All Things Go, Fiction by Sara Ray
All Things Go
Sara Ray
“I wish I could say goodbye to my kids. Tell them I love them. Do you think they’re still out there? Are there other places like this, where people lived?”
I’m honest with the guy.
“Your kids are dead. Well, who knows. Were they close to here?”
He shakes his head. “Bethany lives in Denver. Adam just bought an apartment in Seattle. I didn’t like them being so far away, it’s hard when the kids leave. But I was proud of them.”
That settles that.
“Your kids are dead, man. I’m sorry. Never heard of a survivors pocket west of the Mississippi,” I tell him. He bites his lip, which has been trembling. I continue, “A friend of mine reads the winds, says the plains weakened the miasma. Saved us some. Out west though? Your kids are gone.” He wipes his eyes and sits with his legs hanging into the grave we dug. But he understands. He nods.
He says to me, or himself: “At least they didn’t have to linger.”
“You’re right. They weren’t lonely. Didn’t have time to get lonely, you know? They were just confused, then sick, then dead. How long have you waited to see if they’d show up? Walk through your door?”
He’s quiet and we listen to a soft wind— a safe wind— whisper through the tree canopy. His windchimes make slow soft sounds like someone murmuring in their sleep. He answers, “Years.”
Two, if we’re being exact. I look at the back of his head. For an older guy, he’s still got a lot of hair although it’s gone white and sticks up in tufts.
“I’m glad they’re gone, that they didn’t have to be lonely,” he says, and he does indeed sound relieved. “This is no way to live. I love them so much and miss—”
I shoot him then. Send him off in a memory of love. The air is thick with the promise of a springtime rain, so his blood hangs as a red cloud for a moment before disappearing into the world, like we all will. His body keels forward into the grave. The birds quieted at the gunshot but here they come again with their cautionary chirps and whistles. There’s the chickchickchick of a black throated blue warbler; there’s the high-pitched whine of a wood thrush, unseen in the thick overstory. I sit where the man had just been and look down at his body. He fell into a hunched pile and his white hair is streaked with the brain’s dark blood. He’s in the same suit he’d worn while walking his daughter — Bethany, I guess— down the aisle at her wedding. Said it was the happiest day of his life. Patients are all different. Some are sentimental and some just want it over with. He had spent a long time getting dressed, told me he even found the same cufflinks and socks. I get it. When choosing to walk through the door, why not connect yourself to something you wish you could return to? For all I know, this is what greets us across the threshold.
A girl can dream, right?
I listen to the birdsong and watch the man who told me his name was Dan bleed into the earth. The wind chimes ping together with no urgency, no sickness. I’ve learned to listen to the trees. The soft white noise of them today is like a lullaby. But when bad winds come, the trees give warning to those who listen: a shimmering roar which tells us humans with our soft, porous bodies to get inside, to build our fires, to tend our volatile humors. The dirt is cool and damp, which had made it a real bitch to dig out. Now it feels nice on my palms. Once the chill creeps up my arms, I hop down and turn Dan on his back. I straighten his clothes so he looks nice. That seemed important to him. Then I stare into the exit wound, my breaths shallow and blood pulsing hot in my neck, temples, groin. Exit wounds are enchanting, each one different. I study them believing that they, like tea leaves, contain messages. There is a magnetism to watching a body die and, in doing so, trying to divine what makes us vital beings.
I button Dan’s jacket, brush dirt from his sleeves.
“I’m sorry about how things turned out. You won’t miss anything out here.” Then I pull myself out of the grave and bury Dan inside the earth.
Dan lived at the base of Bear Mountain, on the northern rim of this survivors pocket. It’s a three-hour bike ride back to town, so I’ll stay the night. His fire burns low, fragrant with sweet smells from the aromatics tray hanging at the mouth of the fireplace. The winds had been mild and clean today, which made for a rare chance to be outdoors without the protection of aromatics. It is peculiar to breathe air without fear of what it carries, something most took for granted before the death winds. Growing up, of course, I learned to be careful of the airs— to know my body’s responses to the various winds— but negligence never meant more than light sickness. No one talked about plague: that was an old wives’ tale until it wasn’t.
