Reason and the Sun

The house was secluded. The kind of lonesome that forces lonesome people together. You would think that, stuck together, miles from the nearest town, and many more miles from the nearest metropolitan city, and on the inside of a fence that had been made to impale birds or zombies or teenagers on top of it, that the residents would discover camaraderie among them. But lonesome people are crown shy, growing near together, never touching, living without reaching. When there was no entertainment to be had elsewhere, they turned to one another. The residents were as thrilling and disposable entertainment as the internet.

There was Arcturus, who could never get a moment alone. He was impossible to hide, not because of any physical abnormalities, or a loud booming voice. If anyone wanted to find him, he was found. Arcturus was a formality for the House Advisors. Elsewise, he was GPS. Then there was Tucana, with the body of a vestel virgin, and a similar inability to be left alone. Mostly male residents followed her about; occasionally females as well. She has eyes like a silent movie star, and a smile unfairly like a sphinx. She is reluctantly magnetic, loving when she doesn’t want to be, loved when it was nothing but painful. And then Pisces, with the head of a lion, and a lion’s tale. When he tries to eat as daintily as he can, to avoid stains in his mane, other residents ask if they can ride him, or ask to hear his mighty roar, though the mightiest roar his human throat has ever produced happened when he stubbed his toe on a door jamb.

There is no collective noun for us. “Herd”, or “flock”, or “parliament” don’t quite cut it. There is no precedent requiring a collective noun for out kind. No one who is qualified to name us knows us. Crows are called a murder; it is the most accurate title I can think of.

I’m one of the few who doesn’t expect entertainment from the residents, not because I am one of the most normal, not because I’m distant either. I’ve heard it all. “Where’s Icarus? Too far to get to in a day.” I have never called down a storm of lightning when I’ve gotten angry. I’ve never changed forms for the sake of a prank. I’ve never had to regrow an organ, or tuck a tail into my bottoms, or tailor my clothing to allow for an appendage no one else has to allow for. There is nothing to indicate what my purpose is, what I was meant to do, why I bear this name. Many residents have a guess; many don’t. Know one truly knows the answers for certain. They know only the house.

It used to bother me a little. Now it bothers me a lot.

There are hazards, boxing our kind together in the same room. Always the chance we could kill a visiting tutor, a visiting tailor, any kind of visitor, an advisor, a cook. Or, the worst possibility, each other. Our kind does not go quietly.

The hazards used to bother me a lot. Now they are background noise, as indistinguishable as the days.

The house is a cobbled together cornucopia. It is always what we need, no more and no less. When there are more residents, there are more rooms. When the weather is fine, there are more open walls and large windows. When the weather is cruel and inconsiderate, the walls are thicker, the windows smaller. There are whole sections of the house decorated with leaf patterns everywhere. Within, the baseboards are carved with leaves. Without, the lintels are carved with curling ivy. The red brick glows autumnal when the sun is out. Other sections of the house are paper thin, the walls nothing more than removable screens on rails, some decorated with gruesome and fine pictures of dragons or beheaded maidens or flowering plum trees. The nightingale floors in these parts of the house make it nearly impossible to walk through without playing a groaning symphony. Then there are the domed rooms, or the slating rooms, the ones decorated with devotional stained glass windows. They are dreary and grey, except for the ceiling, which is azure, interrupted by ribs covered in gold leaf. The windows are slender, intricate, glass painting kaleidoscopic patterns on the floors. These rooms, filled only with dim coloured light, make me think of tombs, the kind where goddesses are found sleeping, or kings are buried to never be found.

It is in one of the rooms decorated with ivy where we are allowed to lounge. It is meant for relaxation in the winter, though the walls radiate so much cold that no one sits near them, and as a result the room is functionally smaller. In the summer we congregate in the screen rooms, where we can remove the walls and look into the garden as the jasmine blossoms or the wisteria curls. In the ivy room, I can see the wind push the dead trees outside so fiercely that lesser roots unearth themselves and toss dirt clods into the wind currents. Residents eat, chuckle, frolic, and curse benignly in this room. They might be birds here. Rushing, pretty birds. A shimmer of hummingbirds.

Tojil straddled a bench several tables away, flicking a flame between his hands, cupping it in his palms when it began to waver, tossing it with a little showmanship when it blazed again. His eyes followed it, because they were disconnected from his thoughts. He looked bored, which meant he was thinking. He snapped his fingers. The fire ravaged his hand. He leaned his chin on his other hand and looked through the fire to my table. A brief and furious rain extinguished the fire in his palm; he stood up. Someone at his table made a grab for him as he left, but even his minions, who would follow him into trouble, would not follow him to my table. He straddled the bench on the opposite side of the table and looked at me sideways.

“Evenin’, Icarus,” he said in a tone like sunshine. He always managed to make sunshine sound damning, like it was exclusively for displaying a person’s rough edges or faults.

I looked at his dark face, his full-lipped smile, his heavy eyes and dark brow like he had never seen a single shadow in his life. “Evening, Tojil.”

