In the darkest of the night, when ice sticks to even the dust froze in splashed suspension from the windstorm of last week, the sounds of faraway flickers become louder in the stirring of their awakening the frozen night’s weight brings.
The weight of the night and it’s bringing of the flame magnifies the intensity of the light held folded in orb. The echoes of lost voices and suppressed cries bounce across cracking frozen lake beds.
We almost forgot about them.
The silence makes space in a collection of beings, the dark lights fire on the insides, and inside that cavern of the darkest night, sits a child by a campfire, staring, shaking occasionally in jolting movements or rocking to an unknown rhythm.
The child’s friends, creatures of the wilds from which she to belongs, join her close in watching the ever moving flames, the bright orange embers that take on a language, telling a story.
They watch, and the child, with legs bundled in to stay warm and dressed in soft linens, weeps at the story she sees unfold, weeps at the flashes of memory that spar out into the dark space that fills the mystery in the perimeter of the fire.
Into the flames scenes emerge in a cascade of dramatic unfold: of dragons fighting, of tsunamis as tall as ancient cities, the parades of wildly dancing humans covered in red feather and pale frocks, a cadence of bird long extinct fills the sky that it is black for a moment, even the flickering fellowship of the flames’ fortune filled fingers cannot maintain light in that moment of re-telling.
The black bursts back, the dark springs into fortune telling flames folding thrice onto the bird filled void implodes into itself.
An Oak tree emerges alone in a field, every leaf an emberous golden light reflecting another light which is held in and by the child itself.
The flock of birds that blackened the sky drop down all at once and swoop up, merging with the Oak, they flicker in a collective cadence, fire fingers shake sparks and the child and wild creatures step back a moment to take in the gradiose display.
From the tree hangs a noose swaying, its fibers old and splayed wide.
As soon as it appears swinging it drops and disappears along with the leaves of the Oak, the tree flips inside out and the roots emerge glowing. Fortune telling flames smokes and fumes a scene of smallness, a seed burnt on the spot, a life pulled up and taken, a pile of floating fish, the child’s screaming mentor who would not let up for what felt like spiraling eternities. a well of languish swells in the child who breathes heavy watching the scene.
The flames grow brighter and more erratic sending embers about and the reflection of fortune-telling flame’s fastening scene bursts up and out as if the mentor came alive, through the dark, into the light and back into the dark.
The child witnesses in awe as the beast dissipates, she goes back to rocking, to watching to whimpering.
Her creature friends comfort her.
The fire dies down to a random flicker of no-story, the linen covered child lays down in her bed of cedar boughs next to the fire, drifts to sleep softly, in-between the dark and light the ice of the dust and the steam of the serpent swirling two-fold pushing seed deeper, resting, weaving pleating a potential for rebirth.
