THief of Fire -

second place 2001

© 2000 D.S. Marks (story) & Skydancer (art)
All rights reserved.

He comes to her in the winter, when the blood is slow and thick, and the senses sleep.

Sometimes the heart sings out to music the mind does not hear. Right or wrong, good or bad –  even safe or lethal –  have nothing to do with it. Late at night, her husband asleep bedside her, she tries to think of reasons. But it is the music of unreason that her heart hears; it pulls at her, and she wants to dance.

She believes the affair is her choice. Yes; he’s seductive: yes; aggressive, too, in his way. But still she thinks the choice to be her own; to accept or reject. That no man’s arrogance could override that.

Later, she admits that there had been little choice in the matter. She consoles herself by believing that it runs both ways; that there is something – some chemistry or karmic knot –  that has brought and tied them together. But this is even less honest.

They come together at his place, an apartment over some stores in the shopping district of town.

When he takes her there for the first time, he has a shy, excited quality about him. Standing at the door, fitting the key into the lock, he turns and looks over his shoulder at her, his dark eyes bright and full of open longing. His smile is almost perplexed, as though for all of his desire to achieve this moment, he can’t quite believe that it has come to pass.

He opens the door and enters, walking through a tiny square foyer, then turning to wait on the other side. Now his smile is hesitant, fearful; this is the moment when he would wake from the dream, should that be the case. She follows through the narrow walls of the foyer, and it is like a tunnel, a passageway to another country. Then she emerges, and the master of the realm is there to greet her.

There is no urgency in his manner, and she responds to this with a languor of her own. His excitement, his heat, is resonant in the room, but rather than rushing through it, he seems to savor it, as he touches her arm, and runs his fingers up to her shoulder.

The living room is apportioned with the most generic furniture imaginable. A squat armchair, covered with a rough, knobby material of pale green. A long, low couch of black vinyl, its rectangular cushions worn at their corners.  A square dark coffee table of scratched, overvarnished wood. A stolid, industrial weave carpet, worn in patches and faded with age.

It has a nearly seedy, transient quality, yet the room is filled with the character that he has given it. Prints on heavy posterboard adorn the walls, drawing of intricate designs: mandalas, labyrinths, triskelions amidst tangles of Celtic knots. There are odd collections of objects gathered on all the flat surfaces: a long, grey feather, a smooth, black stone, and an old brass skeleton key; a spray of tiny dried flowers, tied with braided grass; a long bone, polished to an ivory gleam, crossed by a twig bristling with spiky black thorns. In the air hangs the musk of incense; a heady, nearly tangible scent.

He goes to a bureau against the wall, where there is a massive white candle set in a bronze bowl. It sits before a mirror, and is flanked by more small groupings of objects. He lifts a small, silver box, slides it open, and takes out a match. He lights the candle with such unselfconscious ease, that it is clear this is an utterly routine thing for him.

He gazes at the candle, the spent match smoking in his hand. There is something almost reverent in the way he stands before it. Then he lifts an item from one of the piles, and moves it back and forth through the candle flame. In the mirror, she can see his face, his lips forming silent words.

She smiles, feeling an odd affection for his strangeness. He turns, the hesitant smile back on his face. He comes to her, still holding the object. It is a long crystal of dark, smoky quartz.

“Do you like stones?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says. “That’s beautiful.”

“This one is for you,” he says, offering it. Looking into his eyes, she grasps the faceted end with two fingers, not touching his hand, to see if she can feel him through the crystal.

Later that night, her husband already asleep when she gets into bed, she slips the crystal wand into her pillowcase, and dreams him through the ether, as he dreams her.

“I knew we would get together the first time I saw you,” she tells him.

“How did you know?” He asks the question almost tenderly. This is the strange thing about him; how soft he is, how mild. And yet he flows like water, always finding his way through. After all; hasn’t he picked her up like a leaf on a stream?

“I just felt something connecting us.” In his apartment, she is in a world away from the world. Here, she is the center of the universe. “Some sort of energy, I think.”