“You look lonely.” He tapped his fingers on the table beneath us. It was some kind of fake marble that did not singe under his touch. Deliberately installed by the House Advisors when the old tables were too covered with black handprints to be used as decent flat surfaces. His fingertips left small silver puddles on the fake marble instead. He tilted his head toward the trail he left behind. “There’s space.”

“Thanks, but not my thing. I like the quiet,” I said. I popped an olive in my mouth. It wasn’t olive season, I thought, but there were olives anyway, as ripe as if they never went out of season. It was one of the house’s beneficent mysteries.

“I can tell,” Tojil replied. “That’s why I asked. It’s getting rowdy, because we were just talking about how rowdy we can get, and how bad that is for everyone out there. We could use some of that quiet.”

I leaned back. Tojil was so determinedly ebullient that it required physical distance to see that he wasn’t doing anything different from the average person. There should have been no reason for him to seem as immediate as he did. It made me uneasy, like he was polished and a real person, and I was as transparent as a book that had been left in the sun too long. “I’m just here for the olives,” I said.

“Freak,” he said, smiling blithely. “I asked one of the cooks if they come from Greece or if they’re homegrown somehow. If they are imported, it’s the closest we’ll ever be to Greece. I was going to mention it to Professor Lima, get his take on it. See if he thinks we’d be able to even go to a store to get our own.”

“A store,” I said. “Off school grounds. Which isn’t going to happen. Are you really going to ask him if you can leave?”

“What’s he going to say no for?” Tojil said. “A few students at a time, supervised. We can’t do anything. We keep a lid on the funny business.” He tapped a finger on the marble and it flared like a candle briefly. “As long as no one dies, should be fine.”

I spat a pit into an ashtray. “I don’t think it’s the dying they’re worried about. I think they’re more worried we’ll sneeze and roast a parking lot full of people with the lightning that comes out our noses. Then it’s the government or something, we get killed, and then civilians are really fucked.”

Tojil’s smile stayed put. It was interesting. I thought all of his real expressions must be taking place underneath it. Perhaps that was why he seemed so alive. “Do you believe that theory that if more than three of us die at one time, we’d blow up the world? Come to the table, Icarus, and discuss.”

“I don’t. That’s the discussion,” I said. “I’ve got a lot of olives here to finish.”

He made a small gesture at his chest like he had finished performing an impressive trick and turned back to his table. Ten minutes later, Xihe lost his temper during a game of mancala and briefly flared, setting the books at the surrounding tables alight and temporarily blinding several residents. As I waited for my vision to return, I thought I had been exactly right.

Our rooms were divided. Larger rooms hosted more residents. It might have been unfair, but those of us who shared a room to only two or three had to navigate our way around beds one at a time to keep from brushing up against one another constantly. I shared a room with two other people, and if someone was standing rather than sitting on their bed, I had to leap frog over two beds to get to the door. The room once had screens for walls before a resident pointed out that shining a light through the screens rendered them all but transparent. Not it is wood-paneled, and it reminds me of a library. The door is unlocked, and when I am in the room, it is open by a few inches. I am no senior to the other residents of the house, but I have been here for years, and the advisors trust me enough to take care of the other residents’ lesser problems. Most of them would rather deal with their issues themselves than discuss them with the wind off the glacier, but even with my roommates gone, the room is usually occupied by someone other than myself.

Zarauk twisted his hands together as he sat on the end of the bed beside mine. He is young, but his eyes are permanently squinted, as though he’s spent years in the sun. He has beautiful freckles across his nose and hands, and chapped lips and red cheeks. On most days, you can smell salt on him. He looked at the wall opposite the bed.

“How long are we in the house?” he asked. “We can’t live here forever. There’s no one old here. We have to leave at some point. Where to?”

“I have no idea,” I said. I sat on my own bed and offered him tea I knew he would turn down. He didn’t like sweet drinks, or sweet anything. I put the tea on the floor at the end of my bed, because the table between my bed and my roommate’s was only large enough for the lamp on it. “Are you scared to leave, or do you want to?”

Zarauk stared at the wall. He squinted at it, even though it was dim in here with just the lamps on, and there was nothing to see. His cheeks looked particularly slapped today. He licked his chapped lips. They always looked uncomfortably painful to me. He breathed in, but it sounded shallow, like this air was the wrong sort for him. “I keep having this feeling,” he said, finally, “like I’m not supposed to be here. Icarus, I think I’m meant to be there.”

He was looking at the photo of the ocean. Not a photo- just a drawing. Of a dark sea beneath a miniscule boat. His mouth hesitated, so I was silent.

“Out there,” he said. “On that boat. I think that’s exactly where I’m meant to be.”

“Za-za.” I avoided kicking over my tea and took a smell step to the next bed. I sat down and bumped his shoulder with mine. He was brawny under his knit sweater. I could never tell if he did something differently from the rest of us, or if he just grew that way. I didn’t tell him he would be on a boat like that one day. I didn’t tell him he would be leaving the house soon, and that waited for him on the outside of it. “Play a round of Spit?”

Zarauk tilted his head, then nodded. “Yeah, all right.” As we drifted toward the lounge for a pack of cards, other residents, bored or fighting or bored of fighting, or wanting and recognizing someone else who wanted, were caught up in our current and drifted after us. One game turned into several, then turned into a Due South marathon, before I decided it was too late and we couldn’t stay up all night.

