Janice Lee - Fiction
Editor’s note: The excerpt below is from Janice’s novel, Imagine a Death, forthcoming from Texas Review Press.
THE FIRES
Are the fires any worse than they have been?
How does one compare scale with scale, devastation with devastation, that is, there is a quietness of the spirit that knows to sit with the natural cycles of life and death but do we measure aggravation by time, duration, or number of acres destroyed? Does anyone emerge and advance, or stay still, do any of our movements matter anymore? The fire is a place for encounters and fulfillment of one’s worst fantasies, that sensation of being completely swallowed up and consumed by the person you love, when becoming becomes subsumed and at least the burned body then becomes ash then becomes dust and dirt again, then becomes something that will eventually regard those that modulate the air, modulate visions, modulate perspectives. Do you feel the heat? Can you breathe steadily? When was the last deep breath you took that didn’t feel crammed with the remnants of hundreds of ghosts, all of the perished trees and creatures that were screaming but you didn’t hear them?
How many fires are currently burning?
How many individual dust motes that circle and surge from under your feet, dazzling when struck by the sun, the black brilliance that layers and stacks on surfaces, concentrates of heat and more heat, where are the lines between breath, how do we separate the air you breathe from the air that another takes in in the same moment, is the mixture of breeze a blasphemy or betrayal to purity, and when everything converges, what is the hot and blazing feeling that stirs deep within you?
How long will they burn?
Eternity, whose shredded copy is time, said Borges. That is, in another part of the country a sinkhole has swallowed a significant portion of the continent and in another an entire city has been submerged from flooding and in another it has not rained for years and the process of death is very, very slow, and mostly people do not want to panic and mostly people do not want to disturb their lives too much or too often, we shouldn’t normalize the chaos, some might respond, so the greyness is easier to handle, the space leading up to the movement, a displacement that is made up of a series of smaller gestures and the tall trees yet stand under the low skies and tomorrow is when human life will meet its destiny.