Lil wakes up to chilly air against her skin and the smell of smoke. Muzzy gray light around her. Heavy dust motes scatter. She rolls onto her side, putting out a hand for Jason, but the Persian rug where they fell asleep—eventually, at some point—is cold. Once, she could sleep on the ground and rise for school without a thought; now she feels the press of wood in her bones. And the phantom press of Jason’s hands.
“Jason,” she calls. Her voice is so rough she sounds ill. But there’s no answer. The glow of the morning after flickers. Weakens.
Lil opens her eyes. The fireplace is black with dust, more than she’d seen the night before, and the walls are filthy. It wasn’t like this last night; it wasn’t so—
No. That isn’t dirt.
Lil sits up, her heart suddenly lunging in her chest. The air isn’t heavy with dust, and it isn’t dirt coating the walls, the floors, the furniture. It’s soot. Ash. And it isn’t the chandelier casting light over her body, but sky and sun. Above her, the second floors and roof are gone. They’ve disintegrated around her, as if a giant scooped a handful of the house out above her, leaving broken, burned boards behind.
Honeysuckle House is destroyed. The vase with flowers: cracked, water evaporated, flowers burned beyond a crisp. Curtains, devoured from bottom to top, the rods cracked and blackened against the walls; one is thrown clear through the windows. The couch is burned to the skeletal frame, but the rug is only covered in ash.
And so is she. It coats her body. She looks like a forgotten thing left to languish in an attic.
It can’t be.
Lil frantically brushes at her legs, her chest, her stomach, but as her body wakes up, new pains make themselves known. Suddenly the ache of sex and sleeping on a hard floor is the least of her worries. Red burns bloom all over her body, on her arms, her palms. The worst she can’t see, but she feels on her shoulder a building scream of pain.
“Jason,” Lil calls, but it dissolves into a fit of coughing. The burn in her throat isn’t just dehydration. It’s smoke. “Jason!” He’s not there. Where is Jason? He wouldn’t…leave her. Not like this. Not unless he’s hurt, or he can’t come back to her. Above her, something deep in the house groans.
Standing, Lil covers herself. She won’t cry.
In fits and starts, Lil rushes into the hall. But every step is treacherous. She’s barefoot. Nails stick up from cracked floorboards, glass from windows litters the ground. It’s arduous work to get through the hall. Too much sunlight reaches her; behind her in the entrance hall, something shatters. She catches her own ghostly reflection in a mirror and can’t bear to meet her own eyes or see her own body. She doesn’t want to know the damage.
Lil must have passed out. Jason must have risen when he noticed the fire. Fought his way through, seeking an escape route for them both. She imagines finding him collapsed under fallen furniture or ceiling, or burned beyond saving. He must have gone for help, or—he’s hurt. The landline at Honeysuckle House doesn’t work, so maybe he ran…leaving her there? Alone and unconscious? No, it doesn’t make sense. Jason wouldn’t abandon her to the flames. Unless he had to. Unless he couldn’t return.
She won’t cry. She won’t cry.
When she reaches the breakfast room, it’s burned too, the table collapsed under the weight of its own frame. The counter where she cooked is covered in ashy remains. The carnage of a fire. Jason’s clothes are crumbled, covered in ash near the counter.
Lil finds her clothes where she left them, tangled in the corpse of the table. The shirt is ruined, but the jacket remains, sooty but miraculously salvageable. Her jeans still button, and that’s all she needs. She dresses as quickly as she can. She won’t cry.
The air is oppressive. Every breath hurts. Mortally wounded, the house moans again. Boards creak, splinter like toothpicks. It could be ready to collapse around her. Jason could be anywhere inside; the house is cavernous. She can only hope he’s outside, unconscious but alive. Lil doesn’t bother wrestling into her blackened, curling shoes. She picks them up, tucked them under her arm and inches her way across the floor. It’s treacherous. There’s no sign of him as she makes her way, quick as she can, out of the house, but she feels watched as heavily as she feels the burns on her skin.
“It’s the smoke, not the fire that gets you,” Jason told her after his first bad burn, out at the old Texaco near the highway turnoff. He was twenty-three, still in training at the firehouse. When the nightmares kept him awake, she lay with her head on his chest, trying to calm his racing heart, his face flushed like he stood again before the inferno. “So much smoke, I couldn’t see. For a second, I swear I lost my way.”