If we stayed up all night this night, we would want to stay awake all nights, the way it seemed we were all made. The House Advisors had been teaching us to sleep at night for years. I wouldn’t ruin their efforts in one night.

“Ow, fuck.”

I sat up and blinked. Then blinked again. The room was blackness and the muted green glow of my digital alarm clock. At three in the morning, that’s all it should have been. But there was a voice as well.

“Icarus. God’s sake. I thought you would have a bigger room. I hit my knee twice getting to your bed.”

It was a miracle he hadn’t woken my roommates. I sat up and went to push off the covers at the same moment someone touched my foot over the blanket. If the voice wasn’t familiar, it would have shocked all the daylight of the rest of my days out of me.

“I’m not turning on the light,” I said. “So move, so we can both leave.”

A flame flickered mid-air. A moment later, when my eyes adjusted, I saw it wasn’t midair. It hovered above Tojil’s dark hand. He leaned over the end of my bed, holding the flame like it was a bird that had landed fortuitously in his palm.

“Light’s not the only problem. You’re a loud talker. Get rid of it before you burn your face off,” I said.

“Kind of you to be worried,” he replied.

I pushed at his leg with my toes, which was easy because the bed was very nearly too short. If I shuffled down a couple inches, my heels hung off the end of it. He extinguished the flame only when I’d gotten out of bed. The darkness was darker now that there had been light in it, but we moved carefully along the wall to the doorway, and from there to one of the lounges.

I turned on a lamp. Tojil’s face was all shadows, from darkness and his furrowed brows.

“This is where I tell you that you’re committing a double offense,” I said. “For being out of your bed, and for being in my bedroom, past curfew.”

“You don’t care.”

“Not right now. Right now, I care about sleep. So what’s so important that you had to come disrupt mine instead of some other advisors’?”

 Tojil looked around the lounge. Someone had gone to the trouble of decorating it with photographs and paintings so it wasn’t just another room of carved leaves. The House Advisors hadn’t approved at first, but for every photo they’d taken down, two more appeared, and eventually they conceded. There was a picture every twelve inches along the wall. Of white-capped purple mountains far away in a snow-spun landscape. Buttercup-coloured fruit in trees on a bush-dense hillside. A forest so red and orange with autumn it looked like a raging, smoke-less fire. A tangerine temple peering through a dense cloud of white jasmine and yellow gingko trees.

“You like the quiet, Icarus,” he said, still watching the wall, chin tilted up to make a long strained line of his neck. He looked so immediate now it was as though he’d been sleeping through our conversation earlier. He was taking apart the photograph of the red and orange trees. “And the rest of us like to pretend evolution for us ended before we could be bothered to grow brains.”

He lifted a hand to the picture to touch it. I made an aborted movement, wondering if he meant to singe it or if it was about to be covered by a water stain in the shape of his hand. He touched the corner of it, then dropped his hand. It was unmarked. “You always come to this room, when you’re reading or drawing or anything. Because of the pictures, right? Which one do you want to visit?”

“Hm, this doesn’t sound like a conversation about you,” I said.

“I didn’t say it was,” Tojil said. He still hadn’t looked at me. He tucked his hands into his jean pockets and rocked back on his heels.

“So you bumped your knee twice in my room to not talk about you?”

Tojil’s expression was streaky in the partial light, but it struck me suddenly that he wasn’t pretending to be troubled just to be awake at night. I hadn’t know he’d had it in him to be this vulnerable, but I couldn’t think of another word for it. The softness in him made my voice softer as well. “It’s a pretty bad punishment to be out of your bed past curfew, Tojil. I don’t think you did it just to play twenty questions.”

When he turned to, throwing half his face in shadow, he looked strange and dangerous. I wondered who he was, quickly, before he became familiar again. “I want to know why I’m here.”

I had nothing to say to that. There was nothing constructive to say, nothing helpful. He knew all the answers I could possibly have for that.

“We’re stuck here, that’s obvious,” he said. “I think that means we deserve to know why we’re here. Why we are, or what we are, at least. This is our life, the house. I thought life was like that for a while, just living in a house forever, following the rules, but that’s only our lives. We should have this, at least. To know why. Where we came from.”

“What are you asking of me?” I asked.

“I’m asking for you to tell me you like the quiet too much to let me do anything stupid. Tell me that it won’t solve anything. It’ll likely just make more problems. If we don’t know why we’re here then there’s a good reason for it. I don’t have any reasonable in me, Icarus, so it has to be you.”

I had never believed people who claimed to be speechless, but now that I was grasping for words, opening my mouth, and they weren’t coming, I had to concede that it was possible to be speechless. I hadn’t know he would rely on me for that. I took stock of what I felt. Surprise that I was a wet blanket. Dimly hopeful I wasn’t a wet blanket, just reliable. I didn’t know if his saying it that way prompted me to respond the way I did, or it if was what I truly thought. The whole moment was too mixed up to untangle. “You can’t ask that of me,” I said. “’Cause I don’t think that’s an unreasonable thing to ask. It wouldn’t hurt anyone to just ask a question.”

