Burning Bridges (illusion 1)

Burning Bridges, Inhaling Smoke

I walked into a little church on the side of a road at exactly noon. I know that because I checked my watch just as the second hand slid over the elegantly painted twelve at the top of the face. It felt dark inside compared to the late-summer day; there were four high and narrow windows with bright ribbons of light falling in and a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. I glanced at the altar but paid it no more mind than to register the rows of new, unlit white candles. With a weary sigh, I laid down with my back to it on one of the benches, pressed my cheek against the rough wood and closed my eyes.

I do not know how long I slept. It felt as if I heard footsteps just as I became comfortable. I opened my eyes and looked up to find a timid young priest standing there, pale hands resting uncertainly in the air above the back of the bench.

“Hi,” I said softly. Talking in a near whisper felt like the right thing to do; the priests at the orphanage had always insisted on quiet, and the loudest thing in the church was a black fly buzzing lazily in the shadows.

“God bless, my son,” the priest answered in the same hushed tones. He asked me if there was anything I needed, and I asked for the food and water little places like that always stored in case of needy passersby. The priest disappeared into the back and, restless, I stood and walked to the altar. I wish I could say that it was out of some desire for forgiveness of my sins or to pray for the less fortunate, but it was really because one of the candles had been lit.

For as long as I could remember I had been entranced by the way fire moves in air. It was compulsion that drew me to the tiered candle stand, and once there I used the one to light all the others and stood watching the white wax drip down into the wooden tray. The world melted away easily, aided by how tired and sore I was, and relaxation settled deep into my bones. But the feeling of being at peace did not stay with me for long.

I did not notice when he came up behind me. He was very quiet, I suppose, but I might not have heard him in any case. What brought me out of my trance was a hand on my back, half on and half to the side of my right shoulder blade. It was the heat of that handprint that startled me the most. As I turned I was also stuck by the absolute silence in the church. There was no longer a fly buzzing in the corner; I heard myself breathing and that was all.

He was the personification of the absence of light. His clothes were a deeper black than the priest’s home-dyed robes, his hair and expression dark and heavy. The hand on my back slipped up to my shoulder as I moved, and glancing down at it I could see how very sun-tanned his skin was. I opened my mouth, intending to say something, but became unsure of what that something was when his black eyes met mine. For an instant I was terrified that his eyes would swallow me whole.

“Light the rest of it,” he said. His voice was quiet and hoarse, as if he seldom used it.

“Wh—” My mouth was very dry and that made it difficult to speak. I swallowed, and for a moment my ears were not overwhelmed by my own breathing. “What?”

The dark man tightened his grip on my shoulder. “Light it on fire.” I felt as if he was looking into my mind, my soul, my past. Then he added, hardly louder than a breath, “You’ve done it before.”

I did not know who he was then. I was too afraid to ask or even to guess, because deep down I was afraid that I had gone mad long before and that he was some sort of apparition. The only thing I knew for sure was that he was not saying anything I had not already thought. And he was right, I had done it before. I was seeking refuge because I was an arsonist by compulsion, a murderer by accident and an outlaw by consequence.

He took his hand away from my shoulder and I stepped back a little, shivering. For a moment he continued to stare at me and then, with no change of expression, turned and walked out of the little church. I flinched at the sound of the heavy wooden door closing behind him.

The dark room with its ribbons of light suddenly seemed very lifeless. I looked around and only four short wooden pews looked back at me. The wood was dry and unfinished – I still remembered the feel of it against my cheek. I knew it would catch quickly. The floor was much the same, worn smooth in just a few places. A few religious symbols of wood and cloth seemed enough to start the walls. I took it all in, feeling like I was losing my mind and quickly conceding that I probably had already.

“To hell with it,” I said loudly, trying to convince myself. Then I looked at the burning wick and the old feeling bubbled up in my chest; with a wild laugh I kicked over the candle stand.

They all stayed lit on the way down. As the altar caught fire I did nothing to stop it. I just watched the flames growing bigger, greedily swallowing more. I sank down and sat cross-legged on the floor, watching it, mesmerized. Always before I had felt some inclination to leave and watch in safety from the outside, but that time I did not. There was too much I was running from, I think, and it would have been just as well to stay.

The fire spread before me and the light from the four high windows burned bright columns on the smoke until it was thick enough to turn the air black. I breathed it in and started feeling lightheaded from the effort of not coughing. My eyelids drooped to shield my stinging eyes and I slumped forward.

Just before I passed out I felt an arm loop around my middle and scoop me up as if I was nothing. I was carried out of the burning church, but by the time I left the floor I was unconscious.

Looking back later, I realized that I did not know if the priest ever made it out.




