The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (12 page)

We could cut it off, said the ice girl then.

We both stared at her.

Are you kidding? I said, you can’t cut off the
fire
hand, it’s a beautiful thing, it’s a wonderful thing—

But the fire girl had released the bed and was up against the bars. Do you think it would work? she said. Do you think that would do something?

The ice girl shrugged. I don’t know, she said, but it might be worth a try.

I wanted to give a protest here but I was no speechwriter; the speechwriter had left town forever and taken all the good speeches with him. I kept beginning sentences and dropping them off. Finally, they sent me out to find a knife. I don’t know what they talked about while I was gone. I wasn’t sure where to go so I just ran home, grabbed a huge sharp knife from the kitchen, and ran back. In ten minutes I was in the cell again, out of breath, the wooden knife handle tucked into my belt like a sword.

The fire girl was amazed. You’re fast, she said. I felt flattered. I thought maybe I could be the fast girl. I was busy for a second renaming myself Atalanta when I looked over and saw how nervous and scared she was.

Don’t do this, I said, you’ll miss it.

But she’d already reached over and grabbed the knife and was pacing her cell again, flicking sparks onto the wall. She spoke mainly to herself. It would all be so much easier, she said.

The ice girl had no expression. I’ll stay, she said, tightening her ponytail, in case you need healing. I wanted to kick her. There was a horrible ache growing in my stomach.

The fire girl took a deep breath. Then, kneeling down, she laid her hand, leaping with flames, on the stone jail floor and
slammed the knife down right where the flesh of her wrist began. After sawing for a minute, she let out a shout and the hand separated and she ran over to the ice girl who put her healing bulb directly on the wound.

Tears streaked down the fire girl’s face and she shifted her weight from foot to foot. The cut-off hand was hidden in a cloud of smoke on the floor. The ice girl leaned in, her soother face intent, but something strange was happening. The ice bulb wasn’t working. There was no ice at all. The ice girl found herself with just a regular flesh hand, clasping the sawed-off tuber of a wrist. Equalized and normal. The fire girl looked down in horror.

Oh, pleaded the fire girl, never let go,
please
, don’t,
please
, but it was too late. Her wrist had already been released to the air.

The fire girl’s arm blazed up to the elbow. It was a bigger blaze now, a looser one, a less dexterous flame with no fingers to guide it. Oh no, she cried, trying to shake it off, oh
no
. The ice girl was silent, holding her hand as it reiced in her flesh palm, turning it slowly, numbing up. I was twisting in the corner, the ache in my stomach fading, trying to think of the right thing to say. But her body was now twice as burning and twice as loud and twice as powerful and twice everything. I still thought it was beautiful, but I was just an observer. The ice girl slipped silently down the hallway and I only stayed for a few more minutes. It was too hard to see. The fire girl started slamming her arm against the brick wall. When I left,
she was sitting down with her chopped-off hand, burning it to pieces, one finger at a time.

They let her out a week later, but they made her strap her arm to a metal bucket of ice. The ice girl even dripped a few drops into it, to make it especially potent. The bucket would heat up on occasion but her arm apparently quieted. I didn’t go to see her on the day she got out; I stayed at home. I felt responsible and ashamed: it was me who’d brought the ice girl to the jail, I’d fetched the knife, and worst, I was still
so
relieved it hadn’t worked. Instead, I sat in my room at home that day and thought about J. in the Big City. He didn’t give speeches about me anymore. Now we stood together in the middle of a busy street, dodging whizzing cars, and I’d pull him tight to me and begin to learn his skin.

All sorts of stories passed through the town about the fire girl on her day of release: She was covered in ash! She was all fire with one flesh hand! My personal favorite was that even her teeth were little flaming squares. The truth was, she found a shack in the back of town by the mountains, a shack made of metal, and she set up a home there.

The funny thing is what happened to the ice girl after all of it. She quit her job at the hospital, and she split. I thought I’d leave, I thought the fire girl would leave, but it was the ice girl who left. I passed her on the street the day before.

How are you doing, I said, how is the hospital?

