K. Wallace King

Alight

 

It was a white wedding cake of a house. Carved wood curlicues rimmed the front porch like lace doilies under glasses of ice tea. My grandparents’ house was Victorian, a time when women’s dresses followed them as they walked, scraping everything up in their wake; dirt, crumbs, mouse droppings. The paraffin in their petticoats caught fire when they stood too near the fireplace. Whoosh! Up they went. Screaming torches. The flames licked them then loved them to ashes. 

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I have twice dreamed I was burned as a witch. Once in France chained to two women, again in Tennessee, all alone, tied to a tree. In France I bled as the fire consumed me. If you are burned at the stake you will bleed. Skin blisters then pops open. Blood will try to quench the flame but it cannot. Fire takes everything. 

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The front door of the house was painted evergreen. Walk through the gate—reach over and undo the latch. The gate swings inward, inviting you. Close it behind so the cats don’t get out. Grandmother’s cats, the tortie named Mink, the yellow tabby—I can’t remember his name.

They weren’t allowed inside, they were ratters, and had jobs. Not me. I floated that summer in the lake. Algae on the rim a breathing blanket, katydids, the fuzzed murmur of bees in the long grass. Pressed into memory like movie tickets, love notes, in a diary. The lake was a world of living hum that summer. 

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Beside the lake was the family graveyard. I was still small enough to be afraid of ghosts. Gone Home, said a no-bodied hand, finger pointing to the sky. The sky was Heaven, you see, up there where the green cheese moon was pasted. A headless angel stood atop one marble gravestone. I pressed my finger against the carved granite letters of the ancient name we shared.

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I brought her gifts so she would not claw through earth and float into my night bedroom. In matchboxes I brought her beetles with shells that glowed bronze and emerald in sunlight. Bluebird feathers. And flowers from Grandmother’s garden. The sap, still oozing from their broken stems. Thorny red roses which pricked my fingers. I rubbed the blood into the raised letters of her name. I sang. My lips to the hot summer earth, The Surrey With the Fringe on Top, The Rain in Spain.  

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Still she came. I knew in my deepest self I could not possibly stop her from staring from a crack in the closet door, from climbing the wallpaper in spidery shadows in moonlight. From hiding my shoes beneath the bed. She seemed to disappear in the harsh light of the bedside lamp, but electricity merely cloaked her form. Only candlelight showed her true—flame reveals what darkness shields. 

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Grandmother cooked that summer, blue flame turning orange beneath the iron skillet.

Hamburgers. I licked tart yellow mustard off the knife, and ate boiled corn fresh from the field, ears stuck with yellow plastic mini ears, butter dripping down my chin. Your grandfather put out a fire in the barn, she said. Are you listening?

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In Grandfather’s room the tall narrow windows looked out on a field of black angus cattle. Stern dark wood frowned around a blue and red rug with strange faces in the woven pattern if you dared to look. I pawed through a dresser drawer full of the dead: Hello From Yellowstone National Park, a jaunty man beside a Model T, a pale woman with empty eyes and tumbling hair. I could smell smoke. Grandfather’s pipe, propped in a blue glass ashtray with glued on sea shells. His shotgun with double barrels leaning behind the door. He took me hunting that autumn and when he fired at a deer I saw a bright red spark when the gun discharged. That afternoon Grandfather raked leaves into golden piles and set them alight. As the smoke rolled across the fields, I danced around curling leaves, elbows out, head back to howl. 

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Firebug laughed Grandfather, careful.

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A storm was coming, said the radio. Grandfather had shot a turkey, its murdered head hung off the side of the kitchen counter. Out the window I watched a tornado race across the stubbled field behind the house, the mad black swirl scraping up earth, cows, pickup trucks. The wind tried to blow me backward, but I would not go with it. 

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Come down here, hurry, hurry, called Grandmother from the cold basement below, home to spiders and pickled tomatoes, to cabinets with rusted nails in coffee cans. Its rooms of gray cement mirrored the rooms upstairs, existing in a darkness scarcely lit by swinging bulbs pulled to dim light with a hanging string. 

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I found an old lamp still full of fluid. The aroma as sweet and intoxicating as gasoline. Outside the window the sky was black. A tree sailed by, roots its rudder. I lit the wick and freed the flame from its glass dome, watched the brightness lick the curtains cross-stitched long ago by my grandmother. I locked the basement door while below they called me, and pounded the door.  

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Lyssa?

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But I was already outside the house—

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Lyssa 

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Lyssa 

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Lyssa

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—when they called. Our name was caught in the whirling wind. I watched the glass in the windows pop, the white paint blister, peel, in the lick of the flame. 

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Head back, twirling in the ancient dance, we howled.

 

K. Wallace King is a novelist and in the past has worked as a screenwriter. She lives in Los Angeles. Bienvenue au Danse, Wallace!

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