A Thousand Sparks of Ember

This story is one of my submissions to the 2022 Literary Taxidermy writing competition. The first and last lines are taken from the poem As I Grew Older by Langston Hughes (as per the requirements of the competition). These first and last lines have been reimagined into a new story, titled:

A THOUSAND SPARKS OF EMBER

Image by Adonyi Gábor on Pexels

It was a long time ago when I last saw or felt a smile. We naively went about our lives in the shadows then. If we were happy, our happiness was bound up by our ignorance; and if we were unhappy, it was the brief unhappiness of an everyday inconvenience, or the bittersweet sorrow of the passing beyond of a loved one whom we knew we would see again tomorrow. 

It was not yet our time to step into the sun, and we knew nothing of what lay beyond. We knew nothing of what it was to suffer, or to be caught under the slaughtering arm of an enemy.

What was an enemy? How were we to know? We lived isolated and alone, carefree and content. All we knew of enemies was the petty arguments with neighbours easily resolved with the elders over the bonfires, and our greatest enemies of all were each our own selves. We were like infants under the shelter of the mountain’s rock, and we shared in each other’s joys and believed we were invincible and safe.

The greatest happiness of them all and the greatest sadness that followed began when Wren dove headfirst into the world, in a real hurry. My sisters and aunts and mothers gathered around me with their hands on my naked, bleeding body and sang the thrumming songs of rebirth as the waves of afterbirth pains washed through me.

“Mother,” they all whispered in awe, bestowing the honoured role upon me. Then they took up the blood-soaked sheets and tossed them into the hearth. Wren opened her eyes and saw the blood and flames and wailed. Having just come from the heavens, she had seen what was to come, but had no words with which to warn us.

When her father took her in his big hands and held her over the bonfires to declare her his firstborn and the newest sister of our clan, she wailed again, but he said,

“The Great One has smiled upon us.”

Little did we know that our days for smiling were counted.

Safe in our valley of Caira’zah, under the shadows of the encircling forested mounts, the days were short and the nights were long. Some songs sang of foreign neighbours beyond the horizons, but the stories were ancient, and we were all alone under the protection of the twinkling stars.

“Calla,” murmured my sleepy husband one morning after another wakeful night with Wren, who now had a full head of curls and babbled in her own unique tongue.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“You are doing a wonderful job of being Wren’s mother.”

I could not see his smile in the darkness, but I could feel it, as I was sure he could feel mine in return. He reached out and gave my hand a squeeze, knowing, though he had slept soundly, that I had the little one at my breast many times throughout the night.

Those were the days when unhappy moments of sacrifice melted into the joy of love and family, and I will treasure this final moment always, the last bit of the flickering candle before it was snuffed out.

After my husband disappeared with the other men into the forests for the Long Hunt, those of the sisters and aunts and mothers that were coming today arrived to give me the gift of rest, and I slept so deeply that by the time I awoke, it was too late. 

A great sun was setting upon the treetops, setting them aglow with a raging fire and soaking their roots with red-hot blood. The black smoke billowing up to blot out the stars writhed with screams as the clashing of weapons unknown to us fell upon our little village. It was the very trees themselves who tore upon us, slashing us down with their razor-sharp boughs, still ablaze and raging with flames that engulfed every bit of carnage they left behind, and exploding with a thousand sparks of burning ember.

I tore myself awake from that nightmare, only to realize that a much worse nightmare surrounded me. I spluttered in the gagging smoke as I ran to the door, but I could barely discern what was going on through the inferno that was already consuming our hut.

But the clashes and screams were identical to my dream. My heart filled in the horror that my senses couldn’t make sense of yet. They were not trees, but men – strange men from elsewhere, with foreign headpieces and breastplates, unfamiliar weaponry, and unidentifiable markings on their bodies.

“Calla! Calla!”

The sister who held my baby in her arms, the two of them clinging to each other in terror, frantically called for me through the rabid flames.

“Don’t wait for me!” I cried. “Save yourself! Save my Wren! Go, for the Great One’s sake, go!”

Tears beyond what was already streaming down my face from the smoke choked me down as she disappeared, making her way, I hoped, to safety with Wren and the other women.

I put my cheek to the dirt and prayed my death would be swift. But behind my closed eyelids, someone was whispering to me.

“Calla. Get up. There’s still a way out.”

“I’m burning up…” I moaned.

“Calla,” the voice urged on, and a distant part of myself thought it sounded like my buried father calling from beyond.

“I will join you soon, Father…”

“No. Get up. Get up for Wren, my little Mother!”

I would leave this room with my whole face seared off by the burning air, I thought, but I finally dragged myself onto my feet as commanded and found the promised escape between the partly collapsed wall and roof.

The flames grasped at my ankles to drag me back down to their hell, but I focused my thoughts forward.

Wren. Wren needs me.

I thought my legs would not, could not, bear to carry me. But my desperation carried me instead, and I fled faster than I’d ever run before, up into the mountains.

Whichever way the women had gone, and whichever way our hunters were – whether they had become the hunted themselves, watering the forest trees with their blood, or whether they continued their hunt unaware of the horrors happening back home until the smoke on the wind caught up to where they were – I did not know. I only knew I would not escape the fire only to be shot down or captured by this terrible enemy. 

It has been a long time now that I have traveled the mountains alone. I saw the carnage behind me and the desert beyond, but still no sign of Wren and my sisters and mothers, or of my husband and the other brothers and fathers.

I sit now on the rocks overlooking the plains ahead as the great sun rises again in its fiery red splendour – a stark reminder that fire can be both friend and foe.

I take up my writing rock and the bark I tore to write on.

It was a long time ago that I last saw and felt a smile. We naively went about our lives in the shadows then. We knew nothing of what it was to suffer, or to be caught under the slaughtering arm of an enemy.

It was not yet our time to step into the sun … and burn.

If I fail to find the rest – if they have been caught and killed, if I am the last of my kind – I have to pass on our songs. We will die, and all our memory with us, if no one writes down the songs.

And now there will be new songs to tell as well.

We came from darkness, 

but we laughed in candlelight 

and danced before our fires.

It was not yet our time to step into the sun.

We lived in shadow, 

we knew the shadows,

but we did not see the new shadows

until they were already upon us.

They came in the night,

to take our light,

to shatter our dreams into a thousand sparks of ember,

into a deeper darkness no one would remember. 

Help me to shatter this darkness,

to smash this night,

to break this shadow

into a thousand lights of sun,

into a thousand whirling dreams of sun!