The Crane Wife(37)
Author: Patrick Ness

She considers this. After a moment, she lands.

‘What is your gift?’ she asks.

‘An unexpected truth, my lady.’

Across the length of a continent, he holds out his hand for her to step onto.

A fraction of a second more quickly than she would have liked, she does so.

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The volcano erupts, causing the world to crack in two. Factories, towns, cities, nations fall into chasms in the earth. The skies fill with ash and fire. Rivers of lava make the seas boil. All is darkness and flame and destruction.

‘But you, my lady,’ he says, as she stands on the palm of his hand, ‘are unharmed. I cannot, do you see?’

He brings up a wave of lava to fall on her, but it parts as it does, leaving her untouched. He waves his hand to spin a torrent of fire around her, but again, it does not touch her skin. He brings a burning fist down to smash her in his palm, but it stops before harming a feather on her head.

‘I wish to destroy you, my lady,’ he says, ‘so that I may create you again. But I cannot, despite what we both have believed.’ He holds her up high, over the ruined world, up to his green, green eyes. ‘Do you see what this means?’

‘I do,’ she says. ‘And my answer is yes, I will marry you.’

On the palm of the volcano’s hand, grass begins to grow under her feet.

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They set about recreating the world. They call it their child, a joke that neither is particularly comfortable with, especially when the speaking of it makes it true. He raises lava to build new plains. She brings in seasons to wear them down, plant them, fill them with green.

Their regular couplings are violent yet unsatisfying. His hands wish to burn her, blast her to steam, and hers wish to turn him to stone, sending sheets of rock crashing to earth. But they cannot harm one another. He must constantly, viciously boil, she must constantly, violently forgive, but the fruits of their efforts are as naught.

Yet it works. For a time.

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Neither ceases to be what they were before.

She suspects he is behind the wars that blight the face of their child, and when he returns from absences his horses sweat fire and blood, as if they had run to the end of time and back.

He suspects, in turn, that her absences are spent bestowing her forgiveness on others, and when she returns from periods away there is a contentment to her, a glassy-eyed satisfaction she is slow to stir from.

He has thought himself too big, too all-powerful for jealousy. She has thought herself too free, too quietly sure of her place in the world for jealousy to even occur to her.

They are both wrong.

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She begins to follow him on his trips across their child, keeping distant and out of sight, but watching him raise armies that swarm across the land, watching him build factories that belch black smoke into the sky, watching him create a kind of link amongst all the creatures living there so that, by their own choice, they allow themselves to be more easily controlled.

He, meanwhile, hides in hot springs and geysers, travels via ash falls and earthquakes, dances across tectonic plate stresses and the slidings of continents to follow her, watching her deal with the people of their child, watch them try to take from her, watch her forgive them with her touch, releasing them from their burdens in an exchange more intimate than any of their own closenesses could ever be.

Their child senses their disquiet, as any child would. It frets and turns and soils itself under their increasingly neglectful eye. Occasionally, it shames them into submitting to its needs, and they repay it in caresses, in seasons of peace and fair weather, in nights of endless moonlight and days of crisp sun.

But it is never long before their eyes return to one another, and when that happens the world knows to cower and take itself early to bed.

‘Are we ready?’ George asked.

‘Would it matter if we were not?’ Kumiko replied, reaching up to straighten his tie, which needed no straightening and made the gesture almost ironic, a mockery of an infinite number of black-and-white TV housewives straightening an infinite number of black-and-white neckties on an infinite number of patiently loving black-and-white advertising executive husbands.

But it was also affectionate. Yes, George insisted to himself.

‘They’re going to be surprised,’ he said.

‘A good party needs a few surprises. Is that not what people say?’

‘I’ve never heard that.’

‘Then it is possible you have gone to the wrong parties.’

He moved to kiss her but there was a knock on the front door. ‘Already,’ he sighed.

‘They have to arrive sometime. Your friends.’

‘But not yours.’

A faint strain furrowed her forehead. ‘I do wish you would not–’

The knock came again. He released her and moved to the front hallway, the tension from Kumiko staying with him, like a rung bell. He stopped in front of the door for a moment, took a deep breath.

He opened it.

‘Sweetheart!’ he said, greeting his daughter. He leaned down to pick up his grandson, and as JP launched into a breathless analysis of a paradigm-shifting cast change in the Land of Wriggle, George found his eyes not quite believing who he saw behind Amanda, here as an apparent guest, gift bottle of champagne in her hand.

‘You remember Rachel?’ Amanda said, innocent as baby poo.

And the party was under way.

‘Who on earth are all these people?’ Clare said, arriving with Hank and finding Amanda in the rapidly building mêlée of George’s sitting room. The furniture had been pushed back, but even so, it was only 7.40 and they were crammed into the space like a disco.

‘Not a clue,’ Amanda answered, embracing her mother and kissing Hank on both cheeks.

‘How you doin’?’ he said, his voice deep and friendly as a talking forest. ‘Where’s the munchkin?’

‘Helping with the coats. Which means pretending they’re seals and he’s a penguin.’

‘I’ll go and find him,’ Clare said, taking off her jacket and relieving Hank of his.

Amanda was left alone with her stepfather, which was absolutely fine, he was lovely – kind to her mother, warm to JP, sane – but she felt keenly aware, as she did all too often with Hank, that she was talking to the only black person in the room. There was also the additional problem that she’d now spend the rest of the evening worrying about whether to apologise for it on behalf of England.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Where can a Texan get a drink?’