“Just don’t pull the pin.”

I could tell by the look in her eye, these were precisely the wrong words. I knew that look, had seen it before. She had worn it at least once a day throughout her handful of twelve years. And I — being older, arguably wiser, and having experienced her moods — should have known better.

For a moment, her grip on the grenade tightened, white-knuckling her small fist. I felt the vacuum of her scrutiny.

She pulled the pin.

Great.

“Now, you’ll have to keep your finger over the trigger to interrupt the count-down.”

When will I learn?

“Follow me.”

I must find some place she could release the grenade, hurl it as far from her — from us — as her skinny tween arm was able. Despite this — the fact that she’s willing to blow us both to pieces — I feel surprisingly calm.

Just ahead leans a great dilapidated structure. A ramshackle, run-down barn, walls and roof sagging, groaning toward center. Pushing open a door, I lead us inside. The barn reeks of abandonment; dusty shafts of light leak through cracks and seams. Piles of junk crouch in shadows — boards and beams split and broken, pricked with bright and rusted nails; broken chairs; moldering carpets, rolled in upon themselves; ancient, derelict equipment.

“Keep close.”

Past heaps and shifting stacks arranged in makeshift aisles, I lead a careful, winding route, locating, at last, a set of huge, sliding doors, limned in dim light. Hip and shoulder pressed to wood, hands gripping the door’s rough edge, I push, push against the door. Slowly, it scrapes open far enough to allow exit.

Outside, dusk has fallen. A great, green field rolls beyond the barn, spilling gently away to a flowered field. Daisies and bluebells.

“Okay,” I tell her, “now, throw it — as hard as you can.”

Turning to glance behind me — to encourage, exhort, cajole — I find myself alone. She didn’t follow.

I should have known.

 

Gently, she swings back and forth — a dog in a birdcage. She is small and brown and angular, lean limbed and wasp-waisted; the birdcage is bamboo with its front removed, suspended from a slim, black pipe in this cluttered, poorly-lit basement. Although the arrangement is peculiar, the little dog seems comfortable, at home. Her continuous, rocking motion is almost hypnotic — but for the jarring scrape of metal on metal, hook slowly scoring pipe, and the fact that natural gas flows through the very pipe the birdcage trembles and grates against…

By definition, an accident is a thing unplanned. Unintentional. Unprepared for. Most often resulting in injury or harm, loss or damage. This one was no different — whether deer in the road; patch of gravel; or a gradual drift from within those lines painted on pavement, that passive suggestion to maintain double yellow to left and white to right. The cause is now lost — leapt away into darkness, perhaps, or sprayed out beneath skidding tires, or unconsciously crossed. But an accident, by all definitions, it was.

Where, a moment before, all had been a chaos of noise and motion, all has suddenly jarred to a stop — except for the aged vehicle, which coughs and wheezes, its engine a hymn of syncopated pings. A miracle that the three within remain whole — limbs properly jointed, tendons and muscles snugged over unbroken bones. Bruises, yes — about hips and torsos and shoulders where seatbelts gripped and hugged and held.

Shaken, they slowly exit the vehicle. Cool night awaits. Latticework of grasses. Cloudless indigo sky. Only stars to observe and wink in silent testimony. A boy, roughly ten years old, slips from the back seat. Standing aside, he leaves the back door flung wide and watches as the man pries his grip from the steering wheel to emerge from the driver’s seat. The boy’s gaze remains fixed on the man, who staggers breathless around the door’s extended wing to stoop and bend and reach. Attention unflagging, the boy notes the man’s trembling efforts to reach into the back seat, to lift the infant from her car seat, to settle her — a pink confection — protectively against his shoulder.

But he does not merely observe — the boy listens, body taut, straining. He listens to the disjointed thread of words tripping like guilt from the man’s tongue…the desire to go back, back in time, to avoid this fact, this truth, this stark reality that leaves him, them, frightened, trembling in a dark and weedy roadside strewn with shattered glass, and grateful to be so. To go back and change the course of events. To avoid the accident entirely. But — the boy hears the stream of words catch and falter, change direction — to do so, to go back, to change the delicate time line might mean to go back too far, before she, the infant that even now rests contentedly within the slope of his neck and shoulder, is even born…

All of this, the boy hears and digests. Minute expressions flit over his features, fleet as thought and stars’ chill and distant light. He has heard his father’s fears and grief and desire. For a moment, the boy had steeled himself to try again, to attempt to open another fissure — but upon hearing the completion of his father’s spinning thoughts, he puts such tasks aside. Once was enough. It brought them here, to this place, where they are all together. Each of them whole. None of them lost. Unlike that other stream of time, the one that he had just bent and wrinkled and frayed to extract them all and bring them safely here. His father does not need to know. And, though it does not show — in countenance or posture — the boy is relieved.