Tojil sat on the table and leaned forward. This way, he was hardly taller than me. The longer he looked at me, the more I was sure he could see how much I, too, wanted the answer to that question. Why I wanted to know why I was here when I didn’t shape shift or catch fire or blind people or do anything but give people hope or take it away.

“Well then, I guess I’ll ask,” he said. Half his mouth smiled, a smile that came from smiling alone. “Good talk, Icarus.”

He leaned back. Something flickered across his face as he did, or it might have been the shadows, shifting over his jaw and nose. “I’ll ask,” he said again.

I made a small flourish at my chest, to tell him I’d worked my magic and he was welcome. “Great, now back to bed,” I told him.

Tojil and I didn’t have many classes together. I didn’t see him until the end of the next day, during evening meal, when he took his place at his usual table. He didn’t venture over. He didn’t foray anywhere, including into the conversation of his minions. They allowed him his solitude, probably thinking he was just in a mood. He might have been, except Tojil’s temper didn’t look like this. He touched the tip of each finger to his thumb, one after the other, in a way that wouldn’t have been threatening had it been anyone else, but the way he did it suggested he was using the gesture to make a decision, and at the end of that decision, someone would get hurt.

He’d asked.

Guilt lanced through my throat. I should have advised him to forget about it. An answer wouldn’t make him happy. I should have said what I’d said to Zarauk.

I should have gotten up, gone over there, shook him into his usual expression, but several residents at my table were complaining about having a television in the same room as a foosball table, because competitions got too loud to actually hear the television. By the time I’d settled them all, Tojil had vanished. I pictured his fingers on the corner of the photograph of red trees, his face striped with the dark.

The bed was so small I rolled right into my roommate’s feet. He’d leapt onto my bed from his and was bouncing up and down. My head lolled as I struggled to wake up fully. I was still caught in a dream, it seemed. When Pollux shouted at me, I realized the screaming was not a thread of a dream I hadn’t forgotten yet. The screaming came from the hallway.

“Icarus!” Pollux reached down and shook my shoulder. Castor was behind him in a hoodie, looking like he wanted to pull Pollux away. “Get up. There’s a fire in the house! From the garden!”

My body wasn’t entirely mine, so when I lurched out of bed, I nearly fell over. There was too much light in the room for the middle of the night. The lamps were off. Red light bled pressed against the window.

On the other side of it, the courtyard blazed. Embers helixed high above the fire. It was so large and bright that the trees it had swallowed were just shadowy impressions. They would soon be gone completely in the flames. Smoke bruised the dark sky and tripped over the roof of the house where it turned a corner and curled back toward the other end of the house. Some of the House Advisors had gathered, holding their sleeves or collars over their mouths. They’re recruited some residents- Belel, Axólotl, Pincoya- to begin putting it out. They held their arms out- water flowed into the courtyard, rained down through the smoke, pinwheeled from Pincoya’s hands, even as the flames leaped higher. They all tumbled back as the flames skipped over an azalea bush. Residents stood at the far end of the courtyard, evacuated. I couldn’t see the part of the house that was on fire, but that only meant it was too close to us.

I pulled on a sweater and told the boys to followed the House Advisor’s instructions in the evacuation, then tore into the hallway. Residents ran in one direction; I ran in the other.

“Icarus, wrong direction, I think,” Professor Lima said. He stood in the hallway, between myself and a closed door where smoke was beginning to curl out from under it.

“The fire,” I said. I didn’t know what I was saying, just that I had to say something.

“Will be put out. It’s all being handled,” he said. He had a voice like glacier water. “Please assist the younger residents in the evacuation.”

I bit down on his name, which took more effort and felt like I had actually bitten down on my tongue. “Did anyone get hurt?”

“It’s being handled, Icarus,” Professor Lima repeated. He uncrossed his arms and made a shoo-ing motion at me, expression wry. “It’s got nothing to do with you, Icarus. Your calm can be a help right now, if you please.”

That was a lie. I was anything but calm.

In the morning, one end of the house was covered in tarps. I walked down the hallway I had been stopped in during the night. It was like walking out of the house and into a battlefield. The remains of the house were blackened, all charred bones and strange sculptures where plastic had melted, and pits where something especially flammable had hit the ground. Something that might have been a support beam lay on its side. Only one side of it had suffered. The other side was smooth wood, with two singe marks about the size of a finger and thumb. Other bits and pieces were marooned in the blackened ground. Ashes scudded over everything like black dust.

The dread was an awful feeling, as bad as if I’d witnessed the beginning of the fire. My nostrils stung with the acrid, charred scent. I could almost feel the rage that had ignited the flames, looking at the piles of glass next to smashed window frames, the painting frames that glinted dully with fake gold paint. It wasn’t just fire. The house had never had a fire like this.

I walked away from the house, toward the mess of the courtyard.

Professor Lima stood at the edge of the damage. It was impossible to tell from his face if he was considering the trees that had stood before him, or if he was already planning the trees that would grow in their stead, once the top layer of soil had been replaced. He didn’t look surprised to see me.

“I want to talk to him,” I said. “Can I?”

“What makes you think that’s a good idea?” Lima asked.