“Yes, I believe that,” he says, and it is only later that she realizes that she doesn’t quite know what he means.  Does he believe it is true, or only that she thinks so?

There is a room in his apartment that is empty of furniture. Her first few times there, the door had been kept closed. Then, one day, it stands open; an invitation, to look, to wonder. On the floor are only woven rugs, softly glowing candles, and incense burning in bowls. More of the strange, elaborate designs decorate the walls. The windows are covered with heavy, thick curtains. Velvet? She believes that it is.

“Is there something religious about it?” she asks him. “That’s the feeling I get.”

“Not religious,” he says, standing at the open door with her, not stepping into the room.  “Spiritual, maybe. Magickal, maybe.”

“Magickal?” She likes the thrill of mystery the word gives her.  There is much mystery about him, which is how she believes it should be. “Magickal how?”

“I open doorways,” he says. “I go places.”

“What kind of places?” she asks.

He puts his arms around her; kisses her softly on the mouth.

“Places like this one,” he says

In the springtime, when the affair is still young, but now has legs it can stand on, they often both leave work early, and go for drives up into the hills. The roads are shiny and wet; the skies low ridges of grey on grey. On a back road skirting a large field, he stops the car, and points up to a large, spreading tree.

“See the hawk?” he says, and she looks and can see the large silhouette perched in the top branches. It is motionless, and defiantly erect.

“Yes.”

“Now see all the little birds in the lower part of the tree?”

Small dark shapes. They flit back and forth, sometimes flying off to another tree, then flying back again.

“It’s so strange, how they just ignore the hawk up there,” he says. “Do you think when the hawk picks one of the birds to take, the bird knows it; can feel the hawk, choosing it?”

“I don’t know,” The hawk, dark shadow that it is, seems to be regarding them. It knows we’re looking at it, she thinks. “You’d think if it did, it would take off, try to get away.”

He gazes at the scene, his arm looped out the open window. “Maybe it does just the opposite,” he says. “Maybe when a bird knows the hawk has chosen it, it flies out to meet it.”

She looks at him, wondering at the things he sometimes says. “Why would it do that?”

He shrugs, lightly, a gesture as mild as all his others. “Maybe it’s a kind of love,” he says.

Like a fool, she doesn’t believe him when he says that he is dangerous. He is

He tells her about magick, but doesn’t offer to teach her any. He wants her to

“Where do you go?” she asks him in bed one afternoon.

“Where do you go when you dream?” He counters.

“I don’t go anywhere. Dreaming is in my head.”

“Your head is too small to hold a dream,” he says. He is smiling, but there is something else in his eyes, something she cannot identify. Something that makes her heart quicken, the heat rise.

“Maybe dreams don’t take up space,” she says.

He nods; his smile gentle, slight. “I go to a place like that.”

“A place with no space?” she teases.

“It feels infinite,” he says. “Like a dream.”

“I want you to take me there.”

“I can’t take you there. You have to go on your own.”

“Then I want you to show me how.”

“Ask me again.”

“Show me how to get there.”

“One more time.”

“I want you to show me how to go where you go.”

He smiles again. “Okay.”

Her husband and their sons go camping every spring; it’s become a yearly ritual in the family. Her part of the ritual is staying home, having a weekend alone with herself, having a house full of quiet. This year; a new ritual. This year; an opening of doors. So many doors; so many places. She has strayed so far outside the bounds of her circle.

In the room with no furniture, they sit on woven rugs with a candle between them. The flame that tops the candle is a perfect teardrop of light. Pale bright orange with an invisible heart, and a bristling aura of yellow heat. She can see it reflected in his eyes; tiny twin daggers of vertical gleam. Burning seams of light, as though a fire inside him was searing its way to freedom.

"Are you ready?” he asks, and her gaze pulls back to take in his face. He is trying to read her, searching her with his eyes. She can nearly feel their touch; stroking her skin, brushing her eyelashes, tracing her lips until they tingle. A heat suddenly rises to her face, flushing her with pulsing blood. She feels sheathed in fire, burning with an aura as hot and bright as the candle's.

