Smoke still rose from the collapsed remnants of his father’s work house, but the fire had devoured a good meal and was settling down to sleep, the fallen beams glowing with a final few embers. He knew he wasn’t supposed to go near fire, but he went anyway, pushing away still-warm pieces with his hands. When the embers burned his skin, singed his feathers, he shook off the hurt and carried on, kicking aside the ash and the lumps of charcoaled wood until he saw his father’s head.
It was rolling around on the floor, all bone, the eye holes empty. His father’s body—charred black bones—lay in another part of the small building, and Jason knew then that his father had burned up his mother’s insides as well as his own, that he’d cut off his own head using the chopping thing he’d built . . . would have cut off Jason’s if Jason had made a sound when his father called out for him after the screams stopped and the blood began to seep through the trapdoor.
39
But maybe his father had made a mistake, he thought suddenly, hope a bright star inside him, and his mother’s insides had survived?
He began to dig through the ash again, his skin burning, his face blackened by the dust. He dug, and he searched, and he left a trail of sticky red as his burnt skin peeled and his battered hands began to bleed. It was only when night fell that he realized there was nothing to be found.
His mother’s insides had been turned to ash.
“Only a very powerful immortal can rise from the ashes of flame.” Brown eyes shining with relief and concern both. “That’s why you must never play with fire, Jason. Even I cannot survive a fire should it reach my heart and mind, and you are a babe.”
Wings dragging under the half-moon, he walked out to the closest part of their lagoon, washed himself in the warm, shallow water. His mother didn’t like it when he came into the house dirty, so he washed and washed until all the blood and the dust was gone from his body, his raw and cut flesh stinging from the salt water. Carrying his dirty clothes, he left them on the porch where she always picked them up to wash. His wings were slick with water, so he opened and shook them off before going inside.
Mama always kissed his cheek and patted his wings dry with a soft cloth, but today, he had to do it himself. It was hard—his wings were bigger than his body, and he couldn’t reach every part.
“This way, Bumblebee.”
Listening to the memory, he spread the cloth on the floor and lay down on it like Mama and his father had once done, both of them laughing after a swim, their wings glistening in the sunlight as he circled delighted above them like “a big bumblebee.” That was a good memory, of the time before his father became a stranger who locked the bedroom door and made his mother make small, hurting sounds that twisted Jason up until he couldn’t breathe.
Dry, he put on clean clothes, and even though he wasn’t supposed to wear shoes inside the house, he thought it would be all right this time, because the floor was so dirty. Ready, he walked to the back door and out to where his mother kept things with which she worked in her garden. She’d like to be near her big yellow hibiscus flowers, he thought, beginning to dig. They were her favorites—when he brought her one, she always put it behind her ear, where it shone “brilliant as the sunrise against the black silk” of her hair.
His father had said that and kissed her.
Before.
He was only a child. It took him two days to dig the hole. He didn’t want to put his mother in the ground, but the flies had started to bother her in spite of the sheets he’d dragged out from the other rooms and spread over her. He knew she wouldn’t like that. So after he used a mat to gently pull the pieces of her to the hole he’d dug, he put a hibiscus flower in her hair and covered her up with her favorite amethyst shawl. “I love you, Mama.”
Then, he began to put the earth back inside the hole, on top of his mama. His tears ran silent and endless down his cheeks, his body having learned too well never, ever to make a sound. When it was all filled up and he knew none of the small animals that lived in the forest would be able to disturb her, he went to the beach to collect shells over and over, until her entire grave glittered and gleamed with the curves and twists and shine of the sea, the heavy blossoms of the hibiscus hanging overhead.
Then, he put his father’s bones in a sack and dragged it into the damp thickness of the trees, the weight too heavy for him to fly. He didn’t know how long he walked and dragged. A long time. Sometimes he rested. But finally he reached the small coral-reef encircled lagoon that jutted off the main atoll, like a twin that hadn’t quite formed properly.
Unlike their lagoon, he wasn’t allowed to play in this one. His father had told him there was a volcano under the surface, its crater deep. That volcano, it did something to the water, made it burn Jason’s eyes the one time he’d become curious and come to explore.