Quiet, I thought. I tried to project whatever calm it was that Tojil saw in me. “It can’t do any harm. I might be able to help. That’s why I’m the unofficial resident advisor, isn’t it?”

Lima sighed, as though I’d already done it and he was glad to have it over and done with. “I don’t think it’ll do you any good.”

But he led me back into the house, to the solitary room, where I had never been. I didn’t know what a solitary room might look like. I’d seen rooms in the house without other residents in them, but always there was the promise of another resident coming by soon. There wasn’t any space to be truly alone for long here. I had imagined the solitary room as a closet, or a white room devoid of furniture, or a very plain bedroom without any books or cards or a television. It looked like one of the screened-in rooms, all white, with one picture in it of several clouds floating above a tranquil green meadow, and a single window too high up to look through. There was a very small table in one corner, and a thin blanket in the middle of the room. On it, back to me, head bent, sat Tojil.

Lima waited until I was inside, then shut the door behind me. There was no lock. There was nothing to keep Tojil in here. There was nothing to keep Tojil doing anything, but he was here, doing nothing, anyway. I walked up behind Tojil and sat down, facing his back. He must have heard me, but it took him a full minute to turn and face me.

I recoiled. His dark eyes had been swallowed by fire. I knew where he was looking only because his pinhole pupils were pointed at me, through the orange gold haze of them. He looked like something ancient, something that wasn’t to be touched. The eyes warned that this variety of person was not safe to approach.

“Reliable. Knew you’d visit,” he said.

“Then you knew as well I’d tell you that this isn’t the best way to stop being angry,” I said.

He grinned, pleased as a viper.

“What’s your theory, Icarus? Tell me why we’re here,” Tojil said.

“To not burn ordinary people to crisps?” I suggested. “To not drown them with rain, or accidentally make their husbands fall in love with us, or bring a lightning storm down on their houses?”

“I don’t think they’re trying to keep us from the normal people so we don’t kill them,” Tojil said. “I think they’re trying to keep us from the normal people because what are they striving for if they can never do what we do? Because now they’ve kept us in here too long and they’re worried about what we’ll do when we find out we’ve been kept here all this time because they’re jealous.”

I waited. There was more breath in him. His eyes flickered.

“Let’s get out,” he said. “Head for some waves. Or sun. Whichever you want, Icarus.”

I bit my tongue.

“Be reasonable, Icarus. For me. Say no.”

I leaned in, until our foreheads nearly touched. I put my hand on his knee, next to his. His fingers were pinkened, as though the fire had gotten to be too much at some point, even for him.

“It’s completely unreasonable,” I told him. “It’s a bad idea.”

“Say no,” Tojil said.

“Did it tell you why you’re this way?” I asked him.

He shook his head. I was close enough to feel his hair against my brows. “I saw your file in Lima’s office. I know why you’re here, Icarus. And I’m saying we should head for the sea.”

“A really bad idea,” I repeated. Soon, everyone would have realized what had happened, when they noticed Tojil missing. There would be questions, suspicious looks. He wouldn’t be soon forgiven.

Something outside hollered. A raven. When I glanced at the tiny window, several ravens soared past it. An unkindness. That was the name for a bunch of ravens.

Tojil put his mouth to my ear as I squeezed his knee. “Or do you prefer the sun?”

“They’re both bad ideas,” I said, then I stood up, pulling him with me, and to the door. His hand in mine was fire-hot. As if it were contagious, I felt as vital as he was.

Art by Syd Mills

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Nuevo Santuario

Emmett had never been overseas. Not as an affluent child, and so far not as an affluent adult. He was surrounded by those who had travelled so much that there was no more sense of the exotic, just a sense of less haggard. Emmett came from Yorkshire, was careworn from it, and landed in Cuzco, a twenty-hour journey if you only had two layovers, which he did. Yorkshire was a place that was green, but you would be inconvenienced to see the greenery beneath perpetual fog and mist and clouds. There were purple fields rolling drowsily on the horizon. There was sourceless birdsong. Blackthorns spiked driveways and walking paths in public parks. Public buildings were lined like teeth at the edge of the street, everything perfectly laid against its neighbours. There was no space for conflict, architecturally or otherwise. Emmett might have worked in some online industry, or a burgeoning software development start-up, some workforce that required being plugged in to work. He was good with systems. He was probably the golden boy of whichever system he’d been installed in.

Until he left with no word. Two years into university. Two days into his spring semester classes. He left his notes on his desk and left his 8 a.m. class at 9 a.m. and got into his car and drove to the bank to take out two thirds of his savings. He used half of one of his last gigabytes of data to find a seat sale for a local airline. It took him two hours to find a series of flights to take him to cuzco in the next twenty-four hours, and another hour to drive to the airport. Then he left the car in the parking lot and went through security. In the following twenty hours, the signs in the airports transformed from English to Spanish. The view out of the window greened. He slept in a chair. He had never done that before. Most people did that during layovers, but he didn’t know that.

Later, he told me he had been worried about missing his flight, especially because he’d left his phone charger behind and his phone had no power with which to set an alarm. He hadn’t been thrilled like that in a long time. He couldn’t breathe properly.

