November Smoke

First draft of a story I wrote for a workshop

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November Smoke

In the back yard a fire burned. A quick burn of dead, matted leaves to make mothers nervous, small children delight, and white-bristled gentlemen softly reflect. On what, one could assume either the glint of a memory or the nature of an ember. Both would suffice and sustain for the moment. Under and around this sudden fire the frozen ground softened and the crystalline blades of grass, hastily encapsulated by a mid-November frost, slipped free from their watery prison. Those around the blaze tossed foliage by the handful and a dry heat burst headlong from the pile of leaves, only to be forced into retreat by the cold. It was a trifling, evasive warmth. At each sprinkling of umbrage the flames leapt skyward, lapping at the heel of a thick whorl of smoke and carrying off the dizzy shards of leaf that flitted like brilliant moths before extinguishing in the cool evening air. The children jumped and the mothers distressed.
Mr. Lomen could see none of this. From his perch on the high truss, he could make out only a thin column of smoke, substantial here, drawn out there, rising slowly at an angle with the wind. To those unfamiliar it would have seemed nothing more than a silver ply of yarn, fraying against the fabric of a darkening sky; a curious strand of cloud, vanishing as quickly as it had appeared. Mr. Lomen, however, would not be so mislead. He knew what this was. Even from a distance he could smell the dry leaves, taste the bitter ash. It was the winter pyre, one of many that would be burning across the region to clear the fields and mark Autumn’s passing. First frost had finally settled upon the valley.
Reasons. Someone had asked for reasons.
Mr. Lomen gripped up on a girder and scanned the hilly horizon, making a conscious effort to ignore the shifting of tired legs and intermittent conversation at his back. Surely the rabble would have thinned by now; it was, after all, the dinner hour. In his time on the truss, Mr. Lomen had felt the luminance of spectacle rise as the people gathered and then fade when they remained. In the space of an hour they had made their presence felt, and now their persistence, their quiet, lingered like hot annoyance on the back of his neck. What business was it of theirs, a considering man? Had these people no families or warm homes in which to retire? Certainly they did, he thought. Yet they came in spite of their pleasant trappings, drawn on by the lure of spectacle like a parade, each man and woman preoccupied with the same enduring thought: someone is on the bridge. What they so anxiously waited for Mr. Lomen could not be certain of, but he guessed it to be one of two outcomes: down or off. One of two diametrical opposites that for the last few hours had been pulling on each other, grating across the fulcrum of a rust laden iron truss. Down or off. And while he hoped that the people willed the former, in his heart Mr. Lomen knew human nature to be far less forgiving; off drew the crowds, off made the papers.
Presently he glanced over his shoulder. A stranger clothed in the thick blue and grey wools of the local constabulary stood between Mr. Lomen and the crowd. In caution, the stranger raised his eyebrows and his hands, which had become raw from prolonged exposure to the air. This was the man who moments ago, after an extended consultation with his book of procedures, asked Mr. Lomen for a reason, reasons. A well-intentioned, though poorly exacted pursuit of dialogue. Yet, bumbling as they were, the question and the red-cheeked stranger stirred in Mr. Lomen the embers of thought that had gone dormant during his long vigil on the truss: reasons, justifications, troubles.
By the accounts weighted and deemed worthy, Mr. Lomen had no reason at all to find himself in his present company and situation. There were no chinks or breaches to be found in his well-being; nothing to speak of really. He did not ail from weak joints or an arhythmic heart. Both his vision and hearing were sound. He had never been troubled by money, in acquisition or retention. In love, he had never suffered so great a besieging as could not be mortared and masoned to its original strength. He did not smoke. Only rarely did he take drink. No troubles of any concern to the banker, the butcher, or the doctor. No, what troubled Mr. Lomen stood behind the whitewashed battlements and dry-cleaned linens. It swirled in the window wells of respectable living, falling quiet from time to time but never spending itself before precipitating a fine layer of grit on the once clear pane of glass. What troubled Mr. Lomen was the bridge itself. The thought of the bridge and the small child that he had seen step from it.
Precisely how these things came to calcify themselves in his mind was no mystery. He had seen the child a few days prior and time had not yet degraded her image. Though, he did not see her there, not on that exact iron bridge. Rather, he saw her on a grassy commons, from a park bench, from the shade where he so often sat to consider.
Reasons.