I was dimly aware that I was cold, covered only by a thin blanket and lying on something very soft. My dreams were of the fire I had just set. The dancing flames brushed against me everywhere like the tips of sun-warmed feathers, but the more I began to press into their touch the more they faded away. What woke me completely was a door slamming against a wall somewhere nearby. My eyes flew open and my entire body stiffened.

Leaving home had not been a choice for me, but a necessity; men had been hunting me with guns and retribution. That was just what happened when someone lit a little fire in the tool shed behind the lifeless house down the street from the orphanage and let it spread to the walls, the big tree next to the shed, the dry grass, the fence, the empty house and the occupied places next door, all during a drought and a high wind. So my breath caught and my hands shook, and in a nightmarish daze I felt around to make sure they had not managed to find me and exact vengeance after all. I whimpered in relief, because I was still whole, and in surprise, because it dawned on me that I neither had clothes on nor remembered taking them off.

“You’re not hurt,” he said in a low voice.

I looked up and he was standing by the open door, watching me. With a gasp I scrambled away from his black-eyed stare, pulling the blanket up to my chin and practically sitting on the pillow at the head of the bed. Once away from the place where my own body heat had seeped into the sheets, the cloth felt eerily cold and rough against my bare skin.

For the second of many times I felt as if his bottomless eyes would swallow me, that I was falling into some unending darkness, and though I could sense there was something strange in his intent look I could not begin to define it.

My mouth was dry. I swallowed hard. “Who are you?” I whispered, though it was clear enough from my fear that I really meant to say what instead of who.

He did not answer right away. Without a sound he moved away from the door, like a dark predator approaching its pray. I shrank back against the headboard, terrified. He stopped, glared at me and crossed his arms over his chest. “You may call me Lucas,” he said sullenly.

I tried to keep my hands and voice from shaking, and was successful with neither. “W-what do you want with me?”

His face became as blank as a mask as he studied me. This time he did not even feign to answer my question. “Get dressed.” He kicked a pile of clothes at his feet closer to the bed and waited.

It took me a moment to understand what he was saying. Then, shivering, I wrapped the thin blanket around myself and slid from the bed to the cold wooden floor. They were my clothes, washed and mended but still smelling faintly of smoke. My shoes were gone. As I lifted the pants from the floor with trembling fingers, my watch fell out of the pocket.

I winced, snatched it up and ran my fingers over the fresh dent in the tarnished silver casing. That watch was the only thing besides myself I had ever grown up enough to be responsible for, and I had never been very good at doing so. It had belonged to my father and grandfather and back almost indefinitely; then it was passed on to me and I always dropped it or scuffed the glass over the face or snapped the chain, and had carried it off into an exile from which I had no hope of returning. Pulling it out to check the time had become a habit, like a nervous tick, but more for the purpose of making sure I had not forgotten to wind it again than anything else.

Biting my lip, wrapped in a blanket that still let the cold of the floor seep into my skin, I flicked it open. The engraving on the inside lid, paid for and pressed into the silver days before a birthday years ago, flashed at me: For Michael, in your family’s loving memory.

“Twelve oh five,” I read in a whisper. I whipped around to look at the room’s only window, set deep in the gray plaster of an unpainted wall, where drawn curtains let in only a few drops of the waning evening sunlight. The second hand, when I checked again, was not moving. Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes. “That’s it, then,” I said in a voice no louder than a breath. “I can’t do anything right.”

Suddenly I felt a hand resting without pressure on the top of my head. “Hey,” he said gruffly. I had not even heard him approach. “Get dressed. There’s food in the kitchen, if you want to eat. Apples, mostly, but…” His hand slipped from my head and he moved away abruptly, went back to the door with his back to me as I put my clothes on. He added, “That watch still works, just slower. Time passes different here.” Then he left the room.

I did not believe him at first, but the more I looked the more I noticed a slow but definite progress of the threadlike second hand. No amount of winding had any effect and nothing in the watch was broken. The only thing broken, it seemed, was time.




Lucas never asked my name, though days passed and not once did he mention either the prospect of my staying or leaving. It was simply never addressed. In fact, he seldom spoke to me, or I to him. My watch read ten minutes past noon when I first tried to introduce myself; we were outside and it seemed to be near midnight. The lights from the house illuminated us in a white light that made everything I saw seem like part of a charcoal drawing.

Far away to the east and at a much lower elevation lay the glittering sea. The house, pieced together out of rough black stones, faced that direction and was framed on all other sides by the borders of a dense wood. It was nothing like where I had been raised, and as I dwelled on that thought I felt more and more upset. Memories of my old home came to me as though it had been weeks since I had thought of it last, and a sudden desire to distance myself from the place I had been turned out of – by my own fault, which somehow made it worse – welled up in my throat.

