Spell

Spell

To open all closed things

The land thinks, it’s seen it all before and it’ll see it again.  It knows this.  Red blood on green grass – a clash of colours that it soaks up because it has to.

At the entrance to the root cellar, the woman lies still, save for the up-down movement of her chest and the fish gape of her mouth as she struggles for breath.  The other woman kneels by her, keening.  “Come on Bebe, you can make it.  Come on, I know you can.  I love you.”

The land hears the pain in the woman’s voice and it recognises it for its own.  It’s what it feels when trees are ripped out of it by men or storms.  When terrible holes are rent in its earth.  When things that are meant to stay closed are opened.

By the barn, the land sees the boy.  He’s hunched over with his hands in front of him and he’s picking through the small stones like he’s lost something, or he’s sifting for gold.  His shirt is off and the child he was is still there in the soft, white flesh of his stomach.

The boy’s face and arms are bloody and the instrument of this blood lies to the left of him.  Used, inoffensive now.  It’s not the knife he’s looking for in the stones.  He’s avoiding looking at the woman by the root cellar because the knife is the instrument of her blood too.  “I’m sorry, Aunt Bebe”, he whispers.  “I didn’t mean to.  I didn’t mean to.”

Around the woman’s head, blood is spreading and congealing like the unfurling of great, black wings.  The land watches with interest. Here, there are consequences.  Here, bones will grow.

*

To make hail stop

Colt thinks, she’s doing it on purpose and it’s not the first time.  Looking at him as though she can see deep into his insides.  As if she can hope to explain him if she’s peered into every nook and cranny.  He wishes he knew how to tell her to stop, but how would he even broach the subject?  So, instead he thinks he’ll show her with action.  Take the matter into his own hands.

Colt’s thoughts are lists and imperatives.  Harsh, short words to himself.  He’s thinking about soap, candles and pig fat.  He’s thinking about lardy Aunt Bebe come to live with him and his mother on the farm.  Everything is grease – white-grey, clinging, tainting his clothes.

Last year, when he’d stayed at his grandfather’s over the dale, he’d read one of the books by the fireplace, dusty and fragrant with woodsmoke.  A book of spells.  A book of instructions.

Put your palms of your hands against your thighs.  Look upward to the sky, to the moon.  Then turn and face east and kneel down.  Put beans in the mouth of a skull – two in the nostrils, one in each eye and in each ear.

Bury the skull with the face upwards and sprinkle with water.  When you go back the next day, sprinkle the skull with brandy.  When it asks, “what are you doing here?” Answer, “I’m watering plants”.

When it replies, “Give me the bottle so I can water them too”, refuse.  It will demand again and refuse again.  Return on the ninth day and the crop will have matured – twisting, pale tendrils pushing through eye sockets and other holes.

Colt believes none of this shit, but he likes the words and the certainty of a plan.

He waits for Aunt Bebe in the kitchen, knowing her need for food from the pantry will make him invisible and certainly, she’ll not notice the meat knife he hides behind his back.  When he follows her outside, he sees she’s making for the root cellar – for what purpose he’s unclear, but he suspects a guzzle of the cherry preserve or a snaffle of the earthy carrots.

Colt’s head is banging loudly and for a minute, the hail surprises him.  It’s come from nowhere out of an unbearably blue sky.  It clatters hard on the barn’s corrugated metal roof, rendering his own internal noise trivial.  The air is sharp and metallic and Colt has never thought so clearly.

He trails after Aunt Bebe into the root cellar, momentarily perplexed by the cobweb of hoar frost forming on the wood of the door.

*

For speaking with the dead

Aunt Bebe thinks, it isn’t the end of the world.  She’s still here, isn’t she, albeit changed.  Mutated into something else – part-flesh, part-metal.

She hasn’t plucked up the courage or verve or something, to visit him where he is yet.  No one’s putting any pressure on her to do this in any case; but for her everything seems so unfinished.  So fucking temporary.  But when’s all said and done, he’s still her blood.  Her history, and he’s made her what she is today. 

Since The Day as she thinks of it, Bebe hasn’t dreamed when she sleeps.  At least, she supposes she does still dream, but she remembers no fragment at all.  She does though have a far more acute sense of smell and it’s hard for her sometimes to distinguish between real smells and possibly hallucinatory smells.

There are the reliable scents from the pots of lavender near her sister’s back porch.  There is the musk of the tomcat when it bristles home after a fight.  But often, in the middle of the day, she smells blood-iron and the wild, electric hormones of a frightened, teenage boy.  Sometimes, there is the shocking smell of snow on wet earth.

Perhaps she should forgive him, but she knows she’s not ready to yet.  If she ever did, it would only be a sop to make her sister feel forgiven for bringing him into the world.  Bebe accepts any one thing can happen at any time and what happened to her was as mysterious and unknowable as the wing of a crow, or the words of the dead if they could talk.

Sometimes, on cold days, Bebe likes to wheel herself to the back door of the house and sit in its entrance looking out into the garden.  Her sister knows to leave her alone there and it’s a respite for both of them from the tyranny of her care.

When Bebe feels the freezing metal of her chair, her fingers can stick to it and it occurs to her that no-one really wants the world in winter, apart from her.  It makes her smile when she cranes her neck to look up at the rusting windows of the house and the beautiful patterns the raggedy curtains around their frames make.

*

To make yourself invisible

Fleur thinks, I remember you when you were a little boy.  You were so compact and complete from the beginning.  An old soul is what they say.  Sometimes at night, I would look over your cot, not daring to touch you for fear of waking you and I would repeat – I made your eyes, I made your nose, I made your mouth.

In the room you’re in now, you’ve said you don’t want to see me.  I don’t know if that’s fear speaking; or shame.  Bebe was…is…your aunt, my sister; but you are my son and that’s more precious.  All I want is to be in the same room as you and hold your hand.  Rest my head on your shoulder.  Can you be comforted?

They sent me a photograph of you a couple of weeks ago – to prove you were still alive more than anything else, I think.  I’d had dream after dream where I couldn’t find you.  Where I was searching around the farm, in the fields and the woods to find where you might be hiding.  Or worse was the dream when you were dead. The one where I discovered you in the root cellar, in a box next to the crates of onions and old turnips.

You looked older, thinner – less distinct – in the photograph and I wondered if you were not dead yet but instead becoming invisible to the world.  Is this an act of will on your part? Self-punishment for what you did?

If it is, let me become invisible with you.  Let us fade into hail and hoar frost in the fields.  If you go back into the earth, let me go with you.  In the same hole, buried again under the snow.

*