Mourning Fire

Content warning: suicidal ideation, child loss

MOURNING FIRE

by

S. T. Seitz

Calida yearns to be the peony in her garden, the one being strangled by bindweed. How much easier it would be to give up and lay her head on the ground the way that plump bloom rests on the soil. Easier than finding the strength to keep breathing, to keep moving. To put on her gardening gloves and cut back those choking vines before they take over her yard. What would be the point, anyway? If she pulls those ugly serpent weeds, they’ll just grow back. Even if she digs her hori hori knife deep into the newly thawed soil and pulls the full length of the pale rhizomes free, other weeds will just take their place. And if they don’t, the peonies will still die, eventually. They’ll shrivel under the remorseless summer sun. Or at the unforgiving, icy hands of winter. Everything dies eventually. Some sooner than others. So what’s the fucking point of any of it?

She runs through this tired argument as she stares at the garden out the kitchen window. Her elbows are propped on the edge of the sink, the reek of the stacked dishes inside twisting up her nostrils but hardly registering.

“Go dig a hole and crawl in then,” she tells herself.

This is not her giving up. This is what she knows she needs to hear. Stubborn is what people call her when they’re being kind. Obstinate is a more accurate term. So obstinate, in fact, that even when it’s her telling her to do something, she feels viscerally compelled to do the opposite.

“Fuck you.” She tells herself, tells the world, then stomps to the door, pulls her gardening gloves off the hook above the light switch, and marches outside with more conviction than she’s had in two months. Then she’s had since she lost them.

She kneels in dirt still moist with morning dew. Prickly pieces of mulch and the occasional sharp rock press into her flesh through the thin sweats she’s been wearing for—well, too long to remember. The pain is a welcome sensation against the numbing callous of grief. She breathes it in, savors it in the back of her throat, in the pit of her stomach, then drives the hori hori blade into the Earth. The sharp point of the serrated shovel reveals a tangle of smooth white roots, each of them giving rise to a spindly vine. The rhizomes are easy enough to track through the earth. She slides her fingers along them, pressing into the dirt as far as the spring thaw will allow. Then she pinches and yanks back.

As long as you go deep, the roots are simple enough to extract. The vines, less so. At least, now that they’ve had time to twist around the thick stems of the peonies.

Calida takes the serrated edge of the shovel and meticulously slices away at the bindweed. The tool has retained its razor’s edge from when she sharpened it last fall and makes quick work of the first strangling mass. Once she’s yanked away the tangle, she runs her hand down the unfettered stem and over the bloom, propping it up so it can feel the sun. Those petals burn like flames in the light, orange at the edges and a deep ember-red in the center. Morning Fire. Her very own cultivar, one she bred through trial and error for no other reason than to feel the pride of creation.

That feeling rings through her now, but the sound is a hollow thud against the remnants of destruction that coat her insides like tar. She can’t think that word—destruction—without looking to the sky. She’s certain she’s not the first person to be stricken by this affliction. For millennia, man has turned to the heavens with meager hopes of understanding their suffering. But the deity she wants answers from is not some divine spirit. It’s a writhing ball of rainbow gas that stares down on her with as much odium as she casts up at it.

Near Earth Celestial Anomaly. That’s the official name. Calida prefers Fenrir, caster of flame, destroyer of worlds. Her world, anyway. For so long, that iridescent ball of nebulous gas with its black cat-eye center had been harmless. And then, as if it just got bored one day, it spit out a massive, matter erasing flare. The thing crashed to Earth with the same fervor as the meteor that fucked over the dinosaurs, leaving a seventy-mile-wide crater in its wake.

It was just (very, very bad) luck that she was standing farther away than they were when it hit.

With every second she stares into the obsidian eye of that heinous rift, her resolve wains. She could spend all day out here slicing away the weeds, but the bloom in her hand will still die. Eventually.

A sob hits her like a convulsion, whipping her head forward and doubling her over. She catches her face in her hands. The jagged teeth of the hori hori clutched between her thumb and forefinger slide across her cheek, ripping flesh and sowing blood. She curses, then rips the peony she’d been holding from its stem and shreds it, littering the ground with red and orange petals. With soft pieces of flame.

The blood snakes down her cheek, tickling nerve endings like the gentle caress of a lover. By the time she reaches the bathroom, the trail of crimson has made it to the frayed collar of her tee-shirt, saturating the dingy fabric until the stains fade to uniform red. Cleansing them in its way.

Calida stares at herself in the mirror and wishes very suddenly, very deeply, for the same. The cleansing touch of blood. To bathe in it. To feel it vellicating her body as it cleanses the wounds time will never heal. She leans across the counter, reaching for the hori hori. As she does, a drop of blood frees itself from her jawline and catches her hand.

She stares at the splattered crimson. “Do. It.” The words come through her teeth.

Her spine snaps straight and her jaw muscles pulse in that obstinate way. Forgetting the knife, she bends for the bottom drawer, meaning to dig out a bandage for her cheek. But when she reaches inside, it isn’t a box of band aids she finds, but a nest of gauze and hair ties with a foam elephant snug in the center.

Her body goes cold.

How long she stands there before reaching down, she doesn’t know. But eventually that elephant-shaped stress ball ends up in her hands. Weeks ago, friends had boxed up her husband’s and daughter’s possessions. They said it would help. Calida’s not sure it did, and she’s certain it does nothing to ease the sting of finding this last trace of her daughter—the last evidence of her playful soul, so bursting with love that she’d dedicated an afternoon to finding an elephant-shaped hunk of foam the perfect place to sleep.

Calida rolls it around in her hands, feeling warmth where it no longer exists. This object was once alight with her daughter’s touch. She knows it. She feels it.

It isn’t until the third mindless rotation that she notices the white tag hanging below the elephant’s stubby foam tail. On it are three lines of text. The first reads, Intermountain Division, DioMatics Inc. Below is an address—an address less than fifty miles from where she is standing.

Before the flare ripped through the atmosphere and claimed her family, Calida was vaguely aware of a young billionaire buying up companies faster than the other heartless magnates. But it wasn’t until people on social media started dropping the names “XpaceDM” and “DioMatics” as being potentially responsible for the flare, that she came to learn that these companies and this person were related. Calida hadn’t paid much mind to the rumors, because they were only rumors. But as she stares at the address, she can’t help but replay those claims. What if this company is responsible for their deaths? What if the perpetrator of her grief is a mere hour’s drive away?

Without removing her gaze from the elephant, she reaches for the hori hori and wraps her fingers around the hilt, bringing the toothy blade closer. With the snap of her wrist, she slices the air and separates the tag from the foam body of the stress ball. She tosses the knife back onto the counter and lifts the text so she can better read the address.

They’re just rumors. Just baseless accusations formed out of grief and pain. But it’s only an hour away. What harm could come from driving up there?

The End