From my jacket, I remove a bark-wrapped package of my own protective blend. A lot of pine for me, but some mint and lavender too. The Physician had regarded me for a long time, pressing three fingers to the inside of my wrist to discern the topography of my pulse. For a lingering moment, she placed her other hand firm against my chest with her index and middle fingers between my breasts, her eyebrows furrowed together as my heart drummed. Then she disappeared into her garden, emerging later with ten packages like the one I’m unwrapping now. I had put one to my nose, inhaled the cold bite of pine. For your blood, the Physician said with her inscrutable stare, to keep it from running too hot. I wanted to believe she was flirting, but I was too afraid to ask.
I place three big pinches into the aromatics tray above the fire, hanging my wool scarves nearby to absorb the scented smoke. It does smell good. Cooling, grounding. I build up the fire and clean my gun, then lay down inside the halo of heat which lulls me to sleep.
I wake up after dark with an aching back. Outside, the trees whisper with more urgency than before, the wind chimes clanging. Corey warned me this morning about the winds changing, and he’ll enjoy saying “I told you so” when I stop into his bar later. But for now, I turn my clothes to ensure they’re fully infused before the long ride home. Then I migrate to Dan’s bed until sunrise.
When I wake up, I take inventory. First dibs. I put Dan’s gun and knives into my bag along with a few of his warmer shirts, even a lined flannel without holes. There is a stash of seeds in labelled containers. I last saw the Physician some weeks ago, her fingernails ringed with dirt. She had looked at them and laughed apologetically, telling me, “planting season.” I place the seeds in my bag too, grateful for the excuse to stop in and see her.
Then I gather my clothes, snuff the fire, and wrap a now-aromatic scarf around my lower face as I walk into the unknown airs. On the door, I carve two vertical lines to indicate it’s unoccupied, the things fair use.
Long ago, I’d been preparing to send one of my first patients when I saw a beautiful black bicycle in her shed. From better days, when weekend rides through the mountains during foliage season might be followed by a warm bath and a big dinner. I asked her if I might take it. She laughed even as she was crying about the circumstances, her end.
“You want my bike?”
“I used to ride all the time,” I told her. “I miss it. And it would make my work easier, my patients usually live pretty far from town.” She took a long breath and looked at me in a familiar way, incomprehension.
“You’ll ride it then? Through the hills?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s yours. I always loved the view from the intersection with Route Two,” she said. “When you go out that way, would you remember me?”
So I spare her a thought as I rush through that intersection now, bursting over the crest of the hill to see that view the dead woman once loved. There is still such a thrill to riding on the highway, being queen of the road. Back in the beginning, when people were trickling into this survivors pocket, there was a group who fancied themselves a highway gang. People were arriving in rags, hungry, miserable from holding death at the one-yard line. And who welcomed them here to this high mountain valley bristling with conifers which kept the death winds at bay? Shitheads high on dystopia who robbed people of whatever they had managed to keep. I let them take my things, but I returned to their camp at night and gifted the earth six new bodies.
As I ride, I rehearse what I will say to the Physician. I invent scenarios and discard them like litter on the roadside behind me. I met the Physician at Corey’s bar not long after I arrived. She came in after seeing a patient who was not well, a fact which I learned when he called on me a few days later. She was beautiful in her quietude; she drank from her glass with the intentional movements of a dancer; she smiled with her lips pursed inward; she made eye contact with me once and it lingered; she made eye contact with me again and came over. She leaned so her forearms rested on the bar, tapped her fingertips against one another.
She asked, “Do you come here often?”
I laughed with a sound like a donkey. I became too aware of what I was doing with my hands, then too aware of being too aware of my hands. Standing next to her, I felt like a giant and it reminded me of middle school when other girls sneered that I was tall like a freak, like a boy.
“I do. You don’t though.”
“I don’t, no.” She bit her lower lip. “Why were you looking at me?”
