The Long-Shining Waters. Danielle Sosin

the stench is bad. Her heart beats in her ears as she takes a step forward, uncertain whether the floor will hold.

      Weak light angles down from a large patch of sky framed in stumps of charred wood. What’s left of the bar is largely unrecognizable, mounds of blackened and soggy debris. She lifts a metal pole and pokes through a pile. A broken picture frame. Part of a drawer. It could be her stuff, it could be Rose’s—it’s hard to tell since there’s no floor keeping their things separated.

      She always imagined firemen putting out fires as if that were that, but it’s impossible to say which caused more damage, the fire itself or their water hoses. She pulls her sweater up over her nose, but it’s no match for the acrid smell. She pokes at broken glass and table legs, water soaking through her shoes.

      Edging herself behind the bar, she peers into the long mirror. It’s broken and sooty. Her face doesn’t show.

      Nora stands unmoving where she’d stood so many years, as a sensation of heaviness sinks through her body, anchoring her feet to the floor. She should simply get out. She knows it’s dangerous.

      A plane passes overhead, leaving a vapor trail like a zipper in the sky. She’s chilled right through. It looks like a boxcar came down on her pool table. It’s Rose’s refrigerator. There are dark recesses and unrecognizable shapes, tiny sounds that she can’t discern.

      Nora lifts one foot just to know that she can, then tries the other but the toe of her shoe is caught. With her pole she uncovers a piece of netting to find it’s holding a glass float. Fist sized and bottle green, it’s filthy and dripping, but somehow intact. A feeling wells in her chest. She can’t even tell whether it’s happiness or sadness.

      She should walk away.

      She doesn’t have the strength.

      If she leaves, there will be no going back.

      She’s knows that she’s not making sense.

      There’s a rumbling train, and the metal-on-metal shriek.

      She can’t leave, and it’s starting to scare her.

      She doesn’t expect a miracle—the cigarette machine to blink on, or the bottles to reconstruct and line up on the riser.

      Something else is in the room. She senses its presence in the shadows.

      She can’t even move her arms.

      Slap. She feels the sound in her chest. A pigeon bolts from the kitchen, and Nora flies.

      Burt Schnell slips a free fifth of vodka into Nora’s bag.

      “Thanks,” she manages. “That’s nice of you.” She doesn’t realize her fingers are sooty until she holds out her hand for change.

      “What a loss,” he says, “a crying shame. I remember when we were kids, my dad would bring us in for burgers. Me and my sister used to practically kill each other trying to get the bar stool across from Josephine.”

      Nora nods and feels her throat tighten. She hadn’t thought of Josephine, her carved figurehead behind the bar.

      “And the thing is,” Burt continues, “the Schooner hadn’t changed a bit. It was timeless, you know, like real places are.” He shakes his head. “Irreplaceable. So what are you going to do now? It’s hard to imagine you anywhere else.”

      “I know.” She slides her bag off the counter. “I can’t think that far ahead yet.”

      Nora puts the liquor in the front seat and drives to the supermarket at the other end of the lot.

      She’s standing in a row of detergents and fabric softeners, flanked by orange and pink plastic bottles. Everything is absurd. The bright swirling labels. The moms wheeling their kids in shopping carts. The “everyday low prices.” The bulk peanuts.

      Water douses the produce, but no one seems to notice.

       1622

      “And the birds rose up all together, laughing and talking and congratulating themselves.” Bullhead lifts her hands in the air. “And each and every one flew away.”

      “What happened next?” Little Cedar asks. “What happened to the man?”

      Bullhead reaches over and pinches his leg. She laughs and adds a piece of wood to the fire, causing shadows to bounce higher on the wall. “He was flung into the night sky. I’ll show him to you at Sugarbush.”

      The sound of Bullhead’s laughter meant more to their survival than Grey Rabbit had realized. Once more, she thanks the animals who had offered their lives to feed her family. At first the meat felt bad in their stomachs, like hard balls of clay slow to dissolve. Now its good effects are evident. Standing Bird stares at the flames, his arrow-sharp focus back. And Little Cedar is playing again.

      Warm light wavers on Night Cloud’s face. The tightness in his jaw has relaxed as well. He’s no longer stony eyed and quick with gruff words. His feelings come through his eyes so strongly. The morning he awakened from the dream where he was shown the echo rock wall in the woods, his eyes were filled with such gratitude and relief that she knew of the gift before he had spoken.

      “Are we going to hear another one?” Standing Bird asks his grandmother without looking up from the space between two pieces of wood where the flames appear and disappear, creating an eye, a row of teeth, or two tall twirling dancers. He reaches over and pinches his little brother’s knee, and mouths the words, “Windigo, windigo, windigo.”

      Grey Rabbit silences her oldest with a look as Little Cedar squirms and covers his eyes. She, too, would rather not hear of the windigos, the horrible winter specters with man-eating ways. She puts her arm around Little Cedar, feeling the thinness of his shoulder. She tilts his face and feels his cheeks for warmth, but he twists his head free of her.

      Even though they have food enough, the dreams of endangered children have continued. In the last there’d been a lost boy who wandered into a clearing full of bad medicine. Girl or boy and whatever the age—somehow the dreams seem to point to her youngest. She can’t explain why this is. She has never been known as a powerful dreamer. She knows she should ask Bullhead to help her interpret, yet each time she means to, she falls silent.

      “We’ll leave for Sugarbush as soon as the time is right,” Night Cloud announces. Grey Rabbit meets Bullhead’s eyes across the fire. Most of the preparations are already finished. What’s left can’t be done until the end.

      “And when we get there, we can open the cache,” Little Cedar pipes up. “Tell us everything that’s buried in it?” he asks, but then he recites the list himself. “Rice, and fish, and beaver, and maple sugar, sugar, sugar.” His eyes squint shut with pleasure. Again, Grey Rabbit puts her hand to his cheek.

      Bullhead sucks her teeth and then clears her throat with a short cough. “The time has come for me to tell a story that happened as a small party of canoes were on the way to their Sugarbush.”