Ashes to Ashes

The little bird’s blood was stark and bright against the ash that coated its feathers and circled its body. It lay in front of great iron gates that guarded one of the many factories that were embedded on the edge of town.  The bird’s tiny, crooked frame looked impossibly fragile against the somber industrial majesty of the gate and the towers and the rows of belching smokestacks that left the air of this town a perpetual hazy grey. This grey had engulfed the little bird’s down to the point that Lilly and I couldn’t tell what color it had once been. All I knew, all I saw, was its red--its bright red that seemed like a slap in the face of the pervasive grey.

I couldn’t be sure of how it died. Perhaps some neighborhood boys had shot it down with a BB gun. Perhaps one of the many rumbling trucks had smashed its life out under determined, grinding treads. Perhaps in a farewell to this grey world it had swooped into the factory’s exhaust fan, only to flutter and flap and let slip its last vestiges of life amid dirt and soot and ash. But what does it matter how? The bird was dead. I grimaced. Like any other girl in this town would have, I scowled and I grimaced and I turned my eyes from death.

 But Lilly, Lilly bent low as if to scoop the twisted little frame into her hands. She lowered her face, cooing softly like it was a new-born babe and from her usual look of stony indifference emerged a calm—almost a happiness. 

“Oh, Lilly, won’t you get away from it—oh for God’s sakes don’t pet it,” I told her.

She laughed her quiet, tinkling laugh--which I don’t think anyone besides me had ever truly heard—and scooped some ash around it as if making a nest. “But, Jane, it’s cute. It looks free,” she sighed.

I didn’t answer. Together we turned and walked.

“Well, something nice on my birthday, anyway” she said, her voice slipping back to dullness.

“Oh yes, just what everyone wants on their birthday—a dirty, dead bird,” I said with a frown.

We walked on in easy silence.

“You know, I got you something,” I said after a time, “something for you birthday. I was going to give it to you later, maybe if you were going to have a…celebration”

Her eyes flicked to me and her smile was there and gone. “Thanks. But you can give it to me anytime. Pa won’t get back from the factory till late, of course. And Mother just gave me these new boots this morning,” she said, nodding at the ground.

Somehow I hadn’t noticed that on her feet was a slightly new pair of work boots, twins to my own slightly-more-ratty-black ones. The boots were consistent with the rest of our practical clothes—mostly bought by our mothers. Perfectly practical and perfectly suitable for factory-men’s daughters, they told us. Though we could have pointed out that most of the girls at school, maybe all of them, were children of factory workers and they didn’t exactly dress like this, we didn’t. I followed Lilly’s lead and we accepted the clothes with the same indifference as we accepted everything.

Despite the drab attire and stony countenance, Lilly was strangely pretty with her golden hair and blue-grey eyes.  We didn’t look like sisters—well, we weren’t, we were neighbors--but we might as well have been related. We always were side-by-side, walking and sitting and talking and not talking. Though Lilly sometimes seemed to want more, wanted to go, to feel, we were always side-by-side. Since we were babies we were side-by-side.

            Again we set off along the streets, along familiar roads that lead away from the edge of town. We passed the rest of the churning factories and the same little lots of dusty trucks. We passed the school’s sagging wire fences and the browned field that was one of the town’s only open spaces. And we passed house after nondescript house until we reached our own two little ones that looked like all the rest, but just happened to be ours, to be the houses we came back to day after day.

            “Go on in without me? I’ll just run into my house first,” I said

            “Yeah,” she acknowledged with a nod and veered of the sidewalk, up the stone steps to her porch.

            I hurried through my own front door and grabbed a package from under my bed before turning around and making my way back to the street and into Lilly’s house. I braved the creaky stairs on my way to her room with a murmured good afternoon, Mrs. Nixon to her mother, who spared a glance up from her sewing machine.

            I found Lilly on her bed, looking out the lone window in her room and handed her the package, a flat rectangle wrapped in only thick brown paper, before settling into the faded armchair in the corner.

            She took the present silently and stared at it for a second before tearing away the wrapping to reveal the maroon underneath—a book. It was a bit worn; the corners were subtly smashed and the binding was cracked. Where once there might have been a jacket now there was only scarlet covers, blank except for two words stamped across the front in slightly-shiny blue: The World.

            Lilly eased the covers open to first blank page and turned forward to color. On every page were photographs of different places in the world, photographs of places I had never seen and didn’t—couldn’t—dream of seeing. But I knew Lilly could. She flipped through the pages faster and faster, past pages of color and life, pages of streams and rivers and fields and canyons, past pictures of newly-erected skyscrapers and crumbling pyramids, past pages of yellow and red and turquoise and peach until suddenly she stopped. Curious about what made her stare so intently, about what made her curve forward so hungrily and happily as if she wanted to melt into the polished paper, I leaned over and saw the ocean. The ocean photo, like all the rest, was depicted with a slightly dim graininess that still seemed unbelievably vivid. Though pretty, it was just a generic beach: blue-green water stretching far from golden beaches. The minutes stretched by as she stared, enraptured, tracing the lines of the waves with her finger, her eyes a bittersweet blue, her body stiff.

