonbinary pronouns in Spanish, which is so heavily gendered.

  By the time Jess arrives, my parents are cleaning the kitchen together, talking about taking a salsa class at the community center.

  * * *

  —

  “You’re so lucky.” Jess props their feet up on the railing along the back porch.

  It’s that time of year when the evenings stretch further and further and sometimes it seems like darkness will never fall.

  But it always does eventually.

  I know what they mean, so I don’t say something snarky. I am lucky, in so many ways. I breathe in the last blooms on the neighbor’s lilac tree while Jess’s pencil scritches along a sketch pad.

>   “Can I see?”

  “Not yet.”

  Chester perks up at the sound of a siren in the distance but decides it’s not worth his while and settles back down at Jess’s feet.

  When we were little, anytime we heard a siren, Nor and I used to stop whatever we were doing, no matter what, and turn to each other, clasping both hands, and say, “Fire, sickness, horror, flood, sisters always, heart and blood.”

  I have no idea where it came from. Some creepy fairy tale, probably.

  “Has your dad moved out yet?” I ask Jess.

  Instead of answering, they hold up the sketch pad. They’ve drawn an amazingly intricate sword, the hilt engraved with curlicues and letters I can’t read, the blade somehow catching the light, even though it’s sketched in pencil.

  “That’s gorgeous.”

  “It’s meant to be terrifying.”

  “Well, yeah. If it was pointed at my neck, it would be less gorgeous.”

  On the table between us, Jess’s phone buzzes. They glance at a text, grimace. “Can I spend the night here?” When I don’t answer right away, they add, “I don’t have to if it’s weird. It just sounds like they’re still at it.”

  The relief I feel at the idea of late-night whispers, a person who’d wake if I wake, rushes in so fast it floods me with guilt. Jess is not a replacement for Nor.

  “Of course you can.”

  I leave the notebook I’ve been holding like a shield on the table and go inside to pull out some extra blankets and arrange the hide-a-bed in the living room. I half expect Jess to follow me in and chatter up a storm while I make up a bed. But for once they stay still and quiet, alone except for Chester and the distant sirens.

  Fire, sickness, horror, flood.

  Once I’m done, I make hot cocoa and fill my parents in. They’re all sad, concerned faces, but at least they don’t go out to the patio to smother Jess with loving kindness.

  When I get out there with two mugs of cocoa, Jess’s pencil is back to scratching away.

  “Another sword?” I ask, setting the cocoa down. Then I see that they’re not drawing on their sketch pad. They’re writing in my notebook. Cocoa sloshes across the table, spattering Jess’s abandoned sketch pad as I grab Marguerite from their hands. “What the hell?!”

  “What?!”

  “You can’t write in someone else’s journal!”

  “And you can’t pour coffee all over someone’s sketch pad!”

  “That was an accident! And it’s hot cocoa!”

  The ridiculousness of that distinction dampens my fury, but only a little. “This is private.”

  “You’ve been asking for my help on every little thing! What kind of sword? What’s the castle layout? Clothing? Armor? Where they’d take a shit!”

  I take a careful breath, notice my parents watching us from inside. “That still doesn’t make it okay for you to write in my book.”

  They nod. “Okay. You’re right. I’m sorry. I should have asked. But I didn’t write; I drew.”

  That doesn’t make it better. But it does make me curious. I open the notebook and flip through until I find a page that contains not only my sprawling handwriting, but also a striking medieval sword over an intricate flowered tapestry, ripped and jagged at its bottom edge. But it’s also this incredibly beautiful piece of miniature art.

  I glance up. Jess watches carefully, more vulnerable than I’ve ever seen them.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  They let out a breath. “I was thinking about illuminated manuscripts? Do you know . . . ?”

  I shake my head and sit while Jess pulls up some images on their phone. I’m looking at ornate pages from books—really old manuscripts from way before the printing press. The words look like calligraphy, but what’s notable about these pages are the intricate borders, miniature illustrations, and gorgeous letters beginning each page.

  “Illuminated, because they always had some gold leaf involved,” Jess says, reaching over to scroll through and point out a favorite.

  “They look religious.”

  “A lot are. Originally monks made them. Like, there were monks whose whole job was making these beautiful works of art. But by Marguerite’s time, they weren’t only religious. Books became status symbols. They were superexpensive, because of all the labor.”