The space between us was heavy, churning, like pressing together the positive poles of two magnets. I told her one truth, which was not the whole truth: “I haven’t seen someone wearing glasses for a long time. What would happen if they broke?”
“I suppose I wouldn’t see as well.”
She told me she was a physician. That she had lived here for years because the healthful airs were ideal for growing medicines. Even before the death winds came, she said, she was regarded as highly skilled. Pulses spoke to her in their rhythms, she could discern one’s balance of humors through touch, through listening to one’s gurgling insides, she could make protections and tonics for every constitution. She told me this with an unapologetic pride I found erotic and terrifying. She told me she’d brought Corey back from the brink of death and, when he refilled her drink, he confirmed it.
“Sam’s a healer too,” he told her with a laugh, “takes people out of their misery when they can’t stand it any longer.”
The Physician regarded me with a more distant curiosity. “I’ve heard about you,” she said, and the timid buoy of hope within me sank. “You kill people.”
“Yes. When they ask, I do.”
“Why? Do you enjoy it?”
She watched me through a pause pregnant with its monstrous birth. I told her, “Yes. I know it’s strange.”
She smiled at me with tender wariness. “The world is strange.” Finished her newly-filled drink in a single swig and handed the glass to Corey. “I should get going, it’s a ways home.”
When I saw her next, she greeted me with a big smile and said, “hey killer!” A joke, but it bothered me. She apologized and brought me plants the next day: basil which grew like delicious weeds, tomatoes, and peppers. I wondered whether she did this because she cared or was afraid.
I’d thought about calling on the Physician socially. At night sometimes, my mind wandered to a fantasy of picking flowers by the roadside or berries in the woods. With these, I would explain to her that I am strange but not evil— that I’ve loved before.
It takes me half the morning to reach her house from Dan’s. Vines creep around the corner of her home as if they’re eavesdropping. The smells in the air change as I move through it, winter flowers and spring ones, strong grasses and light herbs, decay and wet earth. It makes me feel foolish to have ever imagined bringing her, of all things, flowers. I hear humming from the garden, so I enter the verdant chaos whose multitude of greens resist the simple category; the sound lures me down narrow rows with curious stems winding outward and upward.
Here she is, in a row of peas.
“Sam Ginn!” She scolds, startled. “You scared me.” An ancient dog with a pool of jowls lays beside her, sleeping amongst the flowering pea plants.
“I’m sorry. I should have called out, I didn’t mean to sneak up on you, I’m sorry.” My stomach cringes. My shirt is soaked through with sweat and I attempt to quietly catch my breath, which results in me gasping for air. The Physician bolts upright and removes her gardening gloves.
“Are you sick?”
“Me? No, no. Out of breath. From biking. I was trying to go really fast.”
“Come sit, I’ll make you a tea. It’s dangerous out to be biking. A remedy, just in case.”
“You’re busy—”
The Physician throws her hands up at the world around us. “Sam, who on this earth is busy? Sit down.”
So I do, on her porch where she brings me a warm cup of fragrant tea. The ancient dog lumbers up the stairs and flops down at the Physician’s feet, sleeping again in seconds.
She asks, “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
I rustle through my bag to find the seed containers. “I thought you might want these. Or use them. I was passing by so, well, I figured that I would come ask.”
She pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose as she surveys the labels. “Where’d you find them?”
“A job.”
“Who?”
“Guy called Dan. Bear Mountain.”
The Physician looks away from me.
“Was he sick? People out that way have been getting sick again.”
“I don’t think so. Or, he didn’t mention.”
“I made medicines for Dan. Kept him alive this long,” the Physician tells me, her fingers tracing the table’s jagged wood grain. Fixing me in her stare again she asks, “Do you ever wonder why people call you instead of doing it themselves? Why do they put so much effort into living and then ask to be killed?”
I think about this often while riding home from a job, and so I tell the Physician, “People get used to living alone but dying alone never gets easier to accept. I think people call on me so someone is there with them at the end, even if it’s the person bringing it about.”
