Glass Memories

It happened again last night. Under his feet the sidewalk cracked, a long crevice to the horizon. Sun rays bounced off the shear glass of the building now leaning above his head and over the road. His foot wedged into the pavement gap. He was trapped. Sun glare pained his eyes, searing the retina. His optic nerve pounded and beat spasms into his brain.

The building broke in half over him. Like a cluster bomb the glass blasted the pavement. One of his eardrums exploded. Sharp fragments sparkled and pelted down on him like stinging hail, a poisonous rain of fired sand. Hitting his head and arms, shards bit through his skin, penetrated his blood vessels, scraped through his circulatory system with his every breath. Glass bits infected him, a flagellating protozoa that rapidly spread, immobilizing him with stiffness and pain.

His stomach cramped and he fell over like the building, jagged glass bursting through the sunlit air, brilliant flares, exploding…

He bolted awake. His body was covered with a slick of sweat. Momentarily he had no idea where he was. His mind was numb. His hands and feet had curled, immobilized by the sense of needles sticking into his nerves.

***

Philip Fintan had begun to dread the mission of the afternoon. He had to do this thing, investigate. He was now an officer for the watershed.

He had left his job in the city, a legal aid to an environmental law firm. He had to leave. He had to leave the city. He took a state civil service exam, got some references, and took this job in Ripton. The only glass he saw was the front and side windows of his pick-up truck, tinted glass. In his small home he kept all the drapes drawn. The doctor prescribed anti-anxiety medication for him, but he had to go the office and talk for fifty minutes twice a month to get those pills. That was unpleasant and often upsetting. He preferred being outside. Monitoring human activities that impacted the quality of water in the watershed allowed him to do just that.

Philip had never met Miss Vale Augustine. He had driven from the crossroads down the street seeing nothing but dark evergreens and tall oaks and large boulders. The pull-off to Number 17 was the first break at the edge of a blur of green and gray.

He swerved in leaving a fog of tan dust behind the truck until the tires grabbed on crushed gravel. He slammed on the brakes in front of a gate. His head whiplashed back into the safety rest and forward again toward the windshield glass. Perspiration wet his brow and palms. He stared at the gate.

At her property, the drive to the front entrance was barred.

It was an old, tall, wrought iron gate. The posts and spires had to be eight feet high, minimally. The spires looked like arrows pointing at the sky.  The gate posts were topped with black iron birds in landing flight. Owls. The gate was locked with a large, iron lock. No call box was in sight.

He could not see the house. The landscaping was tall and thick with wildness: more shades of green; black, gray tree limbs and branches; patches of vibrant flowers, red, purple, orange.

Annoyed and disturbed by the sight of the flying iron owls, Philip peeled the cruiser in reverse, drove through the sand dust back down the street and headed for a road he knew. There was a back way. The town forest had a fire road off Hap Street on the rise of Blue Hill.

***

The atmosphere was quiet, lifeless except for the hiss of water from a narrow brook. He was in her woods now. He felt the change of air, languid and darker. A hemlock canopy above splintered the sunlight. Damp air rose from the deep ground and wafted, soaking up pollen and dust motes. A finger of breeze pushed the particles into random rays of sunlight where the light shattered them into tiny rainbow colors. The light scattering bothered him. It reminded him of glass. He looked down at the ground.

            The rock-strewn track took him downhill and curved sharply toward the east. He noted the inside of that curve against the branch and moss laden ground. It rose up gracefully like an ocean wave but totally unnaturally. That was the mark of the dirt bikers peeling the land. Rain water erosion would not spit back that high rise of heavy sand and the especially large rocks into that formation.

             And with that thought, something caught his boot. He stumbled. His feet twisted in the rocks and he went crashing down hard. He shouted at the pain, and sparks flew in darkened vision. Deep breaths. He moved his ankles. One was painful but didn’t seem broken.  He clambered up and limped on. He heard no bird song. No chickadees whistled. No gray jays shouted garrulous paragraphs of bird song. The hemlocks grew thicker; the air darker.

            Struggling along the track he headed down a sharp hill going deeper into her forest. Evergreens loomed overhead. The boughs layered over and over each other. The tree trunks were so numerous that off the track not even a child could escape between them. The air was transparent black with a green haze. It had a dank smell, the smell of wet things settling. He grew increasingly uneasy with his decision to go this way, to creep up upon her house from behind.

