SILICA

In loving memory of Chris Hamlin (1973–1999).

Best friends forever.

The tinkling of broken glass.

I heard it, but didn’t know where it was coming from. It was like thin shards of glass being ground to dust, grating against something. Sand, maybe. Silica sand. Isn’t that what glass is made from?

Silica.

It underlay every other noise I heard, as though someone was constantly sprinkling glass-dust near my ears. Faint. Insistent. On especially bad days, the suspiration of tiny glass motes became the shattering of full windowpanes, to the point where I couldn’t see straight or even think.

In dreams, when the sound was at its dullest, my mind conjured the same image: a sliver of glass with sand flowing from its sharpest point like a runnel. Behind it and below it, only darkness, floating.

Sometimes I heard Silica’s gentle breathing creeping into my subconscious as she lay beside me, dreaming her own dreams. The combination of the sand/glass and her breathing induced in me something approaching panic, and I always woke in a sheen of sweat, my ragged breathing matching hers in time, a metronome of our dichotomous realities.

She slept so peacefully, my Silica.

I think she was the source of the sound because when she left me a few years ago it stopped. When she came back last New Year’s Eve, it returned and seemed to have grown louder. I did not tell her about the glass sounds because I didn’t think she would understand, and I did not want to risk losing her again.

Last week I woke up standing in front of the bedroom window that looks out onto the backyard. I watched the tire-swing move gently back and forth in the soft August breeze, as the creaking sound of rope against wood fell counterpoint to the sand and glass in my head. Ever-sofaintly, beneath the creaking, the sand, and the wind, there was my love’s breathing. I reached up with my left hand and put my fingers against the glass. Upon contact all sound ceased . . . except Silica’s breathing. I removed my hand and the sounds returned slowly, filtering back into my head.

I looked out the window again and saw a small figure there. A child, about eight years old. I glanced over at the clock on my bedside table: 3:19 AM. Where were the child’s parents? What was she doing out at this hour, alone? I returned my eyes to the figure and she looked up at me, the breeze blowing her straight brown hair about her head like something alive. She smiled softly at me, glass eyes searching mine. She mouthed one word that I couldn’t make out the first time. There was too much noise for me to concentrate. I put my hand on the glass and everything stopped again, save for my wife’s breathing.

The child mouthed the word again, and this time I understood it: Daddy.

My breath caught. The child’s glass eyes glittered faintly in the meager light from the thumbnail moon. A slow, knowing smile slithered onto her face, and she kicked off with both feet in the dirt beneath the tire, swinging gently, eyes still locked to mine.

I closed my eyes, then, and thought of fire making heat, making glass, making death.

Making peace.

“Steven?”

Silica was propped up on one elbow, rubbing her eyes. “Steven, is everything alright? What are you doing over by the window, honey?”

The little girl had stopped swinging now and looked in my direction again. Not at my eyes, this time, but at my hand, where it still lay flat against the pane, keeping things quiet.

I watched that little girl die. I watched her burn to death in that house. I watched her flesh boil, watched it char in slow motion right in front of me. Her eyes bubbled and popped, running down her cheeks . . . like sand on glass.

“Steven? Hon, you’re scaring me, what’s wrong?”

Her screams floated through the glass, visible, living tendrils of pain, chewed up by the smoke and flames. My hand against the window, eyes holding nothing, feeling nothing, Silica pulling my other hand, pleading for me to come. The fire! Do you want to die with her? Do you?! There’s nothing we can do! she screamed. They both screamed.

 . . . And the child’s eyes were replaced with glass.

“Steven!” Silica shook me, tried pulling me away from the window.

Again.

The child’s gaze switched from my hand to my eyes, glass shards boring into my skull, cracking it, my thoughts crumbling, losing cohesion.

My little girl is dead.

“Daddy . . . ”

Her voice drifted in through the open window, carrying the weight of her death, carrying the accusation.

Silica stopped pulling on me, noticing the position of my hand on the glass, following my gaze to the tireswing that had been our daughter’s favorite play spot.

“Oh, Steven, there’s nothing you could have done,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around me from behind, resting her head on my back. “You know that, don’t you?”

Jocelyn, my sweet, dead little girl, frowned at my wife’s—her mother’s—words.

You could have saved me, Daddy. You could have . . . 

Tears blurred my vision. I tried to speak, but I couldn’t get around the lump in my throat, the pain in my heart.

Finally:

“Silica . . . let go of me.”

Silica lifted her head slowly from my back, her hands fluttering as they left my body. “What did you call me, Steven?”

I ignored her. She knew her name.

“Look at her, Silica,” I said quietly, tears slipping into the corners of my mouth, spreading out along my lips, salty. “So beautiful . . . and look what we did to her.”

She asked again what I had called her. I don’t understand why she ignored our daughter. She was right there, on the tire-swing, the way she was before she died, and all my wife could think about was her own name.

“Who is Silica, Steven?”

I felt her coldness at my back. I knew by the tone of her voice that if I turned around and looked, her arms would be crossed, her left cheek twitching a little, like it always did when she was mad. I didn’t have time for that; my daughter needed me. But I wanted Silica to see.

“Honey, look at Jocelyn.”