She responds with an indecipherable “hm.” The conversation moves elsewhere: her puzzlement at the recent sicknesses, my leaking water collection system, and, of course, the mercurial weather. She leaves a smudge of dirt across her cheekbone while brushing hair from her face. In an old life, I would wipe the dirt from her cheekbone with my thumb, feel her breath on my face, and kiss her. But in that old life, I’d buried the part of me that the Physician knows because it is incompatible with the type of person who can be loved.
It’s mid-afternoon by the time I get back to Corey’s bar. “Millview Variety,” the sign says in faded letters. As Corey had predicted, the weathervane on the roof indicates that the dangerous southern winds have found us. A windsock sewn from old flags— the country, the state, the baseball team— emits a sleepy growl as it flutters loosely north. Corey understands the winds. Before, it was his career; now, it’s why no one messes with his place.
“Hey, Sam,” he says when I walk inside, “How’d it go?”
“He went well. He was ready. I’ll give you a list of trade-stuff to pass around.”
He brings me a glass of water stuffed with sprigs of mint so potent I can feel them in my lungs. Corey doesn’t offer me booze anymore, but he fixes up a hell of a water. I stopped drinking long before the death winds came through. One night I’d been an inch too drunk while walking home through the park in the wee hours. Ahead was a man my age stumbling his own way home. As I followed him beyond the streetlights, whiskey dissolved a barrier in my brain so that there was now a small hole which widened and widened in a flood of an impulse so primal I couldn’t put words to it. My hand flexed for want of a rock to smash against his skull, my breaths grew shallow hearing in my head the sound of him hitting the ground. I wanted to flip him over and see his confusion, wrap my carpenter’s hands around his neck and squeeze, feel his oil-slick blood, watch him go to whatever awaits us all. Then that hole in my mind clamped shut again but the power of it was so urgent that I threw up down the front of my shirt.
The stumbling man turned around and slurred, “hey bro, you okay?” I waved him on. I sat in the park for a long time wondering what was wrong with me. When I was eleven, my father had caught me cutting open the neighbor’s cat. He’d gone pale, and we buried it. Never spoke about it. He didn’t know about the squirrels and moles, the snakes whose deaths stretched on for hours. Sitting in the park, I accepted that the compulsion toward violence was a part of me that could be contained but not eliminated. So I left alcohol behind for it was a leash and my lion was better kept in a cage.
But the world is different now. The old world has moved on, decayed and blown apart in the gusts of a humid southern wind that threw off the balance of things. My family is gone. My girlfriend died within hours of the storm, collapsed in the bedroom with black bile pouring from the mouth I loved to kiss. The apartment I filled with plants and friends and music is crumbled to dust. This is the way it goes. But I lived through it and have found a place for myself at the end of the world. It is a gift to do the work, infrequent as it is. Less than twenty a year, clustered around the anniversary of the winds. The world took many things from us, but I help people leave it how they choose.
I write a list for Corey of the things I’ve brought from Dan’s. He clinks his glass to mine then walks into the kitchen, emerging with a half loaf of bread and some jam, which I am happy to help him eat. If Corey is uneasy around me, he doesn’t show it. I found his place right after I’d dispatched the robbers. I saw the windsock blowing, the faded sign, and so I came in. Asked the big man about setting up a home. He asked if the robbers had gotten to me, and I told him yes, but that I’d put them in the ground.
He then asked a question I hadn’t realized I wasn’t prepared to answer. “How did you walk up on six people and kill them all? Had you done that before?”
So I’d told him: the road to here was littered with bodies in various stages of dying. My first was a woman sitting against the tires of a dead car. She wailed like wind in the mountains, she wailed that everything was gone, the world was gone, that there was nothing left for us to find. I asked if she was going toward the survivors pocket and she laughed at the idea.
“There won’t be shit there, and you’ll have walked all that way for what?” She asked, looking around at the emptying world, “To realize you were an idiot for holding out hope? God, just kill me.”
“Is that what you want?”
“What?”
“To be killed.”
We regarded each other for a long time. She handed me a knife, and I came into the world I was made for.