Swallowing hard, I found my voice and said, “Sorry, you told me your name and I haven’t told you mine yet. I’m Mi—”

Lucas had been standing immobile, feet apart and arms crossed, facing the forest while I faced the ocean but keeping a careful watch over me out of the corner of his eye. As I spoke he turned his head and glared at me. “Don’t tell me your name.”

The words stung somehow, and I shrank back. “B-but you—”

“It isn’t my real name,” he snapped, glaring now at the dark trees that, being endless themselves, could not feel the full force of his frightening eyes. “Never let anyone know your real name. It lets them assume things about you, gives them command over you. Your name is what you are, and once they know that…”

Then there was silence. There was more silence in that day than I had felt in my entire life, moving deep in my bones like an inevitable thrum that had always before been drowned out by the sheer, crackling existence of other things. It was pulling me in so many directions at once – up, down, towards this stranger, away from him, home, hiding – that I could not decipher whether I was being asked to leave or stay. Hopelessly confused, I stared in silence out over the sea.

In the darkness near me, Lucas seemed to soften a little. “You don’t have anywhere, do you,” he said suddenly.

The way he said it was a statement, not a question, almost an accusation. I laced my fingers together in front of me and stared down at them. “No,” I admitted.

“Where were you going?”

“I was thinking, maybe… one of the smaller islands,” I answered, and immediately felt foolish and rushed to explain. “It’s an old place. They used to bury kings there, back when kings were like gods. No one lives there now but it used to be a place of refuge and the kings are still buried there so I thought… I thought that might still be honored.” I paused, reddened and added defensively, “And even if it isn’t, it’s better than nothing.”

“I know it. It’s close.” He turned and looked at me, not at my face but at me as a whole. “So where are you going?”

I opened my mouth to answer: the same place, obviously. But then I realized the unspoken now and I stopped, puzzled. Though I had been staying in his house for days, I had never known if I would, or could, continue to do so. I was not quite sure if anything had changed. The more I thought about it I felt something had; an island I had never been to was better than nothing, but a house in which I had already become a guest was more real. It was a place, and having been set adrift for most of my life I wanted nothing more desperately than to have a place in the world. In my pocket, my watch felt conspicuously heavy.

“The beach on that island is hard. Lots of sharp rocks. You know where the protection begins.”

“It’s…” I paused, suddenly uneasy. “Just above the waterline.”

From out of the shadows pooling across his face, Lucas’ eyes locked with mine and I felt the same frightening depth in them. “Most,” he said, “never make it past the surf.” In the light I had felt I would be swallowed; in the darkness I felt I already had been. The earth seemed to tilt slightly, and I stumbled forward a step. He looked away, breaking the spell. “You’re better off here.”

I watched him hesitantly. “Is it—”

“Safe?” he interrupted. “Yes. If your little villagers actually track you this far, you’ll be the least of their worries.” I wondered how he knew that, but only briefly; he just knew. If I could accept that time was broken, I could accept that he just knew.

For a moment I thought he would say more, but then a breeze rushed at us from the trees and he paused, drawing himself to attention and staring intently into the trees. Then a faint, predatory grin spread across his face. He started forward, moving low to the ground.

“Follow me,” he hissed, and for a brief instant we were conspirators in something I did not at the time understand.

But I faltered. “What? What is it?”

He glanced back at me. His eyes were still hidden but I could feel them burning into me. “You’ll see. Stay low to the ground. Walk quietly.”

I shifted reluctantly and protested. “I don’t think I—”

“Fine,” he snapped, “then stay.” And he slunk away into the shadows as if one of them.

For a long time I stood there alone, still uncertain. I had been told to stay but in a tone of dismissal – or was it disappointment? The breeze picked up into a brisk wind and I shivered, staring now into the black mass of groaning trees. Instead of feeling the silence I felt like I was waiting for something important to happen.

Something shifted in the darkness where Lucas had disappeared and I strained my eyes trying to see. It moved closer and closer until I could make out the shape of a wolf, the ends of its black pelt all standing at attention and carrying something in its mouth. I could feel it watching me and felt a shiver of anticipation. Then, still moving closer to me, it seemed to flicker and melt upwards into something else.

It was Lucas who stepped into the light cast from the house, carrying a dead and bloody rabbit.

My hands jerked involuntarily. “You…” I gasped, more in surprise than fear. The blood did not bother me; I had seen blood before. Changing shapes was new.

He held up the rabbit, with his other hand drew the sleeve of his black shirt across his mouth, and repeated flatly, “If they track you this far, you’ll be the last of their worries.” His arms dropped to his sides, and he walked back to the house. At the door he paused and half turned, no longer fixing his bottomless eyes on me but on the ground by my feet. “If you’re hungry,” he said, “this will be cooked soon.”