Jocelyn’s face was slowly melting. My hand was hot on the glass, burning up. She started to scream. She lost her grip on the tire-swing’s ropes and fell over into the dirt, twitching and gurgling, skin sloughing off her bones. She twisted her head in my direction once more from her position on the ground, beetles, earwigs, and cockroaches crawling in her open mouth, her beautiful face pitted from flame and belching smoke from holes in her cheeks. Her eyes turned to sand, then, and the sound of a million sheets of glass shattering exploded in my head.

I dropped to my knees, clenching my head, my left hand sizzling against my scalp from the heat of the fire.

Silica bent to cradle me, asking what was wrong, if I was alright, should she call 911, ohgodwhat’shappening, and still, fucking still asking who Silica was, all of it coming in a flood of near incoherence.

You could have saved me, Daddy. You could have . . . She pulled you away from the window, just like she pulled you away from me now, Daddy. And it happened again. Why do I have to keep dying for you?

Silica’s arms were around me again, and I felt their coldness, like glass, like sand . . . 

After Jocelyn died, she left me. My wife left me, without a word. Every night I lay in bed and all I heard was her breathing, right beside me.

On New Year’s Eve, when she returned, she brought our daughter with her . . . every night outside the window, playing in her swing, the glass in her eyes, the glass that separated me from her.

“Silica?” I whispered, the sound of shattering glass finally receding, only the gentle swish of my daughter’s hair as she swung back and forth on the tire, in my mind . . . and, of course, Silica’s breathing.

“I’m here, Steven,” she said, rocking me mechanically under the windowsill. “I’m here.”

“Silica, why didn’t you let me save her?” I had never asked this question. It had never occurred to me before. “Why did you pull me away from the window? I could have saved her, Silica. Jocelyn says I could have. She tells me every night. But you pulled me away, you . . . pulled me . . . from her . . . ”

Silica was silent. Nothing. She stopped rocking me. “Why do you call me Silica, Steven?”

“That’s your name,” I answered, simply.

“My name is Linda, Steven. Linda.”

Sand slipped off the point of the sliver of glass in my mind. Silica sand. I suddenly felt very tired and I closed my eyes, thinking of Jocelyn as a baby, watching her grow up in fast-forward in my mind’s eye, remembering vividly each birthday, her first words, her first steps, the way she hid under the stairs when she heard me coming, thinking every time that I didn’t know where she was, then leaping out at me when I got to the bottom, screaming, “PoppaPoppaGotcha!!” and hugging me fiercely, ragged breathing in my ear from her excitement.

I remembered every time she fell from her tire-swing, cutting a knee or scraping an elbow, and always getting right back into the tire because it was her favorite thing, her favorite place.

I wondered if Silica really understood that she was gone forever.

I opened my eyes and looked up at my wife. She gazed down at me, her own eyes empty, hollow, hard, and cold.

Glass . . . 

“Silica, I’m tired. Can you help me to bed, please?”

She lifted me up and rested my top half on the bed, then swung my legs over to follow. I closed my eyes and thought again of fire making heat, making glass, making death.

Making peace.

When I heard Silica’s breathing become measured, I got quietly out of bed, went downstairs, found a hammer, a handful of nails, and a packet of matches, then returned to our room, the tinkling of glass in my head getting louder with every step.

When I started pounding the nails into the wood of the window frame, Silica stirred.

“Steven? What . . . what are you doing?”

I pounded two more nails in, adding to the four or five I’d managed to do before Silica woke, and turned around to look at her. There was fear in her eyes, and I think she knew then she was going to die.

I turned from her without answer, struck a match, and lit the bottom of the window’s curtains. Flames raced hungrily up the flimsy material, bathing the room in its soft, orange glow within seconds.

I walked out of the room, closed the door behind me and, using the remaining five or six nails in my hand, quickly nailed it shut like I had the window.

Silica screamed.

On my way down the stairs I heard her thumping her weight against the door, yelling for me to let her out, pounding her fists, her feet, terrified.

I dropped the hammer on the stairs, walked around to the back of the house toward the tire-swing.

As I sat down in the tire, closed my eyes, listened to the screams, and the crackling of fire, I reached up to grasp the ropes—

—and felt Jocelyn lean into me, her cheek against mine, arms around my neck, soft breath in my ear—

“Daddy,” she whispered gently . . . and I opened my eyes . . . 

The bedroom window exploded outward and Silica fell, on fire and still screaming, until she hit the cobbled stone walkway three floors below, where her body shattered into myriad shards of twinkling glass.

I pushed my daughter gently from my chest and looked at her perfect face, pallid in the moonlight; her perfect long, brown hair blowing gently around her shoulders in the light breeze filtering in through the trees; her perfect eyes, no longer glass, but the deep, deep blue of the darkest waters on earth.

I closed my eyes, feeling numb, pulling my dead daughter against me and pushing off against the dirt with both feet—swinging, just . . . swinging . . . 

I held Jocelyn tight, feeling her tears on my skin, and listened for Silica’s breathing somewhere in the blanket of crackling, popping wood and roaring flame, but heard nothing.

And for the last time, I thought of fire making heat, making glass, making death.

Making peace.