I didn’t tell him that when I met him was the first time I felt I could breathe properly.

Nuevo Santuario stunned Emmett, as quickly and cleanly as sunlight in the dark. He was stunned by the dragon’s tail river that was the only way into the town, and the jungle that loomed on either side. He was stunned by the nimbus of forest that the village barely beat back beyond the roads and church and houses each season. He was stunned by the flammable heartwood of the trees that grew in floating islands atop river inlets, and the flows of obsidian that wall in the river near the gantry. He was stunned by the glass that formed around the river in the highland, shocked by lightning to perfect lens quality-clearness.

When we first took a boat from our house near the church up to the mountains, Emmett nearly singed his shirt off his back steering the boat into a stripe of lensed sunlight. He said they didn’t grow natural stacks of glass in Yorkshire. They never nearly burnt themselves to death in Yorkshire, he said.

“What happens to the sand and water in your mountains, then?” I asked. We were at the top of a mountain right now, close enough to a flow of obsidian that it was like sitting sideface to a fire. He had brighter hair than I had ever seen, and I imagined it felt as warm and sunny as it looked where the light made it golden. The mountain contined upward in a tide of boulders that looked like the ridges of a petrified giant’s spine. I had never climbed all the way up. The continuous climb made it difficult to picture how far you’d come, until you found a ledge where you could look down and see where you had once been.

“We don’t have mountains,” he replied. He held his hand against his brow to look up without blinding himself. It was a winter’s sun, silver and bright enough to temporarily blind. When he shifted, pine needles jumped beneath his feet.

“Maybe all of your mountains have been worn down by things moving back and forth over them.”

Emmett said, “People and things in Yorkshire don’t move enough for that.”

“How boring.”

“Stationary things are simpler to deal with,” Emmett said. When he lowered his hand, I saw his face had been browned by the sun already. He had more freckles on his cheeks, and less cheeks. His collarbones were sharper. He still spoke Spanish with the broadest accent I’d ever heard, and Quechua was a hopeless task for him. He would never look like he was native to Nuevo Santuario, but he might look like he belonged here, one day. As we sat and the sun shifted, the glass stacks heated the water at the top of a waterfall, and it bubbled and boiled as it spilled over.

Nuevo Santuario didn’t have written rules. There was little in the way of authority. My uncle, the priest and only resident of the only church in the town, was the closest there came, and he answered to the landlord. In spiritual matters, he referred to God. In all other matters, he referred to money. Which meant many matters sorted themselves out before my uncle saw them. Emmett did not know how to follow rules that didn’t exist on paper, nor how to sort matters out as they arose like bumps in the road. Obstacles weren’t meant for someone who did not know how to keep from shuffling his feet. He did not know that Inti owned only a part of the pine forest, that he pretended to own all of it, or that he did not like eyes to touch the air between trees, let alone hands.

Emmett was enchanted by the wild grapes that thrived in the frost, and the glaciers that appeared at the edges of solar storms, and the terraces of glass surrounded by misty threads. Enchantment tricked him off the main paths and into the pine forest. I found Emmett in the pine forest, dripping with water from the pine needles of a tree he’d been thrown against, saying, “There’s no fence, or sign. I didn’t know it was… forbidden. Restricted?”

Inti pushed the butt of his rifle against Emmett’s chin. Emmett’s teeth clacked together. He held himself up gripping the bark of the tree behind him. Inti waited to see if Emmett would drop his head, submit, or go down without a fight. When he didn’t, Inti smacked Emmett across the face hard enough to send him into the pine needles. They jumped as Emmett landed. His cheek hit a large unearthed root. His feet tangled in another. He kicked out at Inti, which did nothing but anger him.

Indignant, Inti pulled out a knife and placed a boot on Emmett’s shoulder. Emmett gasped for breath and tried to blow a leaf out of his mouth at the same time.

“What’re you doing, boy?” Inti asked.

I had hefted the rifle off my shoulder and was taking aim. I faced him through the crosshairs. “Let him up, Inti. Get your foot off of him.”

Inti cracked a smile and removed his foot. There was a grey boot print on Emmett’s shoulder. “The little church rat just saved you. Get out. You come for my timber again and I’ll cut off your fingers.”

Emmett didn’t move at first. There was nothing to hear for a moment but a sound like rain. It wasn’t rain- the trees were dense here for rain. It was moisture between the needles, and mist, all moving as though the trees were breathing it. I kept the rifle pointed until Inti backed up, then I tugged Emmett up. I didn’t let my eyes off Inti until he turned and went deeper into the pine forest. Emmett took my instructions back into the town.

I brought Emmett to the church and leaned him against the glass pipes on the wall, warm and conversational with rushing water. I filled the tub with water and salt. Emmett looked like himself when he was thinking, which is to say he looked like something inside of him had gone away to think and left his body behind, unchanged. When he returned, he said, with a mouth that was dark and swollen as a galaxy on one side, “Never been in the church before.” He licked his cracked lip. “Feels high up.”

