Secondhand Sorcery

The world was a simpler place than it used to be. Ruslan didn’t really know this—he couldn’t have explained it, or understood it himself. But for the past three days, there had been a growing awareness that things had used to be different. More and more, he would reach inside himself for a word for a thing, and when he brought it out it would bring out three or four other things with it, things he didn’t really recognize but knew were important.

He asked for ‘water,’ and got it, and as he accepted the cup he thought of bloody black wings bearing a girl across a narrow inlet at sunset. They taught him to say ‘bed,’ with a lot of coaching, and he smiled when they cheered—but he also remembered two beds in a ruined village, and lying awake at night listening to Fatima mutter in her sleep.

They weren’t all there yet, and he didn’t know how they all fit together, but he could feel the weight of the past. If he’d remembered how to speak, he might have compared it to snow on a mountain top, waiting to avalanche, or gathering clouds full of rain. He didn’t, so the past only pestered him; the memories chafed, the way his clothes chafed when they left him to sit in one spot for too long.

Like the time, yesterday—or maybe last week, a-time-that-was-not-now—when he had wet himself, and Fatima had cleaned him. He didn’t think this was the first time it had happened, but time was a tricky thing to sort out, and he kept wanting to mash it all together. Fatima made unhappy noises, because she always did. Her grumbles were usually comforting; they meant that everything was normal. This time, though, she’d given him a look as she complained, a sad kind of look, and it bothered him.

It didn’t seem to bother her; she put clean pants on him and went back to doing something else. But the look stayed with him, and he remembered, or thought he remembered, a time when he had stood on his feet and put his arms around her and told her things, and she had looked up at him and smiled, because he was strong and he could help her. He didn’t think he could do any of that now. Not the standing, or the talking, or the helping. None of it.

That was what the sad look meant, maybe. He didn’t know, and not knowing bothered him, and being bothered bothered him, because he knew there had been a time when not knowing had been okay, when every new thing that happened to him was wonderful, like seeing the sun rise for the first time. He’d been fine as long as everything stayed simple, but it wasn’t anymore. Now he could remember the sun rising before, and he knew he should know the words for all the things he saw, and he always felt like there were more words to say, but he didn’t know them, and so he choked on all the things he meant.

Now they were in a little place, him and Fatima and the girl who put the bags of water with strings onto the thing in his arm (but he didn’t know why). The place had bad air, full of … smoke? Smoke. Lots of men and women, blowing smoke, and Fatima blew smoke, and the girl was angry with her, and Fatima was angry back. Ruslan didn’t like it when people were angry, since he couldn’t find the words to make them happy again, but this time Fatima noticed, and gave him a little cup of something that wasn’t water. He sipped it, because she told him to. The taste was familiar, and Fatima made him say ‘coffee,’ and smiled and hugged him when he did it. It felt good to have her hug him. But he remembered the look.

Then they were angry again. He didn’t know why. They both held things to their faces and he used to know what the things were but the things made noises like people talking and what was the word? They talked back to the things, and were angry, and then they put them away and were angry with each other, and he tried to help but couldn’t. Once Fatima started crying, just for a little bit, but she made herself stop crying and talked to the thing on her face again. Then she put it away, and they yelled at each other some more, and all the other people stopped blowing smoke to stare at them.

Then the men from the cars came into the place, and they were carrying shiny things in their hands—things he remembered were frightening, but not why. They pointed them at Fatima, and Fatima was scared and angry but acted like she wasn’t, because she was Fatima. Ruslan knew it wouldn’t work, because the men were too angry. The other people pushed their chairs back to get away from the men with the shiny things. One of them came forward and put his shiny thing right in Fatima’s face, and Ruslan saw her hands shake on the cushion of her seat, down under the table where the man couldn’t see.

He wanted to help her, but couldn’t think how. Without meaning to, he tried standing up, only he wasn’t very good at standing up yet and he fell onto the little table and knocked it over. He landed on the floor and hot ‘coffee’ landed on top of him. There was a very loud noise, so loud it hurt his ears, and people screamed. He suddenly had new memories of more people arguing, and shoving each other, and arguing again in a place with cars, and he didn’t know what it meant but he wanted to leave the place and forget all of it.

The memories went away, but the feeling didn’t. He opened his eyes from his place on the floor, and saw Mister Higgins standing in the doorway, and Fatima was standing next to him with her fists clenched. There was no sign of the men with the shiny things. He’d forgotten Mister Higgins, too, but just now he didn’t care. They needed to get out of this place, with the scary people and loud noises, Mister Higgins was blocking the only way out. It came to him that he could start by getting off the floor, and he tried, but it was hard. His arms and legs weren’t very strong.

Before he could do more than grab one of the chairs, Mister Higgins was gone, and he took the feeling with him. His ears were getting back some of their hearing from the loud sound, and he could hear someone crying. He looked to see who was doing it. It was the other girl, the one who did the thing with the bags. She was on the floor too, holding her belly, and her hands were bright red, and her shirt was dark red, and her teeth were clenched down hard and she whined through them while the tears rolled down her face.

Fatima came over to help him up, and he let her help, and even tried to move himself a little, but he kept trying to look back at the girl on the floor. The sound she made was making him hurt in his own stomach. Fatima yelled at him, probably because he wasn’t doing enough, but he couldn’t help it. He kept looking back. Fatima grabbed his face and turned it around to look at her, and she said a lot of things very fast, too fast to understand. He could tell she was scared. So was he. He wanted to put up a hand and touch her cheek, but she moved away before he could lift his arm.

