“Beware. Out of the ash. I rise with my red hair. And I eat men like air.”
Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus”
The dark is starless and the dark is hollow and the dark is heavy around them. Joby and the small boy move slowly between the wet pines. The terpene perfume is cold and the rocks under their feet are slippery, but Joby knows the night and he knows the woods and he knows they will stay warm if they keep moving. Tristan whimpers and squeezes his little hand tightly over Joby’s. Eventually, they will reach a clearing and a farm and an old barn. They can draw water from the old stone well. And if the horses are inside sleeping, they can take shelter with them against the chill, until morning.
Carmen still haunted the boy and whenever his son cried in his sleep, Joby was shattered. The burns on his pale slender arms and the tender concave valley beneath his ribs were an ugly testament to everything he had survived. In the beginning, Joby had dutifully told the authorities about their suffering, but they laughed in his face. His own black eyes and bruises were invisible to them. His beautiful, copper-haired wife turned on the waterworks and twisted the story to make him the guilty one. He only wanted to protect his son, but no one believed him. She set the fire when he was on night shift at the foundry, a day after he filed for custody of the boy. She had told her shrink a hundred times about her fantasies of fire, how she would go out in a blaze of glory. Still they charged him with her murder, despite Joby’s alibi, and the word of a dozen men at work, and despite the protests of the boy who had always been terrified of his mother.
They walk and walk and they are closer to the horses and closer to the dawn. Tristan does not complain, but Joby knows he is hungry. He is as scrawny and sinewy as a winter jackrabbit. It has been a few days since a small feast of squirrel, roasted over flames, and chewy forest trumpets. Tristan had been so proud- he had shot that squirrel himself with his slingshot. They will go fishing today, but first, sleep.
The mournful tremolo of a loon breaks the silence. The darkness starts to bleed open, red heat flickering through the cracks of the void. Tristan and Joby tremble at the milk-pale face and decolletage in a veil of flames. The ruby lips part and glowing embers spit from the maw of that darkness. The rush of trees igniting around them sounds like thunder. There is nowhere left to hide. “Miss me?” asks the impossible force, come to finish what she started.