When she opens her mouth to speak, her lips feel swollen, full. The heat flushes her face again. Her breath quickens, whispers wordlessly, and the candle flame shivers. He watches her, his eyes mapping the geography of her face. There is a tensed anticipation in his statement, as though the fate of worlds balances upon her answer. He has a stillness about him; the stillness of a coiled spring. His body seems poised, as though he hovers on some invisible edge. He exudes a musk of danger and fear, desire and despair. There is something happening, something momentous; she feels it, but does not understand. It is something greater than her ability to see.

"I'm ready,” she says, her voice nearly too thick to speak. She swallows, and the heat in her face flows down her throat, pooling like liquid fire in her belly. He leans forward slightly, and now she can sense his aura, too; unable to contain itself, flaring out from his body; a radiation of strange, unfamiliar longing. She feels his energy field touch hers, and the air between them sparkles and snaps. Her skin feels saturated with something fearsome and delicious. She is leaking bright burning light.

He reaches out to the candle holder, lifting it by the stem as he would a goblet of crystal. He raises it until the flame hovers between their faces. Now the twin reflections are huge, but his eyes are huger still, and they try and read her again. She opens herself to them, feeling them take her in. For an instant, there is understanding: he is predator, after all; she the prey. For a brief moment, she flashes on the hawk atop the tree, and the smaller birds, waiting to see which of their number will be chosen. A kind of love, he’d said. And, for an instant, she understands this, too.

“Come along with me, then,” he says.

Her nerves are on fire; her breath is shuddering. She lifts her hand, then brings her thumb and forefinger to her mouth, making their tips slick and wet. She can hear his breathing, pacing hers, hard, and fast. The flame shivers again; the reflections in his eyes turn liquid. She extends her fingers to the candle, closing them on the flame. There is a sharp hiss, and a bright starburst of pain is echoed in heat throughout her body. A weakness streaks up the insides of her thighs, and something in her belly drops down to meet it. She feels like a swelling ocean wave, rising with the wind to break into white foam. Then the doorway opens, and she is swept through it.

In a dance, in a dream, he turns with her at the center. There is a great current here; something that comes from nowhere and goes to nowhere, and he holds her, here at the center, dancing.

There is no world anymore. Things once solid flow like liquid light. It is no longer life; it has gone beyond life, to something cold and eternal. It moves, and yet is a great stillness. She can barely feel herself in this place. What she feels is a fire, pouring into her. What she feels is the world flowing through her. She is a part of the current; part of the chaos of things pulling her apart. Pulling her into itself. At the center he holds her, and they dance. His awareness of her is the only thing that makes her real, in this place.

This singing, this music; this is a voice, a voice that she can understand. It is music of remembrance; she has been here before. Before everything; before the dream that is her life. She has been here before.

She feels that slow shredding, strings of light spinning off of her like water from a wheel. It’s a different sort of pain; the pain of emptying out, the pain of dissolution. She has no words for this pain, because it is not of her world. He dances with her, spinning her, pulling her apart. He is a dark star; one that draws light in, rather than releasing it. And she: she is a flame, a web of burning light that pours like water into his darkness. He is dissolving her.

She is a river of fire, and he drinks her in.

At some point, she realizes that most of the candles have gone out, yet she can still see things in the room. Grey morning has arrived.

“What have you done to me?” she asks. The heat in the room is tremendous; her entire body is slick with sweat. Her hair lays glued to her brow, her face. She sits on one of the scattered rugs, her back to the wall. She pulls the damp sheet around her, and watches him. He sits across from her, beyond the candles in the center.

“I haven’t done anything to you,” he says quietly.

But he has. He has stolen something from her. Even now she can see it; her own light, that bright webbing that had spun off of her in that alien place; wrapped around him, like a coat of many colors.

“What is that place?” her voice is a faint hiss. “Where did you take me?”

“I didn’t take you. You went there yourself.”