 

 

Running. Running as fast as 12-year-old legs can run. Through this vast house — up wide staircases, down shadowed halls. Searching. Endlessly searching — floor after floor, room after room. The house creaks and groans with age. My footsteps echoing. My dress whispering. Can’t find her. Anywhere. Must find her.

Reaching the uppermost floor. Pausing, breathless. High above the stairwell, the ceiling flies away, peaks and leans one plane against another. Set in the farthest, narrowest wall — a doorless threshold. Running again. Passing door after door. Stepping beneath that lintel, crossing that open space. Entering a small room cluttered and stuffed with dusty antiques — dark waxed wood, turned legs, clawed feet; silk and gilt and brocade. And, to the immediate left, a mirrored drapery. A shimmering, subtle screen concealing another doorway. Beyond this shifting veil, I see her, my twin, trapped in that other space. Captive. I see them both obscured, edges furred. He, chastising, berating. She/me, weeping.

Leaning, now, against the drape. Pressing right shoulder to its surprising solidity. Bracing left hand over firm folds of gauzy reflection. Forcing my right hand through, slipping it between too-solid fabric. On a molecular level, it parts, allows my arm to pass. Groping. Reaching. Cheek pressing to cool veil of not-fabric. Fingers settling upon her shoulder, clutching, pulling. Tugging her through the barrier, into this glorified closet room. Pulling her to me.

Staring at her, seeing myself. Echoing grins. Hurriedly pushing random pieces of furniture against the not-curtain. Fleeing. Leaving that austere, dark-clad man to curse and rail.

Leaping together. My twin and I descending the stairwell’s open, central throat. Feet lightly touching walls, banisters, rails, newel posts. No need of steps. Gravity does not rule us.

We stand together in the back porch, watching through the windows as they approach — a mass of people spills through the quiet streets. A parade? The men are clad in work clothes and overalls, the women in loose, white gowns. But — there is no organization to their ranks. No drums. No music. Just a loosely arranged throng, choking the street, crowding sidewalks and pushing through our neighbors’ neat yards. They advance in growing numbers as twilight gathers; a tide of men and women with little concern for borders or boundaries.

In an all-encompassing wave, they flow through our hedge, course about our house. So many bodies. So many heedless, trampling feet. I dash outside to protest crushed Spring blooms and young, tender branches snapped. Thus, I hear them — the low unison of their  voices weaving through the cool breeze. They have settled in our back yard, intent upon increasing the numbers of their cult — by persuasion, reproach, or force of will.

I find them around the porch’s corner. To my alarm, the women encircle my young hawthorn tree and — arms up stretched, necks craned — they strip its slim, dark branches of fruit. Grabbing, clutching, they gorge themselves on the bright red berries, greedily overfilling their mouths till the juice runs down their chins and necks to stain their bodices.

“If you do not believe in the Fey and the magic of the Hawthorn, its fruit will poison you!” I shout. I wonder at my words, uncertain of their truth, but I will say anything to save my tree. To my relief and astonishment, the women — shocked, fear dawning on their smooth, stained faces — halt their greedy, all-consuming harvest.

Beyond this scene waits another crisis — several huge men crouch over our gas and electric meters. Bare-handed, they bend and twist narrow pipes, rend and snap delicate wires. One pauses just long meet my gaze and says they are “reading” the meters.

An anger uncoils inside me unlike any I have felt before. The intrusion. The disrespect. The greed and unkindness and self-absorption. My voice is enormous, crashing through the descending night. My words scathe and pierce. There is no room for doubt or discussion or misunderstanding. All flee before the the lash of my demands. In his haste, one of the men has abandoned a heavy, yellow backpack. Like a shot-putter, I heft it, whirl it around and around my head and body in a great curving arc. When finally I release it, it carves a bright streak through the night and crashes, lost in the distant woods that swallow the mob’s retreat.