It was late afternoon and all around Mr. Lomen the world was turning to glass. Shadows from the forest began to grow long and fan out across the landscape, reclaiming, if only for a short while, their dominance over the fields in which they once stood. The taut shafts of light that clung to the tips of the ash trees were close to collapse, and they would very soon snap and fall back to the sun; already there were great clefts in the corners of the sky. Gradually, the air began to crack. Mr. Lomen allowed this to happen. The last fine rays of daylight, he believed, were nature’s best tool for whetting the mind. Clarifying, he thought. Crystal, he thought. But that was all, nothing more; these were his only thoughts. Neither the black branches that swayed above him; nor the cold, climbing through his coat; nor the echoed yelping of the dog who sniffed anxiously about the base of a sycamore; nor the tang of duff and dead leaves; nor the sound of his own tired pulse, pushing languidly across his eardrums: only crystal, only clear. How empty Mr. Lomen would have felt, had he been aware of this. But for a time he was not. And so Mr. Lomen sat vacantly, meditating on nothing at all, and drifted out above the commons, where everything was crystal and clear.
However, one cannot escape the wanderings of the mind indefinitely; a knee will jerk, a voice will call out, a thought will crest the quiet surface. Mr. Lomen knew this of course, yet the return of his senses came none-the-less as disturbing and inelegant, and he found that he had been staring off into space rather dully. As he clenched his teeth and shifted his seat in an effort of self-appraisal, Mr. Lomen felt unusually apparent. This awareness was redoubled when he noticed that the space in which he had been staring was occupied by three small children, and that these children, though now contentedly playing beneath a rutted swingset, had probably seen him stare.
The idea of his leering made Mr. Lomen shift once more. If he had bothered them, he thought, they showed little sign of it.
In fact, the children showed little sign of anything. Physically, they were quite ambiguous. Cherubic and freckle-cheeked, with bright shocks of coarse-cut red hair. Only after much consideration did Mr. Lomen place them as girls, though their navy overalls were faded around the knee and their tartan-fringed jackets mudded along the sleeve. From where this deterioration came, he could only guess, for their play, if it could be called such, would have been of complete imagination. Since he had been watching them, the girls had scarcely moved. They sat in a lazy semicircle, their lower halves splayed haphazardly as if each one of them had been dropped to the ground like a rag doll, which only after a period of settling came to assume its current posture. In an occasional and hushed manner, the girls would exchange looks and low voices. What was said, Mr. Lomen imagined to keep with boys and cakes and rings, but even these things could not hold the girls’ attention very long, and quite abruptly they would descend into silence. Only the rise and fall of the breeze, which carried airward the fine tendrils of their hair, gave the continued impression of subsistence to the three children. It seemed to Mr. Lomen as though they belonged to noone.
But this could not be, such peaceable and unassuming youth. It would not be fair. They were so unconfined; their stillness, so natural. Serene, he thought. Surreal, he thought. It made Mr. Lomen feel heavy, knowing that at any moment the children might suddenly become active and shake away their calm, and that when this happened he would remain pacified, and his own stillness would sit untouched. That for some reason beyond his control they could be moved, but he could not.
These were cold realizations. So cold, indeed, that when Mr. Lomen pulled them back into himself, they made distant the inner workings of his chest. His blood slowed, his lungs became short, and as he worked these thoughts down, wore them to slim shavings of ice, he saw that the children were now completely aware of him. One of the girls was smiling softly in his direction. How incredibly affectionate and disarming this gesture was, for the warmth of it settled upon Mr. Lomen with the conciseness of a spark, which fades quickly after it is felt. The other two girls craned their necks to follow the path of the smile. These two faces, unlike the first, were white and inexpressive. Empty. Though, there was nothing of calculation to their blankness, nothing of indignity. Rather, they looked on Mr. Lomen frankly, as though their minds had no preformed response for dealing with strange old men in parks. It was with this same frankness then that all three girls rose to their feet, gathered up their knapsacks, brushed the twisted sheaths of grass from their overalls, and seated themselves on the swingset.
Back and forth. Back and forth. Legs in, legs out. Back and forth. And Mr. Lomen could breath once more.
From this swingset, there ran a long, downtrodden chain of slate stepping stones that had been designed to join with the gravel path of the park in the most roundabout of ways. The stones made a great swooping arc that, bending by gradual degrees, came toward and then ran alongside the gravel walk, finally merging with it after spending some fifty or sixty slabs of slate. Many seasons and many thousands of tiny, spirited feet had taken their toll on the stones. Some flaked, others sprouted shoots of grass, still others had vanished completely, having been either ground to dust or physically displaced. The overall impression was that of a crescent moon balanced artificially on its tail, a connect-the-dots that had yellowed and faded with age.