I thought about it for a moment. Just a moment, long enough to think that it made sense somehow after all the things he had somehow known about me, and just long enough to wonder why I, out of a world of other people, was the one seeing this. Perhaps, I thought, I had entered another world… or perhaps I was mad. Either way there seemed little I could do about it.

Then I followed Lucas into his house, my watch still feeling heavy in my pocket. It was better than nothing – and, at the time, it did not seem like such an important decision.




I gradually began to feel the days melting and running together more and more. After a week I had lost track of whether it was Monday or Thursday or some other day, and eventually gave up on tracking how many hours would pass before the second hand reached the next quarter notch; the number seemed to grow into infinity and speed up by turns, impossible to follow.

At first the pace of life seemed incredibly slow. Meals were infrequent, though I did find myself hungry less and less, and the pace of the few conversations I had with Lucas seemed too drawn out with pauses and unhurried sentences. As I grew more used to it I came to understand the way Lucas lived, how the arbitrary rising and setting of the sun was insignificant when it took an incalculable number of them to age only one day. The best way I know to describe it is this: he had lived in a place almost outside of time for as long as he had existed. In one sense he had the same amount of time as everyone else, but in another he had much, much more. For one day (to me), or one instant (to him), a door was opened and I was slowly pulled through. Time adjusted itself accordingly but the sense of duality that Lucas never seemed to feel lingered in me.

It was minutes, or days, or weeks, before I grew tired of the house and ventured very far from the front door, and at a quarter past twelve Lucas convinced me to come with him into the forest. He moved with a practiced ease through the closely grown woods much more quickly than I could, but always slowed to wait whenever I was just about to lose sight of him.

“Don’t get lost,” he cautioned me. “We’re almost there.”

I stopped for a moment and leaned against a tree that I would not have been able to put my arms around all the way, trying to catch my breath. “Where?” I asked, curious despite being winded. “What is it?”

“You’ll see,” he answered, and we started moving again.

It seemed like the world had shrunk and there was nothing but trees, but then I finally stumbled into a clearing beside him. The trees pulled back to show sky and let sun shine down on new grass, but it was the object in the center of that open space which caught my eye right away.

“What is that?” I whispered.

“An old grudge,” Lucas replied. “Older than your island. It was made a little before the house.”

I reddened. “It’s not my island,” I whispered back, then stepped a little more into the clearing. The object of my attention was a tall black stone, polished like glass and gleaming in the sunlight. It was shaped almost like a pillar but was slightly curved, like the arch of a human spine, and twisted so that the head of it tilted to face the sky. If I stood on the tips of my toes I could see two little pools where water still rested from the last rain and the faint tracks worn by a steady, tear-like trickling. I could see myself reflected on the glassy surface, my pale hair glowing from the light even against the black rock, and I wanted very badly to reach forward and touch it but felt too awed to do so. “What kind of a grudge?” I asked.

Lucas was silent for a long time. I turned to look at him questioningly and saw that his eyes were distant, as if he was remembering something he had not thought of for a very long time.

“A hopeless one,” he said at last. “It was supposed to be a man, but it turned to stone.”

“Who made it?” I stared at him, suddenly wondering how old he was. “Did you?” I had seen him as a wolf and by then I knew that he could become any wild creature in the world; if he had told me then that the stone man was his own creation, I would have believed him.

He turned away. “We should go.”

“What? But we just got here.”

“This is an unlucky place. There are other things to see.”

He went back into the trees and I hurried to follow him, nearly tripping several times. “Lucas, wait – wait for me. What other things?”

“The sea,” he answered, and did not say anything to me again until he stopped at the base of the tallest tree I had ever seen. Thick notches had been cut in the bark from the base up, making dotted lines from high branch to high branch. “It’s farther away than it looks,” he told me solemnly, “but we’re on a peninsula. From the top of this you can see for hundreds of miles in almost any direction.”

As I craned my head back to look up, I knew he was watching me. It had become a familiar feeling, and I knew he could see my hesitation. I had climbed trees as a child but none of them had been tall as this; the branches had been stouter and closer together, and I had always been shouted at to come down before I got very far up.

“It isn’t hard,” he said. “I’ll go up behind you.”

I took a deep breath. I was certain that he would not let me fall, and the thought of seeing the ocean stretching out endlessly struck a chord in me, especially since the day was passing quickly and it was nearing the time when the sun would fall and set the water and sky on fire. “Okay,” I said, and started climbing.

It was a little like going up a ladder. The whole time I stared at my hands, which quickly grew sticky with sap that made me less inclined to fear slipping. There was no wind but the air seemed to grow cooler around me and felt good on my skin as I worked my way up. Where the notches stopped there were two branches growing very close to each other; I clambered out onto the closest one and faced west with my eyes closed tightly, while Lucas slid easily from the trunk to the branch behind me.