Corey and I finish the bread, and I walk my bike the short distance home. Before, my girlfriend and I had often laid in bed dreaming up the home where we’d someday settle down: a little cabin in the woods, one big room and a loft for sleeping, a fireplace by whose light we’d read good books, a small yard for planting. We dreamed of escaping society in the romantic way people dreamt of such a thing while society existed. I did escape to our cabin in the woods; I sleep in its loft with her ghost. That life is hard to remember now. I collect books as I find them, so an eclectic library is stacked on the floor, on tables, on actual bookshelves. I pick one up after hanging a kettle over the fire for tea. Sometimes, like now, I sit by my fire with my book and my tea, and I wonder, isn’t this nice? So many survivors are rotted through by despair. They ask me to shoot them, to strangle them, to bury them, to remember them. They are desperate to escape a world which has moved on. Warm by this fire with its high notes of cedar, guilt pulls behind my belly button saying it is wrong to feel happiness. But can’t it be nice, to survive?
***
It’s been a week, so I stop into Corey’s to see whether anyone has bitten on my trades. I’m barely through the door before he asks if the Physician has come to see me. I tell him she hasn’t.
“Guess something attacked her dog and messed him up bad. Doesn’t sound like her treatments are working so well,” he tells me. “I told her she might want to talk to you.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing. She didn’t seem keen to talk.”
The dog with drooping jowls sleeping in the Physician’s garden, now hurt and probably dying. She told me once that she’d had him before the death winds, since he was a puppy. To have survived with a loved one is an almost unfathomable fortune. So many of the objects of our love washed away that the emotion itself feels like an echo from a dead world, a photograph, a voice recording.
“I shouldn’t go, though, right? She would have asked.”
“Sam,” he says, patient. “What are you so afraid of with her? She knows who you are. Give her the choice. It’s a kindness, you understand that.”
I’ve kept my violence out of sight, out of reach, of the Physician but I’ve kept my affection there too; she knows them through imprints, small residues of things unseen but extant. Before, I had caged my appetite for killing away from the part of me that was loved, but if my violence now has a place in the world, I understand it to come at the cost of the gentler self who is worthy of someone’s care. The world seeks balance, is what I’ve told myself, and these selves are counterweights. I cannot hope for a long life or one filled with the things I once dreamed of. But in the vacuum where such things once were, could my full self burn brightly and briefly?
“I’ll go,” I tell Corey.
“Don’t linger,” he advises. “There’s a storm looking to break through.”
The sky to the south tells me he’s right about that. The windsock outside Corey’s bar is taut and singing in a low hum. Windchimes ding and chirp and clang from every direction as I bike through town, and the trees roar their static warning as I make my way into the hills. Birds zip across the road before me, they chatter in the trees. So much life left in the world.
My legs burn as I climb out of the valley, each pedal stroke like a step into loose sand. The world is moving on: green growth overtaking old buildings, roots reclaiming roads as their rightful passageways, human language foreign in the conversation of the forest. Each of us survivors lives waiting for the moment that the world will exhale us. But in our drawn-out extinction, we see the embryonic growth of a world without us; we see beyond the veil of death into the lush promise of recreation. Dan kept saying he wished he could tell his children he loved them. How long he’d waited for the slim, impossible chance of doing so. My legs are lead, lungs fire, I reach the top of the hill and feel weightless. Love shouldn’t be a dead thing, belonging only to the people we can’t say it to anymore. I pass trees bursting through the concrete walls of an old elementary school, beginnings entwined with ends.
I inhale deeply as I begin the winding descent. Descents are my confessional. Speeding downhill, the sound tumbles out in a trail of words left behind as soon as they’re said. I want to kill and I want to love, is what I tell the blur of the mountain pass; someday I want the world to reclaim my whole self and not half of it.
Why bring flowers to the gardener when I have my own gift to bring: a death with compassion embroidered in its making?
She must have heard my tires crunching through her driveway because she meets me outside. Her windchimes fill the already noisy air which breathes heavily past us, twisting the rooster atop her weathervane to face the coming threat. The Physician clasps a shawl across her shoulders and the silver orb of a pomander hangs at the rise of her collarbone, the scents which keep her health in balance snaking invisibly through the holes between metal vines.