He wouldn’t leave her to the smoke unless he was trapped, unless something held him back from her. She won’t—she won’t—
Clinging to what’s left of her heart, her hope, Lil steps outside of the ruin. The sunlight is bright in the Finch orchard. The leaves are a mix of green and orange, the grass nut-brown. But Jason isn’t there. Lil wanders across the driveway in a daze, like a sole survivor of some great catastrophe, alone in an aftermath of dust and smoke. Lil’s throat burns and she chokes on a sob.
For all the phantom fires she has seen around this town, has she finally stumbled into a real one?
“Jason?” she manages, one more time. But there’s no answer. He’s gone.
“Sasha. Your birthday—that was twenty-nine years ago.”
Sasha sees the whole thing. She watches Autumn’s story unfold, sometimes from above, sometimes from within the tale—she can smell the steam of a queer club at midnight, taste the cream-rich bisque of her culinary school kitchen. Sometimes she’s nodding, maybe, but it is a nod of habit, of a frantic grasping for the normal fakeries of conversation. It is not a nod of comprehension.
This can’t be real. Autumn lost herself out there somewhere. Autumn has a drug problem. It’s a fable, a coping mechanism, a lie. It can’t be true.
Autumn tells her that she’s fifty-nine years old. They’re both fifty-nine, out there somewhere. But she looks the same, just sitting there in front of her, as fresh and crisp as an unbitten apple.
“That’s how old Mom was,” Sasha tries. “How could you—but you don’t look—”
“I’m getting used to the idea,” Autumn admits. She’s curled her arms around herself, the first true sign of self-consciousness. “I think I’m aging. Just slowly. Sort of—” A laugh bursts out of her, strained and accidental. “God, sort of like a tree. Victoria, she saw right through me. I just didn’t want to accept it for a while. But it’s why I had to come back. I have to know if—I’m the only one. Or are we all like this?” She presses a hand to her mouth. “You’re the first person I’ve ever told.”
More words. No sense.
“You didn’t come,” Sasha repeats, once or twice. “I didn’t know why you weren’t there…” Most unbelievably, it was because Pip had a girlfriend. A girlfriend who wasn’t Sasha. Sasha, who had spent her twenties casually recovering from a stolen, forgotten kiss in a rickety tree-ruin. A kiss that at this point is old news anyway, apparently, and all of this is too much to believe.
Here, Autumn doesn’t say anything at all for a long time. She only looks at Sasha and sees too much, with soft eyes that ease back Sasha’s skin, nudge apart her ribs, and touch the center of her. “That was a long time ago for me,” she says. “I always wanted to tell you. But you know me. I was never such a quick learner. It took me a while to come to terms with myself and catch up.” Catch up. Catch up. And now, Autumn has lived an entire other life, in a world where Sasha is now outdated, a milk carton left in the fridge too long—
Sasha leaves through the bakery’s back door. The sky is still dark. She walks home along the road, glancing around her every so often at the far-off glow of house fires. Even Honeysuckle House seems to flicker in shadows, but she doesn’t give it half a glance. It’s all just dream stuff. Her mind wheels. She lands, a bird in a storm, on random branches, random moments of Autumn’s telling.
“So you think we’re what—frozen in time?”
“I think you must be,” Autumn admits. “This town is all the same as it was in the nineties. No cell phones, no gay marriage, and Trump’s just that guy from Home Alone.” Her lip quirks up. “No one’s heard of 9/11 or COVID-19, which is actually a little nice.” She pauses, shakes herself out of the ramble. “No place is this isolated.” Autumn twitches for Sasha’s hand but doesn’t quite take it. “You can’t tell me how long you’ve been here. I think whatever’s doing this doesn’t want you to know. Doesn’t want you to think about it.”
The house is unlocked for her, and she staggers inside, easing herself onto the couch with geriatric care. It’s dark like only early morning is, a dark that is also cold and damp from a long steep in the night air. The TV sits on the floor across the room, where she and Mom and Lil had watched the horrible series finale of that doctor-drama show St. Elsewhere, where it turned out that the hospital was just a figment of a little boy’s imagination, caught in a snow globe. Nobody liked that shitty ending. Now it feels like it was Sasha herself caught in a glass ball of unreality, rattled around in a child’s scrawny grip.