            I was used to silence and I could tell she was grateful, happy, but her own tension and emotion unnerved me.  Finally I leaned forward on the cushion. “It was at a bookstore when I went with Pa to the city last month.  I, well, it’s not too new...they were gonna throw it out cause someone took the cover and I guess--”

            Lilly smiled at me.

I eased back into the chair. “Well, I’m glad you like it. See, the book’s a better birthday present than the bird, don’t you think?”

She blinked at me. “The bird took what the book offers: an escape from neutrality and smoke. A freedom and feeling.” With an almost inaudible sigh her face was once again composed and she closed the book, leaning back onto her bed with it clutched to her chest. “Don’t you see, Jane, the bird and the book, they’re the same thing.”

---

I slipped on the loose dirt and rocks, grabbing for deep-set stones and trees as Lilly scrambled unwaveringly on ahead of me, her face turned always upward.

“Lilly, slow down,” I called to her, “where are we going?”

She slowed, patient for a few seconds. “The lake.”

“I know, but--but, why? We’ve lived here since forever and never once come this way,”

“Exactly.” Lilly turned away, again moving up the slope. “I just want to see it,” she mumbled, mostly to herself,

I followed doggedly, tripping over unfamiliar ground in my impatience. I called to her again but she didn’t seem to hear me as she stepped ever upward past brown earth and occasional trees. We continued for a while and as we began to ascend through the haze of the town, leaving behind smog for sweeter air, I felt her excitement intensify. She began to walk faster and straighter, a fresh energy in her movement. And as the ground turned even greener and the wind picked up, whipping our hair into frenzied life, my own feelings intensified, my annoyance gradually turning to fear, even to an overwhelming panic that I attributed to the fact that Lilly was moving further and further away and I couldn’t seem to catch up. But beneath that annoyance and beneath that unfamiliar building dread, a seed of curiosity grew. I now moved ahead not only to overtake Lilly, but to see for myself what lay beneath blue skies.

Unsettled by these emotions, scared by the foreignness of their intensity, I struggled forward and glanced up--and Lilly was gone. Spurred into speed, I leaped up the last feet and finally breached level ground. 

            And there was Lilly. She was all I saw, standing too close to the edge of the cliff, poised as if for flight, fresh wind whipping her bright hair up into snarls. The edge of the cliff curved a little in the space between us, so I could see her face, tense but calm. I caught sight of her eyes and for a moment I saw it all reflected there. I saw the vast blue lake, spreading all the way to the horizon, and the sinking sun that cast a golden-red sheen on the surface.

            For a moment I think I felt like Lilly. I think I felt I could dive into the clean winds and sparkling currents and they would carry me away, past the eternal water and eternal sunset.

“It just goes on forever,” she said dreamily, still staring towards the water.

            I stepped towards her. I stepped towards the reflection, towards the dream in her bright eyes. But a numbing city wind blew between us and with a shiver, like a flower closing back in on itself after being touched, I retreated back into my own mind.

“Lilly! Get back!” I yanked her away from the edge and turned away from the lake. “Be careful.”

“Right,” she sighed, still caught up in the waters that now seemed so far away.

“And besides it doesn’t. It doesn’t go on forever,” I told her, grabbing her arm, determined to make her see. “Look, look out there—there’s the far edge.”

She winced away from the lake, from me. “Right, Jane. Everything has borders and shores and fences.” She agreed quietly. “But, well, I still just want to see…” She stopped. “Well, let’s get going back then?”

Relieved, I agreed, and we began to the descent back into town. Lilly walked at my side, quiet and stoic like always. She was different, though, like smoldering coals inside her were now lit. She seemed happy, which for the first time bugged me. Lilly walked at my side, yet she felt out of reach. I had lost sight of her at the top of the hill and never really regained it. Now, though we were moving back towards town, she was scrambling away, far from the smog and grey and the accompanying numbness.

The walk down seemed to take much less time than the walk up and we passed the fence that marked the residential neighborhood as twilight settled.

Back at the houses, we said our good-byes in darkness.

---

I woke the next morning, greeted as usual by the weak morning light and slowly shifting shadows. As the sun rose behind my house I readied myself for school and made my way outside to meet Lilly so we could walk to school like we did every day. I waited outside her house as usual. I waited and she didn’t come.

I moved quietly through her front door up the stairs to her room. I entered and stood in front of Lilly’s empty, untouched bed, staring at the open place on her dresser where the maroon book had last lain.

I walked to school alone as the grey factory clouds pulsed on the horizon.