            Anyway, the report he had received stated that the items were in the woods. Crosses. Like crosses for the dead with a bit of fence. The kids reported it as a small graveyard. Some digging appeared recent. It was hidden in the southwest corner somewhere on her property. The kids had pointed at the site on a topo map. Teenagers find everything. They go where they’re not allowed.

A sentinel crow startled him with its loud caw, the warning sound to its murder, its gang of crows, “Here is something that does not belong!”

Adrenalin pumped through him. His head pounded from a quickened heart-beat. Alert he perceived glimmers ahead. Sunlight; through gaps in treetops glass windows reflected sunlight.

His left foot slid and he almost fell down again. The track heaved in its center. At its edges slick muck lay in the erosion, marred with the print of narrow tire tracks. The kids’ bikes, he thought. Dirt bikes. Evidence that others had come this way and gotten back out.

Past a gravelly bend the land opened up. A bit of meadow lay ahead. Not a weedy mess, this was short grass and tiny, wild blueberry shrubs. Small, white ground flowers shone in the ambient light of the clearing. He approached the spot. Unseen from afar was a small and loosely woven wattle fence around the clearing, a bit of boundary. Inside were the crosses. Rawhide lashed together straight branches, snapped or sawed to size. Large stones supported the shafts thrust into the ground, marking and bolstering the graves.

This here, Philip thought, was odd. Who would bury pets here like this? And that’s illegal in most places and certainly in a watershed. Surely people weren’t buried here, were they? The iron owls of the gate flashed through Philip’s mind and he felt his skin chill.

Looking at this site annoyed him. The crosses were neatly painted and starkly so, no decoration, no information. There were four black and two white crosses. Why not three of each? It all unbalanced his already deteriorated disposition.

He turned away and looked at the onward track. It was grassier. There was no muck, no tire tracks. He must have missed some side track that the dirt bikers illegally ground into the forest.

He walked onward. His boots hit the ground almost silently here.

He saw the back of the house. It was stone, thick slabs of gray stone. From his perspective he could see one side extending away to the front. More stone. At this angle all the glass windows were just black.

Underneath the riot of bird song, he heard a tuneful, rhythmic humming. He headed toward that.

She was on a red brick patio. A birch trunk bent low and bushy with limey green leaves shading her from the afternoon sun. She sat by a wooden frame covered with a thick cloth. She was sewing into the cloth and humming.

Her hair chestnut, the color of race horses, fell loose against her back. Behind her a low wall of stone bolstered higher ground. Birds sang in the birch and bushes.

As he approached she flicked large eyes at him, pools of green. She wore loose garments of black and gray, some ethereal material that caught in the breeze, edges fluttering, as she rhythmically moved and hummed, sewing.

“Yes?” she asked, a satiny voice.

“Is that a quilt, Ma’am?” he asked, small talk, curiosity to put the subject at ease.

“No, it’s a tapestry, and I am not, “Ma’am.”

She was already on the defensive, he thought.

“I came about the crosses.”

She stopped sewing and looked at him. “They are on my land,” she stated as if that was final.

“Ma’am,…

Her green eyes darted at him like a fish flicking in a pool.

“Sorry,” he said. “What do people call you?”

“People, call me many things, of that be certain. For now you may call me Ms. Augustine. And who are you?” she asked tossing a quick look up and down at him.

He became self-conscious that the environmental enforcement agency did not provide standard uniform. He moved into a regulation stance like a police officer. He had a name tag. He flicked it with what he hoped was some authority. “Watershed Officer Fintan,” he replied. “Ms. Augustine, I came by that burial ground. It’s against the law to bury pets without a license for a pet cemetery or crematorium. No one in town has one. It’s not done.”

She looked away from him, away from his standard pose, and calmly went back to sewing.

He waited while the birds sang their songs. Then, “Ms. Augustine?”

“Yes. They are not pets buried there.” She looked back at him her green eyes limpid.

“What is buried there?”

She blinked, leaned back and smiled at him. Her teeth were small, straight, very white and her canine teeth were short and pointed. He could tell that she was tall, and he thought she should have a long, lean cigarette between her raised fingers, not a needle and thread.

