The Crane Wife(53)
Author: Patrick Ness

‘As long as this bullet resides in your heart,’ she says, ‘so will a part of me. And as long as a part of me resides in your heart . . .’ She flies down close to his face so there will be no mistaking her words. ‘You have permission to harm me.’

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There is a silence, as the world below takes in a shocked breath.

‘What, my lady?’ the volcano says, his voice low and heavy.

‘Try.’

‘Try what?’

‘Try to harm me.’

He is unsettled, confused. But she is taunting him and begins to fly annoyingly close to his face. ‘My lady!’ he says, cross, and half-heartedly throws a blanket of lava her way.

She cries out in pain. She turns to him, the burn growing on her arm, the skin rippling and peeling in an ugly wound.

‘My lady!’ he says, shocked.

But she flies out of his reach.

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‘Where is your hatred now, my husband?’ she asks. ‘Where is your torment? You can harm me.’ She cocks her head. ‘So what will you do?’

She turns her back and flies away, not too fast, not in fear, just away. Away from him.

He trembles as what she has done sinks into him. The terrible, terrible thing she has achieved, far worse than any forgiveness could ever be.

He grows angry. And angrier still.

She is disappearing into the distance, a speck of light against a night of black.

‘I shall pursue you, my lady,’ he says. ‘I shall never cease pursuing you. I shall follow you until the end of time and–’

But she is not listening.

And he is not pursuing.

His heart aches. Aches with love. Aches with hatred. Aches with the bullet of her lodged inside.

His rage grows.

‘My lady,’ he says, angrily. ‘My lady.’

He storms over the landscape, destroying everything in his path, but there is no satisfaction in it, nothing to be gained from the small peoples running from him, the cities sinking beneath his blows, the vast forests burning under his breath. He turns back to the horizon. She is still a disappearing spot upon it, one star among the firmament.

‘My lady,’ he says again.

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He reaches down into the forest and rips up the tallest tree from its roots. He crushes it in his fist until it is straight and light. He reaches into the metals of the cities, into the factories he knows so well, and fashions an arrowhead from melted weapons of death. He fletches the arrow with feathers, extincting an entire species of the most beautiful bird he can find. He pulls out a bowstring from the tenderest sinews of the world, ignoring the cries of his child. He makes the bow from his own lava, allowing it to cool only into elasticity.

In the instant and eternity it has taken him to make his weapon, she has not disappeared from the horizon. She is still there, forever, like the bullet in his heart.

‘This is not over, my lady,’ he says, lining up his sight.

He lets fly the arrow.

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It strikes her.

‘Oh, my love!’ she cries out, in pain and terrible, inevitable surprise. ‘What have you done?’

And she falls, falls, falls to earth.

The fire began like this (1).

In the top half of the final tile, a volcano made of words erupted its fury, blasting verbs and adjectives and gerunds out into the world to consume everything they touched. In the bottom half, somewhat counterintuitively, a woman made of feathers fell from the sky. She had a single cut word – covered in down to obscure its exact letters – pierced through her heart. She fell with sorrow and resignation, but her position was such that she might also have completed her fall, thrown to earth by the angry arms of the volcano.

Kumiko set the tile on the bookshelves with the others. She had lit the room with candles in every corner, the tiles flickering in the warmth of the flames, like miniature suns in a temple for an ancient goddess.

‘It seems a strange ending,’ George said. ‘The volcano destroying itself in anger, the woman beyond his grasp.’

‘A happy release for both, maybe,’ Kumiko said. ‘But also perhaps a sad one, too, yes. And after all, not even an ending. All stories begin before they start and never, ever finish.’

‘What happens to them next?’

In answer, she only took him by the arm and led him out of the sitting room, up the stairs, and into what was now their bed. Her intention didn’t seem exclusively carnal, but she did press herself to him after they undressed, holding him to her, stroking his hair. He looked up into her eyes, lit by moonlight.

They reflected back to him, golden.

‘Do I know who you are?’ he asked.

To which she only said, ‘Kiss me.’

And so he did.

Down in the sitting room, the candles still burned in their wax cylinders, flickering and dancing. One candle, though, had a flaw. Its flame licked and burned unevenly, and soon the wall of the candle melted away, molten wax spilling over the side, pooling across George’s old coffee table. Even this was only a small danger, but the collapse unbalanced the candle just enough for it to tip, lowering its flame closer to the tabletop.

Later, after a physical intimacy so close and gentle and perfect it made George dare to think for a fleeting moment that happiness might be possible after all, he sat up in bed. Kumiko sleepily asked where he was going. ‘To blow out those candles,’ he replied.

But it was already too late.

The fire began like this (2).

After Kumiko placed the last tile and George blew out the candles she’d lit, they’d retired to bed. They made love slowly, almost sadly, but with a tenderness so light George felt as if they’d finally made it through some unnameably strange and mysterious ordeal, safely reaching the other side. He looked up into her eyes, lit by moonlight.

They reflected back to him, golden.

‘Do I know who you are?’ he asked.

To which she only said, ‘Kiss me.’

And so he did.

Later, they slept, and still sleeping, George rose.

He padded down the stairs with the stumbling certainty of the sleepwalker. In his darkened sitting room, he moved towards the first tile of the story (‘She is born in a breath of cloud . . .’) and took it down from the bookshelf. He tossed it carelessly on the coffee table. He did the same with the second tile, dropping it on the first. He repeated this action, unseeing, through every tile, one after the other, until he reached the last, set out this very evening. He placed it on top of the others, the pile now in great disarray, the feathers and his paper cuttings tearing and ripping under the slipshod weight.