“Damn you!” She makes an effort to stand; then realizes she is far too weak, too tired. Her eyes feel dry, hot. Her lips, chapped. She licks at them. Her tongue, thick. “What is that place?”

“It’s my home,” he says.

She does not question this. “I don’t ever want to go there again.”

To this, he only smiles.

For three days at work, she neither speaks to him nor returns his gaze. She doesn’t want to see if that light of hers he has stolen still wreaths him like a cloak. She feels its absence, the dimming within herself. She wonders if she will ever get it back, or if it is like having a limb amputated; nothing remaining but phantom pain. 

But as the days pass, she comes to realize that his presence, his nearness, is almost like having that light back again. The closer he is, the more that empty space within her sings to the light she has lost. And when she looks at him, allows his gaze into her own, she feels it stronger still.

“Are you angry at me?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says.

“Will you come this evening?” It is Wednesday, and the lie that frees her for one night each week is still good. She doesn’t want to come, because she is still angry, and because she doesn’t understand.

“Yes,” she says, and this she doesn’t understand, either.

She had thought herself strong; a rock. She hadn’t thought someone as gentle as he could wear her away.

In the darkness of his bedroom, she sees herself riding him. Now her light is not his, not stolen, because it flows from him back into her. In this way, she can reclaim what was taken from her.

In the darkness, she sees herself; a web of light, spreading and splintering, while he, a native not of her world, but of this one, spins in a dance that wraps her light around him, drawing it in like thread to a spool.

Again: that pain of emptying out, but a pain so exquisite as to be beautiful beyond belief. This dissolution is not a horror, but a blessing. Only back in her world can this shedding of light be a terrible thing. Here, to be whole is to be apart from everything else, alone.

What are you? She manages to say, or think, and he answers back, I am an Angel, come to take you Home.

You’re a Hawk, she thinks. Come to devour me.

Then fly up to meet me, he replies, and in that flight of surrender, she feels the river of everything flow into her, and she is alone no more.

Cold, so cold. Her husband moves his body against her, and the lifeless chill makes her want to scream. The room is dark, but light flickers at the edges of her vision. It is that other world, that world of dissolution, creeping in on her. His world. Somewhere beyond the veil, he sleeps, wrapped in the warmth and light he has stolen from her. Feeding on it, as a rose feeds on the sun. But she is not a star. Her heat fades too fast, her light darkens and dims.

Later, she locks herself into the bathroom and stands before the mirror. She has turned the light off, and in the darkness she can see in the mirror how she must now appear to him; a ragged net of pulsing life, glowing lines that bleed and fade, holes through which the chaos of the Eternal shines. He has wounded her, and bit by bit he now ravels the thread of her being into himself.

Even now, she bleeds into his arms

She leaves before the sun rises, without explanation to her husband, who watches sleepily as she gets dressed in the darkness. “What?” he mumbles thickly, and she says “Nothing. Go back to sleep,” and then leaves the room, closing the door behind her.

The light is growing as she heads into town; golden light, light like buttermilk, coating the world. It is cold light, but now she knows that the cold is within herself. Here: above this storefront, warmth is waiting; the pool into which she bleeds. Rushing up the stairs, she can smell it like a beast smells water in the desert. He opens the door and she dives in, drinking it, washing in it, even as she spins out like spider silk, losing herself on the wind.

Her husband’s ways with her have changed, of late; he seems unsure of things, and worried. She wonders if he knows. He says it’s because she’s become so pale, and is so dragged out and tired all the time. He says it’s because he thinks she’s sick.

Perhaps she is sick, in a way, but only when she’s away from him. She can’t tell her husband that, of course. So, finally, she gives in to his entreaties that she see a doctor, to find out what could be wrong. She gets checked up, examined, tested for this and that. She watches her blood fill the nurse’s glass tubes, and she sees it not as deep red liquid but pale light. She wonders if the nurse can see that. She wonders if people can see through the holes in her, the way she sometimes can.