As the sun smothered under thick iron clouds, the children made their way to the nose of this worn-out, stone moon. The two girls with hollow faces approached mouth to ear, and the smaller, more larking girl fluttered at a close distance behind them. This one, Mr. Lomen decided, was the younger sister. No doubt that the distance she maintained had been placed upon her, ingrained by years of hair twisting, nose flicking, and name calling to the point of tears, and then the tears, and then her sisters playing nice. Though it seemed she still maintained a resiliency toward the arrangement. This too would fade, Mr. Lomen thought. Long is the road, Mr. Lomen thought. And sure enough, when the two girls reached the first stone slab, they removed their knapsacks and tossed them at the feet of the smaller girl. Almost compulsorily, she began to pick them up, looping one on each arm and struggling to keep their many straps from dragging on the ground, as her sisters hopped away. The new game brought a sudden color and liveliness to their faces. From one broken stepping stone to the next, they exacted their leaps, making clumsy calculations so as not to land on the grass. To land on the grass would have been to fail. Mr. Lomen learned this when one of the two girls over shot her mark, hollered, and then, defeated, began again from the first slab.
Their gaiety faded only when the smaller girl followed them out onto the slate. At this, they did not revert to their look of blank indifference, but instead turned sour, downcast eyes upon her. Mr. Lomen knew what such looks meant, how such undue bitterness felt; the younger sister could only watch. She had been relegated to the role of a dumb beast, lapidated into obedience. Her reward was inactivity.
Yet, the verbal crating of her sisters proved only so strong as the propinquity which it maintained, and when the two older girls had bounded halfway across the moon the smaller girl stepped out. Not onto the stone, however, but instead upon one of her sisters’ knapsack. She then placed and stood upon the next, taking great care to avoid the grass. For a moment, the girl paused at the end of her short progress and surveyed the ground she had just covered. From there she turned, lifted up the first knapsack, tossed it a small distance it in front of the second, and took her third step. It was in this way that she fashioned her own two-piece span across the grass. Measure by measure, she moved away from the swingset, away from her sisters, away from the slate moon. She was some twenty steps out before the others realized what was happening. Even then, they would only shout to her, call to her with sugar forced into their words and give her reasons as to why she should come back. Though this was only a secondary concern; they would not abandon their game.
The small girl seemed to know this, and it soon became clear to Mr. Lomen that the she would not ever turn around. That she would continue across the commons and through the treeline and through the night, carried off upon her own unfolding trail. That she would not bend to her sisters’ requisitions. That in doing so she would, for a transeunt moment, unburden herself. If only she could stay above the grass. If only. The other girls realized this as well. But by the time they let go of their game and took off running through the park, their sister had already gone, eclipsed in the distance by a forest of ash. With an urgency as much out of fear as out of concern, they pitched into the woods after her, and Mr. Lomen was left alone with nothing to regard but an empty field at dusk. And a moon that would not set.
Reasons. Someone had asked for reasons.
Behind Mr. Lomen the faces in the crowd had grown hard. They were strange, disinterested faces, for which he held no significance. Weary eyes, sagging mouths, and running noses, that sniffed impatiently, that thought they smelled something in the air: fire, or failure, or frozen blood. It would not be long before they would encircle Mr. Lomen and, following the lead of the policeman, begin baying at him out of frustration; the gall had already worked its way into their hungry throats. Here was a man in need of communion. Though, their noses had led them mostly astray, for in Mr. Lomen they would find nothing of frost or frailty, only flame. Nothing they might do could bend him. These people would not know this, however, for in their numbers they felt immune and in control. How terribly unaware each and every one of them was. How complacent, Mr. Lomen thought. But, they were on the bridge too, he said to himself. Stop. Go. Stay off the grass. They were all on the bridge, and he was slowly rising above. The policeman was the first to see this and called out to him. Then the crowd broke into an uneasy gossip as Mr. Lomen stepped from the truss and rushed past. A number of the women were round and stunned that a man might do such a thing, covering their mouths and whispering, how terrible, a lost soul. The men were graved with a sense of rage and mockery; they believed their name would be tarnished with his. Some cursed him, others reached out to him, but Mr. Lomen shook all of this off. He would not hear it. He was already some twenty steps out and floating past the moon, rising up out of an empty field and curling like November smoke.
And everything was crystal and clear.