From the Dust Returned

“In time,” said Uncle Einar, guessing his thought. “One day, or you’re not my nephew! Quick!”

They skimmed the roof, peered into attic dunes where Cecy dreamed, seized an October wind that soared them to the clouds, and plummeted down, gently, to land upon the porch where two dozen shadows with mist for eyes welcomed them with a proper tumult and rainfall applause.

“Good flying, aye, Timothy?” the uncle shouted, he never murmured, everything was an outrageous explosion, an opera bombardment. “Enough?”

“Enough!” Timothy wept with delight. “Oh, Uncle, thanks.”

“His first lesson,” Uncle Einar announced. “Soon the air, the sky, the clouds, will be his as well as mine!”

More rainfall applause as Einar carried Timothy in to the dancing phantoms at the tables and the almost-skeletons at the feast. Smokes exhaled from the chimneys shapeless to assume shapes of remembered nephews and cousins, then ceased being smolders and took on flesh to be crushed in the orchestra of dancers and crowd the banquet spreads. Until a cock crowed on some distant farm. All stiffened as if struck. The wildness stilled. The smokes and mists and rain-shapes melted along the cellar steps to stash, lounge, and occupy the bins and boxes with brass-labeled lids. Uncle Einar, last of all, kettledrummed the air as he descended, laughing at some half-remembered death, perhaps his own, until he lay in the longest box of all and let his wings simmer to be tucked on each side of his laughs and with the last bat-web pinion safely appliquéd to his chest, shut his eyes, gave a nod, and the lid, so summoned, shut down on his laughs as if he were still in flight and the cellar was all silence and dark.

Timothy, in the cold dawn, was abandoned. For all were gone, all slept fearful of light. He was alone, and loving the day and the sun, but wishing somehow to love darkness and night as he crept back up through all the stairs of the House saying, “I’m tired, Cecy. But I can’t sleep. Can’t.”

“Sleep,” murmured Cecy, as he lay on the Egyptian sands beside her. “Hear me. Sleep. Sleep.”

And, obeying, he slept.

Sunset.

Three dozen long, hollow box-lids slammed wide. Three dozen filaments, cobwebs, ectoplasms swarmed up to pulsate and then—become. Three dozen cousins, nephews, aunts, uncles melted themselves from the vibrant air, a nose here, a mouth here, a set of ears, some upraised hands and gesticulant fingers, waiting for legs to extend the feet to extrude, whereupon they stepped out and down on the cellar floor even as the strange casks popped wide to let forth not vintages but autumn leaves like wings and wings like autumn leaves which stormed footless up the stairs, while from down the vacuumed chimney flues blown forth in cindered smokes, tunes sounded from players invisible, and a rodent of incredible size chorded the piano and waited on applause.

In the midst of which, Timothy was ricocheted from beast-child to dread relative in a volcanic roar so that at last, defeated, he yanked himself free and fled to the kitchen where something huddled against the flooded windowpanes. It sighed and wept and tapped continually, and suddenly he was outside, staring in, the rain beating, the wind chilling him, and all the candle darkness inside lost. Waltzes were being waltzed; he could not waltz. Foods were being devoured he could not devour, wines were being drunk he could not drink.

Timothy shivered and ran upstairs to the moonlit sands and the dunes shaped like ladies and Cecy asleep in their midst.

“Cecy,” he called, softly. “Where are you tonight?”

She said, “Far west. California. By a salt sea, near the mud pots and the steam and the quiet. I’m a farmer’s wife sitting on a wooden porch. The sun’s going down.”

“What else, Cecy?”

“You can hear the mud pots whispering,” she replied. “The mud pots lift little gray heads of steam, and the heads rip like rubber and collapse with a noise like wet lips. And there is a smell of sulfur and deep burning and old time. The dinosaur has been cooking here two billion years.”

“Is he done yet, Cecy?”

Cecy’s calm sleeper’s lips smiled. “Quite done. Now it’s full night here between the mountains. I’m inside this woman’s head, looking out through the little holes in her skull, listening to the silence. Planes fly like pterodactyls on huge wings. Further over, a steam shovel Tyrannosaurus stares at those loud reptiles flying high. I watch and smell the smells of prehistoric cookings. Quiet, quiet …”

“How long will you stay in her head, Cecy?”

“Until I’ve listened and looked and felt enough to change her life. Living in her isn’t like living anywhere in the world. Her valley with her small wooden house is a dawn world. Black mountains enclose it with silence. Once in half an hour I see a car go by, shining its headlights on a small dirt road, and then silence and night. I sit on the porch all day, and watch the shadows run out from the trees, and join in one big night. I wait for my husband to come home. He never will. The valley, the sea, few cars, the porch, rocking chair, myself, the silence.”

“What now, Cecy?”

“I’m walking off the porch, toward the mud pots. Now the sulfur fumes are all around. A bird flies over, crying. I’m in that bird! And as I fly, inside my new small glass-bead eyes, I see that woman, below, take two steps out into the mud pots! I hear a sound as if a boulder has been dropped! I see a white hand, sinking in a pool of mud. The mud seals over. Now, I’m flying home!”

Something banged against the attic window.

Cecy blinked.

“Now!” she laughed. “I’m here!”

Cecy let her eyes wander to find Timothy.

“Why are you upstairs instead of with the Homecoming?”

“Oh, Cecy!” he burst out. “I want to do something to make them see me, make me as fine as them, something to make me belong, and I thought you might—”

“Yes,” she murmured. “Stand straight! Now, shut your eyes and think nothing, nothing!”