The Crane Wife(54)
Author: Patrick Ness

Still in the dark, he reached for the box of matches with which they had lit the candles. He struck one, and though his pupils recoiled at the sudden blaze of light, he didn’t wince or blink or look away.

He held the flame to the edge of one of the tiles near the bottom of the pile. It was at first reluctant to catch, the tiles being made of a particularly heavy matte bonding, but catch it eventually did, a dark blue flame oozing over it, grabbing inexorable hold of the first batch of page cuttings, then brightening, expanding, a hungry tongue sprouting two more, which each sprouted two more in turn.

George dropped the match and turned back towards the stairs, slowly climbing them as the fire grew and spread and flexed its muscles.

He would remember none of this and not believe it if he had, having zero history of somnambulism. Nevertheless, he climbed back under the covers, placed his head on the pillow, Kumiko snuggling in behind him, and he closed his eyes again, as if they had never been properly open.

The fire began like this (3).

In the darkened sitting room, while George and Kumiko slept upstairs, the tiles looked at one another across the bookshelves. They told a story of a lady and a volcano who were both more and less than what they were called. Their story was told in feathers and paper, but it was the feathers alone that now seemed to waft and shift as if in a breeze–

A feather detached itself from one of the tiles, flitting in the air, jumping and dashing in a fretful spiral–

Where it was joined by a second, a bit of feather from a different tile, swirling around the first–

And then a third and a fourth, then a flurry, then a wave of feathers, pouring from the shelves, twisting in spirals and helixes, coalescing then bursting apart, grabbing at each other like fists at the end of living ropes. They started to concentrate themselves in the centre of the room, and there seemed to be a kind of charge running through them, with flashes here and there, as if small electrical storms raged inside the cloud of feathers–

A spasm surged through the cloud, every bit of feather rushing towards a middle point–

Where, for the briefest of seconds, the feathers came together to make a great white bird, its wings outstretched, its neck unfurling high into the air, its head curled back in what might be ecstasy, might be terror, might be fury or sorrow–

And then it blasted apart, uncountable feathers and sparks flung across the room as it exploded–

The sparks caught cloth and books and wood and curtains as they landed in a hundred different spots, igniting them–

The fire began like this (4).

The volcano opened its green eyes and looked out across the vastness of the sitting room, a universe unto itself.

The horizon of this universe told a story.

The volcano stepped from the final tile to read it, his eyes showing first astonishment, then grief, as he read the tale along the skyline. He wept tears of fire to see the lady again, to see how things had gone.

But as he read, he also began to grow angry.

‘This is not how it happened,’ he said. ‘There is more than what is told here.’

The volcano’s anger began to make him grow, as anger inevitably did to a volcano. The valleys and glaciers along his flanks trembled and broke apart, re-forming as he grew larger and larger, taller and taller, his anger firing the furnace that burned within him.

‘You have misrepresented me!’ he shouted. ‘You have denied the truth!’

He grew so large he filled the world of the sitting room, nations fleeing from him, cities crumbling under his earthquakes, forests and landscapes disappearing through crevasses big enough to swallow an ocean.

‘This will not stand!’ he shouted, raising clenched and furious fists. ‘This will not stand!’

He erupted, sending ash and fire in an unstoppable cataclysm that burned the universe entire.

The fire began like this (5).

The house was silent, asleep. Nothing stirred, even in George and Kumiko’s bedroom, where they slept against one another, the blankets twisted around them like foothills after an earthquake.

Down below, in a still moment, the front door of George’s house slowly opened, followed by silent footsteps inside. The door closed, just as quietly.

Rachel made her way into the sitting room, holding the key that George had forgotten he’d once given her in the palm of her hand. She stood, squinting in the darkness, trying to read the tiles.

She hadn’t been feeling particularly well lately. Whole swathes of time seemed to vanish from her day without her being able to account for them, and when she was fully aware of what was going on, the rushes of feeling that buffeted her were both exhausting and perplexing. She had always known who she was, it had been her greatest weapon, and then, one day, after ending it with George, she had woken up and not known. That had proved increasingly difficult to handle, increasingly difficult to live with, and there seemed no relief from it, as if she’d suddenly been given a burden to carry, one that slowed her down while the rest of life rushed away from her, leaving her behind.

Perhaps, she wondered, as she brushed her fingers against the barely visible tiles, she was going crazy.

What on earth, for example, had possessed her to go and see Kumiko? She couldn’t even remember how she knew where Kumiko lived, though it can only have been something Kumiko must have mentioned at that party. But when she arrived, she and Kumiko hadn’t even argued. Rachel had calmly – really quite astoundingly calmly – told Kumiko that she’d slept with George, that he’d called her over and insisted on it, and that she had done so immediately and willingly without a thought to Kumiko’s feelings.

Kumiko had taken it all without visible anger, except perhaps for a slight impatience, as if she’d been expecting the news all along and it was tardy in arriving.

And then Kumiko had opened her mouth to speak, and the next thing Rachel remembered, she was downstairs, looking for her keys in her handbag. Which was really annoying, because she would have loved to have heard what Kumiko had to say about it, even if she couldn’t remember for the life of her why she’d gone over to Kumiko’s in the first place.

Then she had glanced up and seen George sitting in his car.

And oh, the shame that followed. The unbearable shame. It had been so painful, she’d had to sit in her car for nearly twenty minutes before the crying ebbed enough to let her drive.

Which also made no sense. She’d never much bothered with shame before. And why so much, especially if George was the one who–

No. No, it was crazy.

It was, in fact, further proof that she was going crazy.