The doctor proclaims her anemic, and prescribes things to make her all better. If these were more primitive times, she thinks, he would have been a witch doctor, a shaman, and he would have known what was really wrong. He would have seen the dimming of her light, would have sensed her warmth being drawn away in long, glowing strands.

What would he have done for her, then? she wonders. Could he have offered her anything as sublime as what he can give her; that glorious dissolution? Could a shaman replace what he has taken from her; what only he can give back, if only for a time? Could a shaman teach her to find warmth in anyone else, ever again?

That evening, as she sits listlessly, waiting for the morning, when she can see him again, her husband breaks down in tears, his fear and confusion pouring from him. From the doorway, her sons watch; their faces are wet with tears, too. Such sorrow; she can nearly feel it in the air. But all their pain is absorbed by a cold, dark spot inside her, and she wonders in amazement at what has happened to her. She has become more space than light. How can they even see her at all?

“I’m sorry,” she manages to say. She looks from her husband to her children, then back again. “Maybe it’s not too late.”

“What?” her husband raises his face to her, his eyes stricken. “What?”

“If I stay away, I’ll get better.” Suddenly realizing what she has just said, she adds “if I stay home. If I just stay home for a while, I’ll get better. I’ll get it back.”

Her husband, thinking he understands, nods, and smiles through his tears.

Her first day home, she cannot sit still, and she roams the house and the yard like a bedeviled wind. But the second day, she finds she hasn’t the strength to get up, and she stays in bed, drifting in and out of a ragged sleep. She wakes to find her husband, just home from work, standing over her with panic in his eyes.

“I’m just tired,” she tells him. “I need to rest.”

When she wakes again, it is the next afternoon.

The days are warm, now, but she has a chill she can’t dispel. Three days, now; three days away from him, and still she is so, so cold. Purely for the sense of motion it gives her, she gets into her car and drives. She drives into the hills, avoiding the places she used to go to with him, seeking out different scenes, places where life has never known her.

Along the edge of a reservoir, she watches the sun go down, slipping behind ridges of ancient hills, setting the sky afire. It is a kind of music: that same music of the swirling void. Her body sings to it, as though she were nothing but delicate strings tuned to a dying pitch. Her sun is setting, and her song is beautiful.

It suddenly occurs to her that now she knows the truth; that there is no return from that place, because to go there is to surrender to it. He took her to the river, and bathed her in it, and when she became the river he drank of her, and now she belongs to him. Perhaps he is an Angel, he who opens such doors.

But if he is an Angel, then Angels are thieves, and their light is stolen fire. That which he has stolen from her was her human heart. Without it, she cannot live in this world. She has no choice but to go to him, because through him, the river flows.

The next morning she gets up and dresses for work, telling her husband that she feels better, much better. She gives herself a complexion with powder and rouge, and her hunger for warmth, her need to find him again, gives her what nearly passes for vitality. She forces herself into her normal routine, trying not to arouse suspicion, but she still manages to be the first one on the job.

It’s not until mid-afternoon that she admits to herself that he isn’t coming in.

She leaves work early, and drives to his apartment. At the top of the stairs, his door is open, and she can hear the hollow voice of vacancy, even before she walks in and sees the place cleared out. He has stripped it of himself, and the faceless pieces of furniture are dead things in a museum.

“You bastard,” she whispers, standing on the bare wood floor in the room where he used to open doorways. “You can’t leave me. You can’t.”

Her yearning is so cold, her hunger born of such emptiness. Is this what it means, to lose one’s soul? To be a sunset, forever on the edge of twilight, to be a light forever dimmed? In the empty room, she collapses to the floor, wrapping her arms around that dark cold space that used to hold her heart.

She cries for him: thief of her fire, eater of souls.

In dreams, she sees him.

“Where did you go?” she asks.

“I didn’t go anywhere.”

“You’re not at the apartment.”

“I don’t need it anymore,” he says. “I have you.”

In dreams, she sees the light he has stolen from her. Glorious light, Godlight, and in its nearness, she revels in its warmth.

But in the mornings, when she awakes, she is always, always cold.

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