She got him into his chair, then got around behind him to push him out of the room. The girl was still on the floor, still crying. He could tell she hurt, and she reminded him of a lot of other things he’d forgotten, none of them pleasant. Moonlight in the park, Nadia shivering wet and screaming at him that Hamza was going to die, calling him useless. Waking up with the thing in his throat, unable to breathe, just hurting alone in an empty room. Hiding in the tent when the old man took over, trying not to think of Komron’s body with the bullet hole in his forehead.

(There was another tent too, he thought a tent with a dead boy in it—but that boy didn’t matter anymore. He was dead, and Ruslan forgot him.)

The old woman came into the tent after him, and hauled him out by the ear, cursing him for a cowardly skittering rat. He had no business hiding when there was work to be done. The American wouldn’t feed idle mouths. That was how things went; the big men made the trouble and the little people took the pain. If he didn’t learn that, he could die in the cold, alone.

Ruslan worked that night till there was no night left, till the sun was rising past the mountains and they could leave off burying the new dead to feed the still living. Ruslan put down his shovel somewhere, and sleepwalked his way to the cook fires to get the rice ready like he always did. He burnt himself twice, and the pain helped to keep him awake until it was all done, and he could help the men pack up the tents and move.

Somewhere in the noise and bustle, as he was struggling to keep his eyes open and not cry, someone put a hand on his head, and told him he was doing good work. He didn’t know who it was—didn’t recognize the voice, or turn around to see. There was too much work to do. But it told him that he was not alone. His pain had broken through the wall, and earned him a place by the fire. It was the only way—to hurt until you were proven, to give everything you had so you were finally worth having. To die until death made you human.

He hadn’t meant to call Saray, hadn’t known her name was Saray when he called her. She was simply there, in that moment, because he needed her, and she gave him life. She knelt down in her beautiful clothes and wept over the girl on the floor, clutching her stomach where she could feel the girl’s pain—and Ruslan could too, if only a taste. She took it into herself, and so did he, and the girl sat up intact, shaking her head because the world was bitter.

Fatima helped her up, and for a moment they held each other and cried. Saray was already walking out the door, ducking a little to clear it. Ruslan couldn’t follow her, and didn’t mind. Saray was beautiful, absolutely perfect, a vision in gold and white. His mother, his sister, his lover, his daughter—everything he needed, she could be, and she would never leave him.

Just now she was busy looking for good work to do, and burdens she could bear. She could feel the suffering out there, and was ready to take it into herself, and show the world she was lovely. She reached out, and felt every ache and pain for a quarter-mile, and took it in to fill the emptiness inside her. Old men stood straighter, and children stopped sniffling, and she blessed them for giving her their troubles.

The agony gave her strength. She pushed off from the asphalt with her pretty gold slippers, and she was soaring in the air, hungry for new needs. She wasn’t shining as brightly as she would soon—but no. She could feel it pressing against her, the place where he was. There, in the sky, a black devil was flying in on bat’s wings, dripping fire. She could see him clearly, even at a distance, and knew him. He was the one who had hurt Ruslan before, at the bridge. He was probably here to hurt him again. So what? He knew nothing, if he thought Ruslan couldn’t bear pain. He was the foundation of the universe, the soul of Saray, and he could handle anything.

The black devil threw a bolt of fire, and hit Saray full in the chest. She screamed, but took the pain, the way she was made to. If she could feel her body break apart from the impact, the knowledge that she was breaking gave her new strength. There could be no greater offering, no purer proof. Let her bleed. Let her burn. She was a goddess.

Another hit, another little blossom of torture, a kiss from the universe, right on her heart. It was good—but it did not give her strength, not really. She could stand up under destruction, but her own pain was not sufficient. She needed someone else’s. Before the devil could hit her again, she let herself drop, and her glorious black hair streamed behind her like a comet’s tail.

She could not, would not, go far from Ruslan, still sitting in the smoky room in the prison of his chair. But there was sorrow enough to feed her nearby. A beggar-drunk in an alley, his body diseased and full of loathing. A battered woman crying in bed. A crashed car, its driver bleeding internally. A burned child in an ambulance, halted on the way to the clinic to give her an offering instead. Saray knew them all, intimately and personally, for just an instant, and the mere echoes of their combined pain made Ruslan cry out in his chair.

It was too much, all at once. She felt heavy and bloated. She rose up again to burn it off, and show the world her glory. The devil was there to meet her with fresh assaults, and she took them gladly, until she couldn’t. She could feel it coming, the pain building up inside her, the overfilling within and the battering without. Too much. Her body was breaking down under the load, and she couldn’t hit back.

Couldn’t hit back. Couldn’t hit back. Couldn’t hit back. Don’t hit, don’t touch, hands off Ruslan, be a good boy. Why can’t you behave? Why can’t you do what we want? Why can’t you be what we need? You will never be filled. The gold is fake, the silks are a lie. Saray is not enough, and neither are you.

Inside the smoky room, Ruslan screamed in rage. In the sky above, Saray disintegrated, and fell back into herself so her pretty black hair swallowed her up. All that was left was an ugly snarl in the air like a scribble of thick black crayon. For a second it writhed in place, impotent. Then it exploded.

Not a bird anymore, or any more than a slight suggestion of it. Two long wings of boiling black tar, oozing and dripping over the city. A long tail, splattering pieces of itself in black drops as the thing built up speed, leaving streaks of darkness behind it. It had no head, no eyes, no name, no purpose, no story. It was hate, and a need to rip and kill.

From his chair Ruslan shouted, and the black thing charged into battle.