“Look,” he said.

I opened my eyes and gasped. The forest and the earth had dropped away below us, sloping down into the inescapable sea that dominated the horizon in three directions. Clouds the texture of smoke were spread across the sky, painted black, dark blue, indigo, red, orange, bright yellow. The sun itself was white, the center of the flame, dropping gradually along an invisible wick that every morning stretched from west to east and was now once more being burned to the quick. Pressed into the water’s swell-marked surface was the fire’s smeared reflection, and the long trail of sun was the candle. With only the sky around me and Lucas’ body heat close to my back it seemed as if the whole world had been set aflame.

We stayed there until the light was extinguished beneath the sea and in unspoken agreement we climbed down silently. Watching the sunset had left a jittery, empty feeling in me, and moving again somehow made me feel cold. I was impatient to get my feet on the ground, and Lucas’ steady pace irritated me. As soon as he reached the base of the tree and had moved away I jumped down, not really thinking about how to land – so when I did I was not prepared to balance properly on the uneven ground. I fell.

My momentum carried me down a short incline peppered with rocks and small bushes. I could hear Lucas curse and run after me, but I only cried out twice: first when a fallen branch broke painfully under my right arm and second when another tree abruptly stopped me, striking in exactly the same place.

Lucas was there immediately and helped me sit up. First he slipped my watch back into my pocket; it had fallen out at some point but was miraculously undamaged. Then he examined my arm, noting my wince when he touched the place halfway between my shoulder and elbow. “It’s broken. I need to set it.”

I gritted my teeth, realizing the crack I had felt must have been my bone instead of a stick. “Will it hurt?”

“Yes,” he said simply. “Give me your hand.”

The numbness was beginning to fade and my entire right side throbbed. “I can’t,” I said faintly. “I can’t move my arm.”

“Your left hand.”

I did and closed my eyes, feeling very dizzy. Distantly I could feel him holding my hand very tightly but that was all; everything else seemed to blur together. Suddenly the pain exploded in my right arm, then just as abruptly eased. My eyes remained closed but I felt him setting long pieces of wood to my arm as a splint. I peeked; he had used black strips of cloth to tie them in place, and the bottom of his shirt was frayed and a few inches shorter.

He picked me up, careful not to jar my arm, and carried me swiftly out of the woods. It was like something out of a dream; whatever he had done to my arm had left me sleepy and unresisting, as if I had been drugged. My head rested on his shoulder, very near to his neck, and I could feel the convergence of his breathing and the beat of his heart.

As we neared the house I began to rouse, remembering that it was only my arm that was broken and I should still be able to walk. At the front door I tried to shift in his arms. “I can go in all right,” I murmured.

“Hold still,” he replied. He sounded almost as if he had not even heard me, which brought a faint scowl to my face.

“I’m serious, this is stupid. Let me—” I brought my good arm up to his chest and pushed away just as he opened the door and stepped forward, and the back of my head hit the doorframe. Lucas cursed again and sank down until we were both sitting.

I blinked and my eyes gradually focused on his face, which was very close. His lips were pressed together tightly enough to tell me that he was annoyed and possibly concerned, his expression sharp as he touched the back of my head lightly to check for damage. It suddenly struck me as funny that I had managed to hurt myself twice in such a short period of time, but in a tired sort of way; my arm and my head ached, and like everything I had brought it upon myself.

The slight pressure of Lucas’ hands at the back of my head and that sudden weariness made me slump forward. My forehead pressed against his cheek and something like a sob caught in my throat and sent a shudder through my entire body. For my entire life until then I had been secure in the knowledge that I was alone, left to my own, often insufficient devices to muddle through life. But all of the sudden there was Lucas, showing me things and giving me help because I needed it, and I did not know what to make of it.

Lucas hesitated, then slowly relaxed his arms. One hand drifted down my neck and the other down my back, completing a rudimentary embrace.

I felt it and managed a small smile. “Thank you,” I whispered.



My injuries healed quickly and I soon grew used to the sight of no discernable movement of the hands of my watch, but sometimes my right arm ached a little, and I still did not lose the tick of checking the time. Once, just after the minute hand touched twenty minutes past the hour, I walked into the kitchen absently rubbing the place where my arm had broken in two and noticed I was doing so only when the phantom pain was chased away by a strange, clean smell. Lucas was standing at the counter, turned enough that he could see me out of the corner of his eye as I entered.

“Good morning,” I said sheepishly, using the hair falling too much onto my face as a pretense for my left arm being raised.

“Morning,” he replied.

I walked over and stood next to him at the counter, watching what he was doing. He was holding a cone-shaped piece of black coral in one hand and using the other as a mortar to grind something against it. A pot of water was slowly heating on the stove. “What are you making?”