We were at a higher altitude in the church- the road sloped downward toward the town and my house and every place Emmett had wandered into and been bewildered by since arriving- but I think I understood was he was saying. When the bath was filled up, I helped him get his shirt off, then the rest, and dumped it in my uncle’s laundry pile. He winced and touched his shoulder, but he just said, “This is the first time I’ve missed Yorkshire.”

The bath only had enough room for him, and barely that much, so scrubbing him with a bar of soap was difficult. I took off my shirt so I wouldn’t soak it, and I leaned over the edge and kissed him. There was pinesap and dirt in his mouth, so at least he tasted like he belonged here.

The bath did fit two people, it turned out. When we’d scrubbed the dirt and blood from his face, and the grime from my hands, the water was murky enough we didn’t have to avert our eyes. Emmett used the soap, even though he didn’t like the smell of cocoa butter. It had taken a long time to explain what it was to him. Cocoa sounded too similar to coca, and one of the first times he said it, I misunderstood and thought he’d meant coconut. But he refused to say cacao, or he just forgot every time. He was a good with languages as with unwritten rules.

I pushed his head down and washed the worst muck from the back of his neck and head as he stared at his reflection. He scrubbed at my knees under the water after. Our fingers had been red and chapped from the cold. They grew redder from heat, and pruned the longer we sat.

“Not here,” he said. “I thought New Shrine would work. It’s too far… there had to be something between here and Yorkshire. I can double back a ways.”

In his voice I could hear that he was already on his way out. I missed him even as he sat here. The missing him was worse, in fact, for his still being here. I said, “I don’t think that’s a place you can get to. It’s a place you make.”

He disappeared inside himself for several long minutes, while I wiped his shoulders and tried to read the clock to see when my uncle would return. I didn’t notice when he returned until he said, “I want to know how the mountains here make glass, and how they get taller every year instead of smaller even with all the rain. I want to make mountains in Yorkshire.”

I didn’t say what I thought, which was that he didn’t want to go back to Yorkshire to try it, and he knew it already. He wanted a place that existed within him to exist without. A place he could fly to, settle in, that made the rest of the world seem like a dream, without seeming like a dream itself. But between Yorkshire and Nuevo Santuario, there was only Emmett.

But in the morning, I followed his tracks out into the snow, up into the mountains, where they disappeared, and Emmett with them.

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Scarf Season

Autumn is a penny coloured season in these mountains. Trees are light with yellow and scarlet leaves. The fallen, dead ones crab walk across the ground. The wind pushes the clouds across the sky, and people across town, to their destinations, to school, to work. Each lungful of air is crisp, and they only get crisper. He likes to open the window and inhale first thing in the morning. He says a frigid breath of air is like a throatful of very fine glass.

He does not think of autumn as the dying of a season. Other things rise in the decent of summer and green, he points out: the frequency of turtle necks, the height of snowbanks, the number of wood fires in the evenings, the sharp smell of evergreen trees and the presence of needles.

Whether alive or dead, I love this season.

Especially once he finds the scarf.

His scarf is striped brown and orange, so from a distance it looks as though he’s unraveled an old pumpkin and draped it around his neck. It breathes dust into the sunlight front hall as he ties it twice, once too tightly, and once just right. He opens the door of the closet for me. “I don’t know why I brought a scarf- I could have just borrowed one of yours.” He squints into the closets depths. “You’ve certainly got enough. Do you actually have any coats in your coat closet?”

“They tried to settle, but the natives drove them out,” I told him. I hook my chin over his shoulder and move aside the few coats I do have. The rest is just bags and some hats, and one belt that I don’t remember hanging up but possibly did on a drunken night. The scarves were the first, and they don’t take kindly to interlopers. Somehow I’ll always toss a coat over a chair or the banister before I consider arranging the scarves to take up less space.

A thick cord of wine wool sweeps the floor as I move hangers around.

I nudge him aside and pluck the scarf off its hanger, then hold it to my face. It smells like wet and frozen soil, and cigarette smoke, and cider.

“This is huge. It’s a circus tent that’s been unraveled. You didn’t buy it for yourself did you? Were you looking to live in it?” he says. “It is from an ex? Did you date someone nine feet tall with a three-foot neck and not tell me? Please don’t put it on. I’ll have to rescue you when you start asphyxiating.”

I wrap it loosely around his neck and use it to pull him to the kitchen. When I leave it over a chair and gather our thermoses and fill them with tea, I wonder just how many others are opening their closets to find Winter Scarves. I’ve never met anyone, but it’s just as possible that others have Winter Scarves and it isn’t just me, as it is that I’m the only one. I prefer to think that it isn’t just me. Supposedly, there have to be more people out there pulling Winter Scarves out of their closets (or bags or purses or drawers) than just me.

He wrestles his perfect scarf off for the moment and begins to organize the loose tide of teabags across the counter as I refill the kettle. “You need a box for these. What is your face doing?” he asks. He taps his fingers on the wall tiles. He has to reach across the counter to do it, but he likes the sound of his nails against the tiles. The kitchen is all yellows and blues, and his green coat dresses it up like summer. “You look sort of like you have a plan. Like, a super agent plan. Conspiracy? Are you going to suffocate someone with that scarf? Or burn it for fuel? Make it into a blanket for a family of orphans? Come on, it’s not really yours.”

