Nothing here but clinker

Pick­ing through debris. Sift­ing detritus. Siev­ing and shak­ing the coal from the clinker, and then I’m back. An inward child sat cross-legged in the middle of the high-walled back yard. Regress­ing and regret­ting. Embra­cing the past for fear it might reach out and strangle if I don’t take its hands in mine.

“Did I do well?” I whispered, timid and tamed. Ter­ror came later. It seemed like the only time he could force him­self to be proud of me was when I had some­how man­aged to find fuel from that teem­ing dust pile of waste. Waste not want not what not. I saved another ebony rock for the flames today, but only because — well, you never know, never can be sure — it might be the most pre­cious of jew­els rather than a lump of mere fossil.

“That’ll burn well,” he would say, as he car­ried the metal tray to the coal-fired boiler, neg­lect­ing the more import­ant busi­ness of the day such as why she had dis­ap­peared to the top of the house or why the cup­board door was hanging from its hinges yet again. He could grit and grin his grim­ace through any­thing, that man.

He listened intently to the weather fore­cast on the radio as he stoked the age-old black and iron with the poker that scared me so. No, no, I’m not say­ing what you’re wildly ima­gin­ing. It was the noise that unnerved me; the noise and the leap­ing fire. Pic­ture a five year old with a firm con­vic­tion that this black-haired fig­ure was some­how dig­ging into the pits of hell, which I had only just begun to accept were undoubtedly lying beneath the found­a­tions of our broken home and slowly break­ing house. An obvi­ous assump­tion, because that was the only explan­a­tion for the sights I had seen and the sounds I had heard.

His arms. Arms that wanted to be muscle, yet weren’t. I saw all the marks on the sleeves: grass stains from the garden, oil leaks from the engine, scuffs from the stone­work, other tell-tale traces whose proven­ance I knew but could never, would never give a name.

In that yard and in that nar­row cor­ridor of a kit­chen, we were close for a moment. Do you believe that too, from whichever fire you tend now? Tell me we were close and I might be able to hold onto those wintry week­end hours, if noth­ing else.

There we stood, shar­ing a brief desire to warm the creak­ing floors and eight­eenth cen­tury walls for another night, so that when I hid myself under the thick blankets I would melt. So that I would melt, melt into, melt apart.