“Tea.”

This piqued my interest. I had seen him drinking tea all the time, more often even than I saw him eating, but never seen it being prepared before. “What kind?” I asked.

“Awa.”

“Oh.” I leaned a little closer and sniffed at it, trying without success to define the smell. “What does it taste like?”

Lucas glanced at me, but briefly. “A little peppery.” He looked very absorbed in what he was doing, almost reverent.

“Oh.” I did not know anything about tea, so this told me nothing. “I’ve never had tea before. Is it good?”

He shrugged. “It’s all I ever drink.”

I watched his hands. They moved smoothly, occasionally shifting expertly to let some of the wet, finely ground paste drip into a shallow bowl he was working over or pausing to slide another thin slice between the mortar and pestle. “Can I try some?”

“Sure,” he said, “there’s plenty. It grows wild here.”

“What does it look like?” I asked, tilting my head to one side.

“Heart-shaped leaves… You can see them from here.” He nodded his head toward the window. “It’s the root that’s used to make the tea.”

I tore my eyes away from his work and looked out the window. The leaves I recognized immediately; they grew all around the house and in patches in the forest, which Lucas had by then well acquainted me with. “I thought those were just weeds…” He shrugged again and moved away to the cupboard to look for a second cup for me. I felt the absence of his body heat but did not see, or hear, him go, focused instead with a puzzled frown at the plants growing outside. Feeling very much like a secondary student trying to remember something obscure I had been taught in primary school, I bent down and closely inspected the roots on the counter. It was a familiar feeling; I had always been a horrible student. But this seemed so familiar, as if I had seen it in a textbook once. “Wait, isn’t this… from a kava plant?”

“It’s the same thing,” he said. Somehow he had come to stand directly behind me without my realizing it and I jumped a little. “The name changed after the missionaries came.”

“Oh.” Reddening, I moved out of his way. “But… this stuff is expensive. And it just grows here, wild?” He nodded, portioning small scoops of the moist gray paste into the two cups. It was strange, as feral and abrupt as he sometimes seemed, to watch him do that. “Wasn’t this politically important before? The kind of thing they drank at official ceremonies?”

“Yes,” he said. Then he added, absently, “It was important in the old religion.”

“Really?” Encouraged by this volunteered information, I tried to catch his black eyes with mine.

He noticed and looked directly at me for the first time that morning, making me shiver under the sharpness of his gaze. I took one step back and found myself in the corner where the counter met the wall. He matched that step, one hand resting on the counter near mine and effectively cutting off any escape in that direction. His other hand was free and, I knew, quick enough to catch me if I tried to slide along the wall. I froze as he moved a little bit closer, feeling his breath upon my face. We were almost touching, but not quite.

When he spoke, his voice was quiet but calm, as if this was not an unusual position to be in at all. I do not think it was, for him; I was smaller, weaker, the prey, who had managed to bring about a topic he did not feel at ease with, and he was looming over me, regaining control of the conversation.

“It was the drink of the gods,” he said in a low voice. “The sprits rejected by the gods were left on earth when it was separated from heaven and weren’t allowed to drink it. The god Kanaloa helped them rebel, but they were defeated and he was sent with them to the underworld.”

My heart was pounding loudly in my ears. “I… I think I’ve heard of Kanaloa,” I stammered. “He was the god of the sea, the dead, the darkness, squid—”

Something flickered in his eyes. “Who told you that?” he asked.

“It was… my parents, I guess. They were bedtime stories.” Out of everything else, I was most keenly aware of how close his hand was to mine. I wanted to know if he was going to move it, and if so in which direction, but the longer this went on the less it seemed like he was going to move at all. “I don’t really remember, I just… know a little bit. Mostly about Kanaloa. I think we lived near the sea…”

He stared at me and, after considering this, asked, “What else do you know?”

“I… I’d have to think about it.” I glanced down, blushed, closed my eyes and tried to think. “The… ‘The West is his much traveled road.’ I think that was part of a song or a rhyme. I don’t remember the rest.” I kept my eyes closed, feeling a little ashamed at the few memories I had of that. “It was a long time ago.”

Abruptly, Lucas pulled away. When I recovered enough to open my eyes, I saw he was pouring the now boiling water. “You don’t know very much, then,” he said.

I slumped against the wall, feeling the tension his close presence always brought to me drain out of my bones. His comment bothered me, though I knew it was a true enough statement. “Should I?”

He stirred the kava paste into the hot water and turned to stare at me intently. “Do you know who Kanaloa is to the missionaries’ god?” he shot back.

“The… the devil, I suppose.” I felt my face flushing again and pressed my hand against the wall to force myself away from it. “I don’t know much about him, either,” I admitted. “I should – I mean, they raised me to, at the orphanage, but I never had much interest. It’s all mythology to me.”