“I know why you’re here,” she says with a bite. The muscles of her jaw tense, her eyes redden.
“I’m only here to ask.”
“To ask what, if you can kill my dog?”
That stings, and she sees it. Sighs. Pinches the bridge of her nose.
Self-consciousness rises in me hot like bile, spreads so my skin prickles, raw. “I came to offer him passage. If you want that.”
The Physician sits on the porch steps and covers her face with her hands. I put down my bag with its gun and knives and ropes. I sit on the steps beside her.
“I’m sorry he’s hurt.”
“I know it’s the right thing to do, but I hate it,” she says into her palms. Her neck pinkens then reddens as blood travels through the thick channels that pulse softly beneath her skin. “Everything else is gone, and now him. How can you stand killing things when there’s so little left?”
So much is left I think but do not say. I watch blackening clouds roil through the sky like ocean waves, flits of color as birds seek shelter, the overstory of the forest heaving as it inhales. “The world is trying to find balance again,” is what I tell the Physician. “Elimination is a part of that, and I believe any job should be done by someone who appreciates it for exactly what it is. Who understands the beauty in it and who cares about doing it well.”
The energy between us roils like the clouds as her dark eyes search me, try to square my circle. I see the pale face of my father as he takes the knife out of my young, bloodied fingers, the dumb drunk obliviousness of the man in the park, the resigned puzzlement of the woman whose bike now lies in the Physician’s driveway.
I tell her the truth that I have to offer: “The rules of the old world are gone, and the new ones are hidden. I can’t make sense of all this, I guess no one really can. It feels like the best I can do is to make some worthy use of the impulse nature gave me.”
The Physician bites the thick pinkness of her lower lip. She puts her hand on my knee, takes it back.
“I don’t want to know how you do it.”
I dig a grave while she says goodbye. The garden teems with springtime potential, leaves bursting outward, caterpillars munching, bees buzzing, strings marking off sections each with a label written in the Physician’s small, looping hand. In a month, color will explode from the ends of these plants, blossom like exit wounds. I dig the grave at the garden’s boundary so that the plants will find him with their roots, make him a part of this smaller world which has kept the lingerers within the larger world alive.
The door snaps shut when I’ve nearly finished. The Physician stands so close I can see the small, cracked blood vessels in her eyes.
She says, “Okay.” I put the shovel down and go inside.
Her friend lays on a fraying blanket, and I scratch his ears as I tell him what I will do. He rests his head on my leg, breathing unevenly. It doesn’t take much, doesn’t take long.
I wrap him in the blanket and bring him to where the Physician sits with her feet inside the small grave. She’s laid leaves and stems around the bottom in a series of intersecting lines and circles. A sigil, she tells me, to guide his passage into recreation.
“Do you usually say something?” She asks as she lays the body across the sigil.
“Me?”
“Yeah. Do people usually ask you to say something?”
“No,” I answer, though I’ve never thought about it before. “People usually want me to listen.” Dan told me about his daughter’s wedding, and how proud he’d been of her and his son, how much he wanted to sit on the coast with a beer and watch boats go by in the distance. The woman with the bike told me the gears could get sticky in the low range, something she’d never got around to fixing. She told me she’d come here after the storm because her family vacationed on a lake nearby, but her kids had gotten sick on the journey and she’d arrived alone. No one has wisdom to offer, only remembered fragments of a life they didn’t see ending this way.
Afterwards, the Physician asks if I’d like tea before I go. Her living room is a forest of drying plants hanging from ceiling beams and labelled jars line the walls. She mixes some together in a metal infuser hanging from the lip of a cup which she hands me and fills from her kettle.
“Thank you,” she says, sitting down on an old couch which had, not so long ago, contained a hurt and dying dog.
“I’m sorry he’s gone.”
The fire emits a sweet fragrance but no smoke. The Physician holds her mug with both hands as she looks at me beneath pinched eyebrows.
She asks, “How do you want to die?”