She turned away from me, still couldn’t look me in the eye. Everyone is sick in the hospital, she said. She stood there and I waited for her to continue. Do you realize, she said, that if I cut off my arm, my entire body might freeze?

Wow, I said. Think of all the people you could cure. I couldn’t help it. I was still mad at her for suggesting the knife at all.

Yeah, she said, eyes flicking over to me for a second, think of that.

I watched her. I was remembering her face in the jail, waiting to see what would happen when the fire hand was removed. Hoping, I suppose, for a different outcome. I put my hands in my pockets. I guess I never told you, she said, but I feel nothing. I just feel ice.

I nodded. I wasn’t surprised.

She turned a bit. I’m off now, she said, bye.

When the town discovered she had disappeared, there was a big uproar, and everybody blamed the fire girl. They thought she’d burned her up or something. The fire girl who never left her metal shack, sitting in her living room, her arm in that bucket. The whole town blamed her until a hungry nurse opened the hospital freezer and found one thousand Dixie cups filled with magic ice. They knew it was
her
ice because as soon as they brought a cup to a stroke patient, he improved and went home in two days. No one could figure it out, why the ice girl had left, but they stopped blaming the fire girl. Instead, they had an auction for the ice cups. People mortgaged their houses for one little cup; just in case, even if
everyone was healthy; just in case. This was a good thing to hoard in your freezer.

The ones who didn’t get a cup went to the fire girl. When they were troubled, or lonely, or in pain, they went to see her. If they were lucky, she’d remove her blazing arm from the ice bucket and gently touch their faces with the point of her wrist. The burns healed slowly, leaving marks on their cheeks. There was a whole group of scar people who walked around town now. I asked them: Does it hurt? And the scar people nodded, yes. But it felt somehow wonderful, they said. For one long second, it felt like the world was holding them close.

Once there was an orphan who had a knack for finding lost things. Both his parents had been killed when he was eight years old—they were swimming in the ocean when it turned wild with waves, and each had tried to save the other from drowning. The boy woke up from a nap, on the sand, alone. After the tragedy, the community adopted and raised him, and a few years after the deaths of his parents, he began to have a sense of objects even when they weren’t visible. This ability continued growing in power through his teens and by his twenties, he was able to actually sniff out lost sunglasses, keys, contact lenses and sweaters.

The neighbors discovered his talent accidentally—he was over at Jenny Sugar’s house one evening, picking her up for a date, when Jenny’s mother misplaced her hairbrush, and was walking around, complaining about this. The young man’s nose twitched and he turned slightly toward the kitchen and
pointed to the drawer where the spoons and knives were kept. His date burst into laughter. Now that would be quite a silly place to put the brush, she said, among all that silverware! and she opened the drawer to make her point, to wave with a knife or brush her hair with a spoon, but when she did, boom, there was the hairbrush, matted with gray curls, sitting astride the fork pile.

Jenny’s mother kissed the young man on the cheek but Jenny herself looked at him suspiciously all night long.

You planned all that, didn’t you, she said, over dinner. You were trying to impress my mother. Well you didn’t impress me, she said.

He tried to explain himself but she would hear none of it and when he drove his car up to her house, she fled before he could even finish saying he’d had a nice time, which was a lie anyway. He went home to his tiny room and thought about the word lonely and how it sounded and looked so lonely, with those two l’s in it, each standing tall by itself.

As news spread around the neighborhood about the young man’s skills, people reacted two ways: there were the deeply appreciative and the skeptics. The appreciative ones called up the young man regularly. He’d stop by on his way to school, find their keys, and they’d give him a homemade muffin. The skeptics called him over too, and watched him like a hawk; he’d still find their lost items but they’d insist it was an elaborate scam and he was doing it all to get attention. Maybe, declared one woman, waving her index finger in the air, Maybe, she said, he steals the thing so we think it’s lost,
moves the item, and then comes over to save it! How do we know it was really lost in the first place? What is going on?

The young man didn’t know himself. All he knew was the feeling of a tug, light but insistent, like a child at his sleeve, and that tug would turn him in the right direction and show him where to look. Each object had its own way of inhabiting space, and therefore messaging its location. The young man could sense, could smell, an object’s presence—he did not need to see it to feel where it put its gravity down. As would be expected, items that turned out to be miles away took much harder concentration than the ones that were two feet to the left.