All these trips from one riverbank to the other. Countless nights porting shadows. On that side, the world of the living; on this side, this strange, frozen purgatory. Who have her passengers been? Who can come and go, between human time and the underworld?
Has she been ferrying the dead?
Yet, Autumn got in. She came home.
“But why didn’t you tell me as soon as you came back?”
Thumbprint cookies. A walk in the woods. Autumn was lost momentarily for words at that.
“Whatever is keeping you and everyone else under pulled me in too for a minute,” Autumn recalls. “The first few…days? Weeks? I was so disoriented. I remembered certain things, like Netflix, like my friends, but I forgot—” Tears glimmer to life in her eyes. “I forgot my parents were gone.” Autumn isn’t Lil, who fights grief like it’s a straitjacket. Autumn just feels it, lets it pour from her eyes. “I thought they were just on their trip.” It feels wrong to just watch her cry, but if Sasha is going to comfort her, she’ll have to move, and Sasha can’t move.
Autumn gathers herself. “The longer I was here, the more I began to remember the things that weren’t right. I asked you how long you were going to be here and remembered I hadn’t expected you to be here at all. I saw the pecan children and remembered I’d come here for them. I saw one of Dad’s sweaters in my closet one day and suddenly I remembered they were gone.” More pearl-shine tears slip down her cheeks. “After that, it was easy to remember everything. And I just had to figure out how to tell you.”
There’s a ferocious burn on the horizon, but Sasha isn’t sure if it’s the sunrise or just another phantom blaze.
On the porch, there’s a hard bang, like a body against the door.
The doorknob rattles, then gives. Sasha stands swiftly, heart thundering in her chest.
Lil crashes into the house. She’s barefoot and her clothes are so ruined, so covered in dirt that, for a brief flash of horror, Sasha imagines it’s their mother returned from her grave. She doesn’t even register Sasha, but catches herself on the frame, raises bloodshot eyes and stumbles toward the kitchen.
“Lil?” Sasha trails after her, stunned by the night’s second slap. “Wh—”
Lil collapses at the table, shivering, and then reaches for the phone. Through a gap in her shirt, her shoulder is red and blistered.
“Holy shit.” Sasha ducks back into the sitting room to grab up their ancient monster of an aloe vera plant, stuffing the first aid kit under her arm on her way back. “We need to go to the ER—”
Except if Autumn was telling her the truth, there’s no way to get there. The road is closed. And despite that longing in her gut, Sasha’s never stepped off the ferry onto the other bank.
Could they really be trapped here?
Sasha forces down a claustrophobic panic. She lays her supplies on the table. Lil has her ear to the phone receiver, listening to an endless ring. “What the hell happened?”
Lil finally looks at her, rather than through her. “Honeysuckle House burned last night.”
There is a long, fumbling silence, Sasha’s new preferred form of communication, apparently. She gapes at Lil’s injuries: the worst is that burn on her shoulder, which definitely needs a dressing. “Burned burned?” she clarifies anyway. “I was on the road and…” But when had she even walked by there? Her own night was a blur too tender to probe. “Where’s Jason?”
Lil’s reddened fingers tighten around the phone, ringing endlessly. It must hurt to touch anything. Even so, Sasha longs to reach for her, wrap her up tight, prove to herself that at least her sister is still real. “I don’t know. I can’t find him. I think he might be in there somewhere.” Lil slams the phone down. “This is useless,” she snaps. “I have to go back.”
“Sit still,” Sasha cracks back, ripping thick fleshy leaves from the aloe vera for a salve. “You need a bandage on your shoulder.”
Lil looks ready to protest, but when she meets Sasha’s eye, whatever fight brought her here seems to abandon her. “I don’t know what happened,” she says. “I didn’t notice it burning down around us.”
That—Sasha just moves on from that. It’s immediately clear what was going on; Jason and Lil have a history of drowning in each other. “You need new clothes—we should just cut these off,” she says.