I rub my thumb over his wrist. The wool fibres of his coat sleeve make my fingertips itch. “It’s not really mine.”

The boy I was with last year wanted to keep the scarf. He asked if I loved it and told me he would take it off my hands if I didn’t. He thought it was chic. The thought of the scarf around his neck might have been part of why we broke up.

He stares at it as though something might be hiding in the folds. Like a bug or a small woodland creature or a maturing child. He empties a sugar packet into his thermos. “Are you bringing it out with us?”

I fill his thermos for him. He looks a little less offended by the scarf. I’ve never known any problem that can’t be somewhat relieved by tea. “It isn’t a third person.”

“Are you sure? It’s saying a lot more than you usually do.”

“It’s not that loud. Are you about to say you only want to walk around where no one we know will be?”

He makes a face. I can’t imagine anyone not being completely charmed by it. “Don’t be ridiculous. Just don’t talk to me, and walk ten feet ahead of me.”

I screw on the lid of my thermos and grab the scarf. He looks more and more dismal as I wrap it around my shoulders. It smells more like fur than I remember. He backs up an inch when I lean in. “Two feet. An arm’s length.”

“Two arm’s length. And if I see your lips moving in my direction, I’m breaking up with you.”

He’s the first one to see me in the scarf. I watch him dawn his scarf again. It’s navy, and it sits under a tweed coat. His fingerless gloves look a little rogueish. Evening light spills and ebbs away overhead when we finally leave.

Everything smells like the end of autumn, like a scale tipping.

The scarf feels warm around my neck, almost over warm. It’s a heavy kind of wool, always heavier than I expect. As a little boy, I struggled to wrap it right. Now it sits around my collarbone and shoulders a little like a shawl. I wonder if my parents would recognize it if I facetimed them. They might have never noticed it, even though I waited always for it turn up, in the coat closet or the basket of scarves and gloves and hats. It always appeared like it hadn’t, like it had always been there and all that had changed was my noticing it.

“It’s like a mouth,” he says, frowning. “It’s eating your whole head.”

“I think you’re being a little judgmental,” I reply.

“I’m being very judgmental. That scarf deserves judging. I feel like I’m about to watch it grow teeth and go for the jugular. Do you still want to walk right next to me now?”

He doesn’t mean the question, of course, because he knows the answer. The sound of leaves scuttling seems muted, like it’s happening on the other side of a screen or a wall. Only a few weeks ago we could still hear cicadas screaming in the trees. Now all the sound comes from things with no heartbeats or thought. Leaves whispering, wind chimes and screen doors rattling. Even the mist curling at the end of the street has a sound, like steam hanging in the air. I laugh at him.

He smiles at me. It’s clear he likes my laugh, and every time I remember that I feel carbonated.

Some people are raking leaves in their lawns by their porch lights. Some kids are playing hockey in their driveways or in the middle of the road, with their puffy vests and gloves on. No one is very visible, but everyone takes quiet notice of their neighbours passing them by. A couple shivers on a swinging porch seat and drapes an enormous quilt over both their knees. Lamps limn window frames with buttercup light.

We cross from the residential area to downtown. The glass buildings have no light to reflect. Each one is dark and quiet, and some have so many huge windows they look like walls of black water. I touch the scarf around my neck. In my reflection, I touch air. I can’t tell if he sees it or not. He says nothing. Not even when I touch my finger to the glass and a frond of frost curls there.

Leaves scuttle quietly as we walk, then louder. There are more and more dry and dying leaves to scuttle. Each gust of wind, fiercer and colder, throws up more of the dead. Maples and oaks that were blushing start to denude themselves as we pass. The water in gutters glistens and stills and turns silver at the edges. In the public park, the only horse chestnuts that the squirrels haven’t made off with crack from cold. The sand in the playground is dense and sludgy as we walk across it.

“So close,” he says, nodding at a cluster of chrysanthemums. They look stark as sun drops in the grey. As he says it, they begin to look ruddy and faded.

“My mistake.”

“Do you put on this kind of show all the time, or am I the only lucky one to witness the scarf?” he asks with a pleasing half smile. I tell him he’s the only one. He looks long suffering. “It’s a heavy burden to bear alone.”

The wind has begun to howl. The tree branches clack together. They look more clustered even, without the leaves, all sniggering clannishly together like they think it’s funny to be so nude. Then they just look naked and cold themselves. My hands tingle like they’re covered in frost. His hand is very warm, and his gloves soft instead of itchy. The season lapses and changes as we pass it. I can feel the ending of it in my, like a light winking out, like a wash of cool water.

When we get home, he watches me return the scarf to the hanger in the closet. I take my time. As in the way of dreams, I know somehow that this is the last time I’ll see it. Tomorrow and every day after that my closet will be back to blue and black and grey.

He tugs me toward the kitchen to make hot chocolate. More than the fading of autumn, I feel winter creeping in. I feel it like a wet footstep in the wood, and a frost flower in a puddle, and a skein of sunset over a frozen snow bank. He calls me and I feel a whole season arriving inside me.

Art by Jack T. Cole

Text by Lucie MacAulay