Читать книгу Pigs - Johanna Stoberock - Страница 12

Otis started the fire with the glass from his locket. He used the nail from the crate to pop the glass from its frame. The photos inside slid out and landed on the ground. He hung the chain back around his neck and felt the empty locket against his skin and held the freed glass up to the sun. The sun concentrated through it onto a leaf, and before long the leaf smoked and then burst into flame. He couldn’t believe it worked: the glass, the warmth, the heat, the wisp of smoke, the finger of flame. Who said he couldn’t work miracles? He was so amazed that it took him a second too long to bend his head down and start blowing, and he lost the flame and had to start all over. This time he blew gently, his cheek wedged in the sand, and the flame blazed stronger. He fed it with the tiniest sticks he could find—he had a whole pile of thin twigs next to his left knee—and then he added sticks as thick as his pinky, and then as thick as his pointer, and then as thick as his thumb. In a minute or two it was hard to believe he’d ever not had fire. What was life without fire? He couldn’t believe he’d been alive before the fire, alone on the beach without a flame.

He could have watched that fire forever. The flames twisted like dancing girls. They shook their hips and jumped over coals and dipped down low, their hair streaming out like water. He could make fire. He was practically a god. He’d never let it die.

The flames formed shapes beyond the dancing girls. A soccer ball. A ring. A bird. The bird’s chest was wide and its hips were narrow. When it stepped out of the fire it was the ash gray of coals gone cold. It turned to look at him, black eyes glittering. It cooed. His heart shifted sideways and the bird lifted its wings and circled up, over the sand, and away. He rubbed his eyes and took a sip of water.

Otis remembered watching birds with his son. They’d lived close to the ocean, and when his boy was just a toddler, he’d take him for walks so Alice could get work done around the house. They’d go out in all weather. If it was winter and the wind was blowing, he’d wrap extra blankets around the boy and wheel him out in the stroller. The boy would be nothing but eyes, glittering eyes surrounded by a pile of blankets, watching anything in the world that Otis pointed out as interesting. He’d take him on the same walk every time: through a couple of blocks lined with houses to a stone gate that opened to a park that overlooked the sea. He’d push the stroller through the gate and onto the cobblestoned path, and the world would turn to nothing but wind and salt air and birds. He’d crouch down next to the boy and point out gulls and cormorants and occasionally a pelican. When he shut his eyes now, the boy’s eyes glowed in his memory as bright as the coals at the bottom of the fire.

He had to get home. There had to be a way to get home.

Otis’s stomach growled and he looked out to sea, and he wondered if he’d missed a ship passing while he’d been watching the flames. Just like him to get so entranced by beauty that he’d forget the purpose for which it had been created. The locket was hot against his skin, its metal surface heated by the fire. He didn’t notice when the pictures on the ground, picked up by a gust of wind, circled once and settled in the coals.