“Memories, Officer. They are memories. Come in and join me for a drink and refreshment. You look like you have hiked hard to see a ghost.

He was confused. What was she implying? He agreed but added, “I’m on the job. No alcohol.” He tried smiling at her. “You know.”

“Of course. I know that. Let’s have a glass of cold, cranberry juice and toast with jam.” She waved her left hand languidly over toward the west side of the area. “My berries grow there and in front. Come. Watch your step crossing the threshold.”

He stepped up over the old, seemingly ancient, granite threshold of the back door, his eyes only slowly adjusting from the vast, bright sunlight outside to the shattered sunlight in a many windowed space. Dark shelves held cut glassware. The prismatic nature of the glass angles broke sunrays into rainbows and sparkles around the room. Mirrors of various shapes and sizes hung on walls, reflecting everything back and back. It was disorienting.  He realized he was breathing all wrong and getting dizzy.

She prepared refreshments in another room. He spun around uncertain of what to do. He was in a large room with old, dark furniture. There were too many windows. There was too much glass on display. Decisively he chose one of two wingback chairs facing away from windows. The sides of the chair curved around him as he settled in. But a mirror hung on the wall in front of him. The silvered surface displayed objects and light back at him. He saw himself. He was pale. He was sweaty.

She returned and settled a silver tray on a table. From there she served him a glass, a wine goblet with crimson liquid. Stoneware plates with tiny toast pieces spread with a maroon jam remained on the tray.

“It’s not wine,” she stated.

Politely he took a sip. His tongue stuck to the membranes of the roof of his mouth. It was like a lemon, so tart.

She smiled. “It’s just juice, no sugar. Just juice.” You’ll find it to be bracing.”

She settled back into the other winged chair, not touching her own glass or a plate of jammed toast.

He decided to just get to the point and cut the visit short. “The crosses, Ms. Augustine. You can go to jail for burying anything that lives. And what else would you bury?”

She snickered. “In the sense you are saying, no, I have not done that.”

“Memories, you said outside,” he continued.

“Yes.”

“Why different colors? And why unbalanced?”

“Are these legitimate questions, Mr. Fintan? Black crosses, white crosses, six, two, four. Everything can die. Many can be buried.”

He took a sip of the tart drink. “Everything has a destiny to die,” he said. He thought he was catching the tone of her banter.

“Not today,” she said. “Not today for everyone, Just memories, dead memories.

He stared at her blankly. “And you bury your memories,” he replied. He looked at the glass in his hand, cut glass, crystal. He put it down onto the tray.

The glass sliced a beam of sun from one of the many windows and sent blood red blotches staggering around the walls. The mirror caught some of the red light and bounced it back onto his forearm. His mind reeled the nightmare, the memories. He closed his eyes. Blood red circles spiraled in that darkness.

He snapped open his eyes. The woman’s blood red lips were moving. Was she talking? All he heard was the pounding of his own blood in his eardrums. He bolted up out of the chair too fast and was unbalanced. He saw her arm on his. He heard her words as if she was talking under water. He mumbled something and waded toward the doorway. By the exit another mirror mocked his weakness, a full-length mirror. Confused he thrust forward, a man trying desperately to escape.

***

Philip Fintan opened his eyes. He lay propped up on a bed in a windowless room, a curtain drawn to one side and another against the wall by a door. There was a needle stuck in his arm attached to a plastic tube. Behind him monitors beeped.

A man in a white coat was talking at him, a harsh voice, vowels like cracked glass. “Spasmenagaliaphobia, or more generally even hyalophobia, nelophobia. Fear of glass.” The man flicked a page with a snap and spoke more words, more cracking vowels. Then he heard something that sounded familiar. “Fintan.”

Philip looked more steadily at the man. “Fintan? You’re a Doctor Fintan?” he asked.

More words came at him. Something about him falling into a full-length mirror, hitting his head on a granite step. The doctor caught Philip’s gaze and asked him if he remembered.

Philip said, “Six, two, four,” and looked at the doctor as if those words mattered.

The doctor asked him a series of questions. Do you remember this; do remember that, anything?

Philip didn’t remember. His mind was blank except for those three words, “Six, two, four.” Beyond that, Philip Fintan had no memory.

The End