“You know, Liv,” Eastman says, kicking lightly at one of the reinforced cardboard boxes we’ve lugged to the woods behind the house. “When Mum said to finish unpacking, I’m pretty sure this isn’t what she meant.”
I kneel beside him, slitting open a taped box with the pocket knife Uncle Lewis gave me. The knife itself is another thing Mum would lose it over if we gave her the chance, but it seems pretty insignificant compared to what we’re about to do.
Besides, these days she could witness us commit ultra-bloody murder and still not notice us.
“What’s Dad’s favorite saying, again?” I ask, rooting through the box, pushing aside a stack of family photo albums. “‘What Mum doesn’t know can’t hurt us’?”
He scowls and slicks back his blond hair, apparently not amused. Which makes sense, I guess. After all, he knew about Dad’s affair way before I did, maybe even before Mum did. It’s probably been festering inside him all this time.
But that’s what today’s about.
Eastman gathers up half-rotten logs and fallen branches, arranging them in the middle of the clearing. We’re not that far into the woods—the holiday home Mum won in the settlement is just visible from here, all dark rock and glossy windows. But we didn't want to drag the boxes too deep into the trees, and something about having our new prison in view of this whole thing is more satisfying.
Eastman jogs over to our supplies and grabs a gas can, douses the logs with it. He spills a little on one sleeve, and the smell’s already strong enough that I know it’ll give me a splitting headache before too long, but I don’t complain.
Once he’s got the fire built up enough, we bring the boxes over and start unloading them. Family photos. Stuffed animals I got on family vacations. The baseball Dad caught for Eastman when we all went to a Yankees game ten years ago. A painting our parents got for their last anniversary. All of it goes into the fire.
It should feel cathartic, watching it burn. Eastman got the idea from some book he read about wicker men—big effigies built to use in sacrifice rituals. We’d build our own effigy, made of memories instead of wicker, and then we’d stand back and watch as it burned. We’d sacrifice the cause of our troubles to right all of them.
Fire is supposed to be cleansing, after all.
Eastman pulls out a lighter and a couple of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, passes one over to me. I wrinkle my nose—smoking still makes me cough, and the smell’s terrible, even worse than the gas fumes from his sleeve. But I take one of them from him, and we stand there together, smoking twin cigarettes to burn all the badness out of ourselves, too.
“Olivia,” he says after a minute, frowning. The exhalation of my name comes wreathed in smoke, wreathed in sins. I frown, too. “I have to tell you something.”
I consider that for a minute, holding my cigarette with one hand, feeding sentimentality to the flames with the other. Neither of us has ever been particularly sentimental. Mum says we have good heads on our shoulders. Dad says we’re just missing a chip.
“What is it?” I finally ask.
East shifts slightly, turning to face me but not meeting my eyes. He takes up a little toy guitar and reaches out to drop it in the fire—but at that exact moment, a stiff wind stirs up out of nowhere, and the flames shift too.
At first, I can only stand and watch as they snake out and bite into my brother’s gas-soaked sleeve.
The smell of burning skin is worse than the gasoline or the cigarettes.
Then something inside me snaps out of the daze, clicks into place, and I’m shoving him away from the fire, onto the ground. He’s screaming, and it’s terrible, but something in him must whir into gear too, that
stop drop roll training from elementary school.
I throw my cigarette to the ground, then dig out my phone and call 911.
***
It’s a while before I get to talk to Eastman again.
Even once the hospital releases him, Mum and Dad keep him locked away in his room, insist he needs his rest. But as soon as I can, I slip in to visit. He’s awake.
Before I can open my mouth to apologize, he says, “It’s my fault.”
“We were standing too close to the fire,” I say. “You don’t control the wind.”
He shakes his head. “The divorce. I told Mum he was cheating on her.”
“That’s...” I start to tell him it’s stupid—that if anyone’s to blame, it’s apparently Dad, or whatever sleaze-haired mistress he picked up. That the only thing he did wrong was not telling me.
But then I look down at his face, pale and guilty and creased with pain, and his arm, hidden away under bandages and blankets like a bad secret. It’s true that Mum never would’ve left Dad if she hadn’t found out. Eastman had been trying to do the right thing for once, but sometimes the right thing is a bad thing.
I sink down onto the chair beside him. My twin brother. My partner in crime.
My wicker man.
Outside the window, Mum and Dad are actually talking. Not screaming or accusing or throwing things. Like their problems have been burned away.
Maybe Eastman’s right. It’s not fair, but maybe he’s right, and there never would’ve been problems if Mum had never found out. It’s hard to tell.
I reach into the pocket of the cardigan tied around my waist, fish out a lighter and our last cigarette. It’s a little bent, and when I straighten it and light it for him, he accepts it wordlessly.
We sit in silence as he breathes out his sins, and look out the window at the conversation his sacrifice bought us.
Author's Note: This week, I decided to use Tom Gauld’s “Map of the Area Surrounding our Holiday Home” as inspiration. It’s a drawing of a holiday cottage surrounded by all sorts of pleasantries, like an ax murderer, a slaughterhouse, and a Japanese soldier unaware the war has ended.
Options like that made it a little tough to choose which element to incorporate into my story, but when I looked up what the wicker man was supposed to be, that one caught my interest the most. As it turns out, wicker men were once believed to have been used by Druids as part of human-sacrifice rituals; apparently, Julius Caesar wrote that some Celtic peoples built effigies out of sticks and filled them with living people, then burned the structures as sacrifices to gods. I took that concept of fire and sacrifice and played with it a little bit here, set against a backdrop of family dysfunction and—apparently—teenage pyros. The biblical idea of fire as cleansing has always been interesting to me, and I wanted to explore that with a slight element of self-sacrifice too, which is partly where the cigarettes came in. As for Gauld’s holiday home itself, I used it as the vacation home the twins’ mother won in the divorce settlement.
Bibliography: Map of the Area Surrounding our Holiday Home by Tom Gauld.
Image Credit: Lighter by Matlachu. Source:
Pixabay.