When Mrs. Allen’s little boy didn’t come home one afternoon, that was the most difficult of all. Leonard Allen was eight years old and usually arrived home from school at 3:05. He had allergies and needed a pill before he went back out to play. That day, by 3:45, a lone Mrs. Allen was a wreck. Her boy rarely got lost—only once had that happened in the supermarket but he’d been found quite easily under the produce tables, crying; this walk home from school was a straight line and Leonard was not a wandering kind.

Mrs. Allen was just a regular neighbor except for one extraordinary fact—through an inheritance, she was the owner of a gargantuan emerald she called the Green Star. It sat, glass-cased, in her kitchen, where everyone could see it because she insisted that it be seen. Sometimes, as a party trick, she’d even cut steak with its beveled edge.

On this day, she removed the case off the Green Star and
stuck her palms on it. Where is my boy? she cried. The Green Star was cold and flat. She ran, weeping, to her neighbor, who calmly walked her back home; together, they gave the house a thorough search, and then the neighbor, a believer, recommended calling the young man. Although Mrs. Allen was a skeptic, she thought anything was a worthwhile idea, and when the line picked up, she said, in a trembling voice:

You must find my boy.

The young man had been just about to go play basketball with his friends. He’d located the basketball in the bathtub.

You lost him? said the young man.

Mrs. Allen began to explain and then her phone clicked.

One moment please, she said, and the young man held on.

When her voice returned, it was shaking with rage.

He’s been kidnapped! she said. And they want the Green Star!

The young man realized then it was Mrs. Allen he was talking to, and nodded. Oh, he said, I see. Everyone in town was familiar with Mrs. Allen’s Green Star. I’ll be right over, he said.

The woman’s voice was too run with tears to respond.

In his basketball shorts and shirt, the young man jogged over to Mrs. Allen’s house. He was amazed at how the Green Star was all exactly the same shade of green. He had a desire to lick it.

By then, Mrs. Allen was in hysterics.

They didn’t tell me what to do, she sobbed. Where do I bring my emerald? How do I get my boy back?

The young man tried to feel the scent of the boy. He asked for a photograph and stared at it—a brown-haired kid at his kindergarten graduation—but the young man had only found objects before, and lost objects at that. He’d never found anything, or anybody, stolen. He wasn’t a policeman.

Mrs. Allen called the police and one officer showed up at the door.

Oh it’s the finding guy, the officer said. The young man dipped his head modestly. He turned to his right; to his left; north; south. He got a glimmer of a feeling toward the north and walked out the back door, through the backyard. Night approached and the sky seemed to grow and deepen in the darkness.

What’s his name again? he called back to Mrs. Allen.

Leonard, she said. He heard the policeman pull out a pad and begin to ask basic questions.

He couldn’t quite feel him. He felt the air and he felt the tug inside of the Green Star, an object displaced from its original home in Asia. He felt the tug of the tree in the front yard which had been uprooted from Virginia to be replanted here, and he felt the tug of his own watch which was from his uncle; in an attempt to be fatherly, his uncle had insisted he take it but they both knew the gesture was false.

Maybe the boy was too far away by now.

He heard the policeman ask: What is he wearing?

Mrs. Allen described a blue shirt, and the young man focused in on the blue shirt; he turned off his distractions and the blue shirt, like a connecting radio station, came calling
from the northwest. The young man went walking and walking and about fourteen houses down he felt the blue shirt shrieking at him and he walked right into the backyard, through the back door, and sure enough, there were four people watching TV including the tear-stained boy with a runny nose eating a candy bar. The young man scooped up the boy while the others watched, so surprised they did nothing, and one even muttered: Sorry, man.

For fourteen houses back, the young man held Leonard in his arms like a bride. Leonard stopped sneezing and looked up at the stars and the young man smelled Leonard’s hair, rich with the memory of peanut butter. He hoped Leonard would ask him a question, any question, but Leonard was quiet. The young man answered in his head: Son, he said, and the word rolled around, a marble on a marble floor. Son, he wanted to say.