Another strange look flashed across his face, too quickly for me to read. Then he laughed humorlessly. “All belief is based on truth, to some extent. Some more than others. One man’s mythology is another’s reality.” Without breaking eye contact, he swept the leftover bits of root into one hand and dropped them into the sink basin. “‘And the Lord said to him, Where do you come from? And he said in answer, From wandering this way and that on the earth, and walking about on it.’ What am I quoting?”

“Job,” I answered easily. “I know Job.” I managed a little laugh. “I always liked it because I thought his name was funny.”

Lucas gave me a very serious look. “That wasn’t his name.”

“What?”

He turned away and picked up the two cups. “The bible is a varied account of half-truths. It’s broken.” Pinning me with his eyes again he offered me a cup, the one with the lighter glaze. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Oh,” I replied faintly, wrapping my hands around the cup. Steam wafted up like purified smoke from the surface of the tea and warmth radiated into my fingers and palms. The curious smell that I still could not define tickled my nose, but I thought it might still be too hot to sip. Lucas sat down at the kitchen table – really more of an island – and I followed suit, choosing a chair across from him. I watched steam drift up and disperse, then asked suddenly, “What was his name?”

Lucas looked up from his tea. “Hmm?”

“If Job wasn’t his real name, what was?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Then how do you know it’s wrong?” I asked, though I was not exactly sure why I was pressing the subject. Some of it was because he had pushed me into a corner before, and some of it was because he had made such a point of not touching me. Whatever else there might have been going through my mind then could not be quantified.

“Because he was allowed to enter heaven,” Lucas replied, sounding a bit edgy, “and no one owned him.”

“Didn’t God?”

He shot me a stormy look. “God only owns the people he doesn’t like. Everyone else is free to do as they please, within boundaries.”

I paused, then asked without blinking, “Does he know yours?” He did not answer me, just glared. I looked away. “Lots of people know each others’ names,” I complained. “Couldn’t I just tell you mine?”

“No!” he snapped, slamming his cup down violently, and against my will I turned to look at him with wide eyes. The full force of his dark glare poured into me and the wildness in it paralyzed me. For the second time I was held firmly in place, only this time I was not physically cornered. “You guard your name – it’s the most important thing you own. Don’t make the mistake of telling anyone. The only difference between an unknown man and an infamous one is that people know his name, and an infamous man can only become unknown again if everyone forgets it.” He removed his gaze and released me from my paralysis. “It’s better not to say it at all,” he muttered.

Trembling, I looked back down at my tea, lifted the mug gingerly and sipped. The taste was strange and like the smell too elusive to describe, but it was good. I drank half of it and said, being careful to keep my voice steady, “You were right… It does taste kind of peppery.” Whether or not it did I could not really tell, but I said it as a kind of peace offering. I felt that somehow, somewhere during the beginning of the conversation I had taken a wrong step and sent it spiraling into this.

Lucas inclined his head slightly and that told me he had heard. But he said nothing, merely drained his cup.

I gulped down the rest of my tea and stood quickly. “I could get you more,” I offered, “if you want.”

He looked up at me, calculating. Then he handed his empty cup to me.

Holding back a smile, I poured the hot water and stirred in a spoonful of kava each, watching them swirl together. “It’s very good,” I said, still facing the window above the sink. “The tea I mean. Maybe… you could show me how to make it? I don’t really do much… If I’m staying here I should be able to help you with some things.”

There was a pause. “You don’t have to,” he said without inflection.

“I don’t want to be a freeloader.”

“I’m not charging you room and board,” he said, sounding faintly bothered but no longer angry. “You don’t have to work for me to stay here.”

I turned back towards him, a full cup in each hand. It was probably a miracle that I did not spill any of it. “What if I want to?” I could, and did, meet his eyes easily, because he was not trying to intimidate me anymore. In fact, he seemed a little unsure of himself.

He gathered himself quickly and flashed me a small, tolerant smile. “Then do it.”

When I handed him his cup, I made sure that our hands touched. I wanted to see what would happen, and he did not really react but he let me do it. Smiling a little giddily I put my cup by his and sat on the table next to it. On a whim I laced my fingers though his and he let me do that too.




There was a certain line that Lucas was willing to approach but never cross, and by twelve twenty-five I knew it very well.

I had learned to make the awa tea. I had learned how to get around in the forest. I had not brought up names again. My skin was getting darker, like his, and I felt more in control of my body, like he was of his. But as much as I felt myself moving towards him, he was unmovable. Not pushing me away – that would have at least been something. He would let me hold his hand and follow him around the house, and then occasionally he would become a predator, a dangerous and wild man that would trap and terrify me without ever making physical contact. Nothing changed.

