This Dirst I Kneel Beside - story snippet

The Monster Made from Fire

‘For Everything There is a Season.’ The words fluttered and leapt: the cloth on which they were embroidered, old and unmoored at one corner, come loose from its nail. The persistent gale shredded everything in its path: a constant, a companion. A consequence of settling here. The season of the wind.

When she was a child, Emma thought those words meant the literal seasons of summer, fall, winter, and spring. She learned later they were about death. She learned they were about settling a person's mind to the fact that their time on this wind-ravaged earth was finite. They were from the Good Book, a book whose sole purpose, she reckoned, was to put mankind at ease with its mortality. A bedtime story to pacify and placate the populace. Please go quietly. Please work hard, don't murder, give your tithes, and just go quietly.

She set the lamp down at her feet and sucked on the old nail in her mouth, tasting its iron, and rolling the flat end around the insides of her teeth, producing an occasional pang when its rust hit the sensitive parts.

She reached for the corner of the cloth, swearing softly—her boy was asleep in the cabin across—as it evaded her grasp, once, twice, gotcha. She stretched it taut, but not too taut. It was old and its sermon, calligraphic and striking, had been lovingly sewn by her grandmother. Its frame lost somewhere in the move—1841 or near enough to—its whiteness lost to the decades of dust after, dust that no amount of careful scrubbing could restore. She'd hammered it into more than a few boards now and this stubborn corner, frayed and fading, couldn't bear one more nail.

She folded the material; doubling, then tripling the fabric before splaying out her thumb and forefinger and positioning the nail at the thickest part. Three raps with the hammer satisfied her that it was secure, but she still watched a while in the lamplight as it buffeted and billowed like it was breathing of its own accord. It held and she nodded.

'68 ain't the year you're gonna quit.

But the asymmetry of it annoyed her now. She stepped back a few paces, wondered if she should fold all the corners just so to match. Tomorrow. It was coming on 9 pm and John was waiting inside.