“We have to go back out there,” Lil says, but she lets Sasha slice off what’s left of her jacket to look at her shoulder. She just presses her knuckles to her mouth and turns away like Sasha would care if she cries. Working with farm equipment, plus a reticence toward paying for outside help, ensures that everyone on an orchard has some basic first aid skills. Sasha swiftly plunders the supplies they have, triages the burns, and sets to work. That blistered place on her shoulder outpaces the rest of the angry red marks. The soles of her feet are almost as bad, cut from walking through debris. Another streaky red mark curves around the ridge of Lil’s ribs. It’s only when the light hits right that its shape becomes clear. A handprint, swollen, raised, burned into her skin. Sasha stares at this for a long time.
Where was Jason?
Soon, she’s done all she can. “Take these,” Sasha says, shaking several aspirin into Lil’s singed palm. “You stay here and rest. I’ll go look.”
“No.” Lil cuts over her, catching her wrist. “You’re not going out there alone. I’m coming.”
“Dammit, Lil, you’re hurt,” Sasha bursts out, eyes suddenly brimming. It’s half exhaustion. The sun is up, but this night feels like it will never end. “Your feet look bad.”
“You can’t stop me,” Lil says and doesn’t let go. “If he’s there, I can’t stay here. And I’m not risking you disappearing too. You try to go without me, I’m walking back out there anyway. So wait for me to change and we’ll drive.”
For a moment they glare at one another, Sasha caught in her grasp. Swallowing hard, she turns her hand over to grip her sister back, very gently. And then Sasha follows Lil to the laundry room to help her get out of the rags she’s wearing and ease into whatever clothes they find in the dryer.
They drive, Sasha behind the wheel, creeping down the road like it might come unbraided at any moment. She turns at the Finch driveway, gasping softly at the smoldering ruin of Honeysuckle House. There are no fire trucks, no cops. The disaster has gone, apparently, totally unnoticed by the town, despite the gutter of black smoke above.
Sasha parks closer than is probably safe and jumps down from the truck cab. Immediately, the dirty, chemical air of the burn torches her lungs and she coughs. “Didn’t you say he was going to grill?” she rasps. “Maybe the charcoal was still hot and the wind…” It was an old, dry house. There could be ancient wiring in there, old gas lines, parched insulation…
“We didn’t even know it was happening. I woke up and he was gone, but he wouldn’t just leave me.” Lil stares out at the trees, probably still looking for a figure among them. “It’s like I was drunk. Or under a spell. I don’t know how I didn’t…”
Sasha climbs the porch steps. They moan ominously. The once grand entrance hall is visible, since the front of the house has caved in, no more than a slumping portico and gray ash now. The curve of a staircase is as unreal as a charcoal sketch. “Jason,” she calls through the sooty gloom of early morning. “Jason!” Picking her way through the debris, the hanging cables, the split kindling of the floor, she searches. Together, they overturn charred remains, peek through improbable crannies created in the collapse, wander through the house’s soiled decadence. The chandelier crashed and shards of crystal now scatter across the scarred beams below. Lil limps badly. They shout up the remains of the stairs but don’t dare test the second floor. He’s nowhere to be found.
Lil finally sits down on the front steps, digging her hands into her short hair. White bandages peak from under her cuff. “Sasha,” she says. “What do we do?”
There are suddenly so many reasons to ask this question, and Sasha has no answer for any of them. But, for once, Lil is asking. Sasha has to answer. “We have to go to town. We can—get some more help. We need the sheriff. A—bigger search party.”
“Yes.” Lil stands, stronger now that she has a purpose. “Okay. Everyone will be at the festival. We can find help there.”
They get back in the truck, and Sasha turns the ignition over, her eyes still on the house. Nothing smokes now; in fact, the air is cold. The house looks like an ancient ruin, long derelict. Abandoned for decades. And then—she almost knocks her hand on the windshield, craning to watch.
“Do you see that?” she breathes to Lil.
Lil follows her gaze.
The house flickers, a guttering candle. One moment, it lies in miserable decay, a moldering wreck. Then, like light splitting in a prism, she tips her head and there is the house, whole, complete, just as she’s known it all her life. Another erratic blink and it’s skeletal again. There’s a blurring, like one of her long-exposure photographs in the dark room, when the shutter can’t capture a shift. The haze of unreality.
Shattering time.