My favorite room in the house had become the living room because of its openness; there was more space to move around in, to shrink or expand at will. There were fewer corners. The big window at the front of the room angled out in a kind of bubble towards the dip in the earth that showed a part of the ocean. I was sitting in the dark on the ledge looking out at the water, with empty hands and a blank piece of paper in front of me. It was long after sundown, but I did not want to go to sleep.

For the past few weeks I had been having the same dream: I was setting a building on fire. It did not seem to matter what or where, it was usually different every night. Sometimes it was the orphanage, sometimes it was the shed, sometimes it was the little church… I painted the front door with gasoline that sank into the wood and left a dark stain in the shape of a handprint. And then the house burned, and I stood there waiting for someone to find me, for a crowd to come surging towards me yelling abuse and brandishing weapons, but no one ever came. I lit building after building, millions in a row, until the futility of it broke me and I finally stood still, gasping and trying to wipe tears from my face. Then I would wake up.

Lucas came silently into the room, but I saw him out of the corner of my eye. His dark hair and clothes diffused into the shadows and I only had a vague impression of where he was. He moved as easily in the dark as he did in the light; sometimes I wondered if it made any difference to him at all.

I turned toward him a tiny bit. “Do you have a…” I began, but trailed off. It occurred to me that anything I could have asked for would have been useless in the dark, and I was not in the mood to ask for a candle.

“A pen?” he finished dryly, not slowing his pace.

“A minute,” I corrected. I pulled out my pocket watch and nervously fingered the slim chain, not quite looking in his direction. Even though I could not see his eyes, I would have been drawn to them immediately and he would still wield that terrifying power over me. I did not want that; there was something I needed to ask. “What… What do you think of me?”

He had been moving across the room, past me, but stopped and glanced at me sharply. I could feel it, even in the dark. “What?”

“What do you think of me?” I repeated. By then I was staring at the blank sheet of letter-writing paper resting on the windowsill and reflecting what little moonlight there was. My stomach was in knots. “Why do you let me stay here? Why—”

“You don’t have anywhere else,” Lucas reminded me coldly.

“I did,” I said, my fingers tangled in the watch chain. “I was going somewhere.”

“An island,” he spat. “About which you knew next to nothing.”

“That’s more than I knew about this place,” I pointed out. “And it isn’t like you’ve told me much about anything.”

He took a few steps towards me, but stopped.

The window was open a crack, and just then a faint breeze had blown in. It was not much, just enough to upset the paper. I dropped my watch in my lap and quickly put my palm on the paper to keep it from blowing away. Against the white sheet, especially in the moonlight, my skin looked unnervingly dark. Seeing that startled me a little; I had always been pale, having not spent a great deal of time outdoors. I knew Lucas saw it too.

“You,” he growled. “You still haven’t figured it out, have you?”

I pulled back a little, surprised at the anger in his voice. “What are you talking about?”

“Where we are!”

My hand shook on the paper, in frustration more than anything. “I don’t care! That’s not what I’m trying to ask!”

A slight pause. “What are you trying to ask?” he said in a low, dangerous voice.

I took a deep breath and tried to pull myself together. It was easier to avoid looking at him in the dark but at the same time I desperately wanted to see his face, which was sometimes more expressive than his words. In his eyes I could sometimes see, or thought I could see, that he was sorry when he had to move away from me, though he never said a word about it. It was his eyes that had kept me there so long, and something in them that always smoldered behind a veil in the background; without that, I would have felt our lack of movement a good deal sooner.

“I would have died,” I said. “I would’ve been burned in that church. Why did you pull me out?”

“Why did you want to die?” he snapped back.

I stood and moved across the room to him, glaring. The paper fluttered to the floor. “Why do you think?” I hissed. “That’s the whole reason I started this conversation, remember, to find out what you think?” My voice rose in volume with every word. It was different, to stand there with my fists clenched, practically shouting up at him, but it infuriated me that he still did not react. “Why were you even there?” I continued angrily. “What am I to you, that you would even care? You’re just different, I get that, but I’m not. I have no family and no friends, no one that would do anything like that for me. There’s nothing special about me, so why did you do it?”

For a moment I thought he might hit me; his entire body tensed and he stood a little taller and took another, single step forward. In a way I wanted the blow, because then it would mean I had found something to make him react. We hovered on the edge of it, waiting.

“If you can’t work it out for yourself,” he said finally, “I don’t have any right to tell you.” And then he started to leave the room.

I felt like he had hit me, twice: first by not being able to answer, and again by just walking away. The second time especially he had struck a place that bruised easily, something anyone who ever had a reason to be in an orphanage would understand. I opened my mouth and a shriek came out.

“My name is Michael!”



Continued in "Burning Bridges (illusion 2)" .