  “And the gold leaf.”

  “Right. They sort of fell out of fashion when the printing press came along. But that was after Marguerite.”

  I scroll through some more of the photos. They’re absolutely stunning. I’m not really a fine-art person, but I can’t stop looking at these, all the detail, all the time poured into them. Books as status symbols, stories valued so much they were cast in gold.

  “Marguerite’s story is worth illuminating,” Jess says carefully.

  “Yeah. It is.”

  FLAY

  The crack of a twig

  alerts the doe

  she’s no longer

  safe at the stream.

  A man’s shout

  propels me to my feet.

  Some dive for shelter

  while Betsy wields her knife;

  one of the new girls

  grabs a broom, I grasp

  for something, anything

  but this is not an armory

  and there’s no time.

  A man bursts through

  the door; a surge of fury

  sends me lunging, clawing

  at his face, but Betsy

  yanks me back.

  Master Philippe!

  My brother’s wild eyes

  and his desperation are

  blunt-edged reminders

  our parents have been slaughtered, and—

  Helene?

  He barely sees me, hell-bent on

  the only survivor who matters.

  I haven’t . . .

  I couldn’t—

  My brother’s voice tears a sob

  from my gut, the crescendo

  of a keening wail that started

  the moment the first dragon

  breathed its all-consuming fire.

  I never cried as a child

  when he cut off my braids,

  stole my sword, bested me in races.

  My cry pierces his armor, brings

  him to his knees as well.

  I thought she’d stay alive

  until I found her, blessed her

  but wading through the massacre

  has erased all doubt.

  Helene is dead.

  Philippe sees but doesn’t

  the women all around us

  stripped to their cores

  with nothing left but horror.

  He asks not after Mother, Papa;

  if either lived all eyes

  would turn toward them.

  Helene is dead.

  I don’t realize

  how desperately

  I long for embrace

  until he reaches out

  but only yanks me

  to a corner.

  You must take these women.

  Go immediately

  to the Sisters at Salette.

  One day’s ride to the south.

  You’ll be taken care of there.

  I cannot stay in this fortress of horrors

  but neither can I set out on the open road.

  Both prospects terrify in equal measure.

  What life awaits me in a convent?

  What death awaits me in the world?

  And what of you?

  Me?

  There’s the Philippe I know

  looking at his kid sister

  as tho
ugh she were ridiculous.

  I’m going to find these bastards

  and flay them open, end to end.

  Before I can argue, he’s gone.

  I’m left with the task of shepherding

  these women, injured, traumatized,

  into the mountains.

  But

  you’ll be safe there.

  We aren’t safe now.

  Even if the monsters don’t return

  the life we knew here

  has been drowned in blood.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Maybe we could do the whole thing in the traditional style. Like, use the same sort of parchment and ink and stuff. When you’re done writing.”

  Since I’ve started letting Jess doodle in the margins of my draft, they have been moping about their parents a lot less. Still sleeping over at my house more than half the time, though. The second night they fell asleep in my room, and we haven’t bothered with the hide-a-bed again. Which has led to pointed questions from my parents, who fall all over themselves telling me how much they like Jess. “We want you to know you can always talk to us about stuff,” Mom said yesterday, curiosity barely concealed.

  Jess’s focus on what Marguerite’s story might be when it’s finished is kind of antithetical to what I’m doing. I don’t know what it’ll be; I don’t know if it’ll ever be finished.

  But I’m letting them drag me downtown to look at illuminated manuscripts.

  A woman wearing everything she owns gets on the bus and slides into the seat in front of us. Jess digs around in their bag and when we’re getting off at the next stop, they hand her a ten-dollar bill.

  “I thought divorce was expensive,” I say as we step onto the busy sidewalks of downtown.

  They shrug. “Not as expensive as poverty in Seattle.” Looping our arms together, they pull me toward the Seattle Art Museum.

  The woman on the bus has somewhere to sit, unbothered, out of the sun for a while. I’m startled by how many tents line the streets, even in this swanky part of downtown. Somehow I didn’t notice when we were here for the trial. Maybe these people, stripped to nothing in a city built on so much opulence, stay away from the courthouse because clearly justice is not in their favor.

  Or maybe I didn’t notice because I was too wrapped up in my own thing.