“I always thought that if I get sick or hurt or something, that I’d walk into the woods until I couldn’t anymore. Lie down somewhere and let the forest take me back however it wants.”
I’m gripping the hot mug like a vise, so I set it down and lock my fingers together.
“Do you think I’m a monster?” I ask, and the Physician leans forward and places her hands on top of mine.
“No.”
“I feel like one when I’m with you. Whenever I see you, I want to tell you how much I like you. But it feels impossible because I can’t imagine you not being horrified by that, by me. So I don’t. I pretend avoidance is noble, cosmic, necessary. Pretend like I don’t want anything. But I do.”
“What was it like before? Did you have someone?”
I press my palms into my eyes as they prickle. “I did. But I didn’t have this,” I say, gesturing to my work bag. “I wanted normal things, a normal life. I wanted to fit in, so I buried this self. It was okay. I was happy. I’m happy now too, but I feel guilty for it. Like I’m asking for too much. I have a purpose in this world, and it feels wrong to ask for more.”
“For love? To be cared about?”
“Yes.”
She slips her hands between my sweating palms. “It’s not the world’s gift to give you, it’s mine. Would you come back again, if I asked? To help me in the garden maybe, and for supper? You could stay a while. I would like that.”
“Yes,” I answer as distant thunder rolls over the hills, the bad winds gathering rain and strength. “Could I come next week, after the winds pass?”
“Next week,” she says through a quiet smile. “Wait here.”
She disappears into the next room and returns with another silver pomander. She pulls some jars down from the shelves and sits back on the couch, pinching out samples onto a metal tray. “To carry with you,” she explains without looking up, and I smell pine and lavender and mint. She pops the pomander open so that its slices fall outward like a sectioned orange. “They are small but strong and, most importantly, they look much better than your scarves.”
She fills each section before snapping them shut into a latticed ball. The Physician kneels before me and fastens the pomander around my neck, her fingers tracing across my shoulders after it’s clasped. We look at one another in a way that doesn’t feel inviting as much as steadying, like our energies have found a leyline. She drops her hand to mine, squeezing it.
“Be careful getting home,” she says, “and keep your fire going.”
The storm is crackling across the southern mountains, a persistent god of death knocking at our door. I bike home carried by a better wind, flying through the world like a bullet, singing an old song as I tear down the mountain pass toward home. The Physician’s gift rests on my shirt so its scents rise to meet me like the open road. Keep your fire going, she told me. I will beat those dark clouds, beat the splintered lightning, beat the rain; I will beat those things home and build up my fire with her medicine upon it, safe to fulfill my place in the order of things.
Sara Ray is an award-winning storyteller hailing from Philadelphia. By day, Sara is pursuing her Ph.D. in the History of Science, but she enjoys escaping academic life to write stories with the Backyard Writers fiction workshop and tell them on stage with First Person Arts. Her short fiction has been published by Passengers Journal and The Head and the Hand Press, and she will be appearing on USA Network's "The Storytellers Project" later in 2021. She can be found on Twitter @kappapej.
Inquiry
The following has been provided by the author:
My doctoral research is on the scientific history of "monstrous births," particularly the work of one Dutch embryologist in the early nineteenth century. Faced with bodies that seemingly defied nature, he theorized that these bodies were not errors but, instead, were simply incompatible with the environment outside the womb. An advisor once asked me whether my Dutch embryologist had ever described what environments— what worlds— these "monsters" would be compatible with, worlds where they could live or even thrive? The historical answer is "no," but my imagination couldn't shake the question off.
"All Things Go" centers a person's darkest impulse and reconfigures the world to give it an accepted place. The world itself is based on humoral medicine, the paradigm of health that persisted in the west from antiquity until the advent of germ theory: in humoralism, disease was not an entity to be eradicated but, instead, resulted from imbalance. It is an elegant theory that tightly binds the body with its environment— the four natural elements (air, water, fire, earth) corresponding to four vital fluids of the body (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile). This story, and Sam herself, celebrate the sanguine: a humoral temperament defined by an excess of blood, and associated with springtime, the element of air, and optimism.