Castle, Chris

Angelika's Song

Chris Castle

By the time I walk back to sit with her, the cabin’s caught light and is burning brightly. Angelika’s sitting crossed legged and watching the flames, smiling gently. I take my place beside her and see the raging warmth inside her eyes.

As I lower myself down I feel her hair brush against my arm, pretty and fine and at odds with the petrol on my skin. When I’m settled, she tilts her body backward until her head is resting against my shoulder. For the first time since we started all this, my heart stops tightening and instead starts to soar.

The fire ignites against the blank ink of the sky and it looks beautiful and terrible at the same time, like two separate worlds that were never meant to meet have collided. The sparks flicker down onto the knotweed by the door and it begins to pop with brief but fierce explosions. It sounds like gunfire and though it should make me wince, I actually enjoy tuning into the sound; it feels like the frequency of my heart whenever Angelika touches me, like now, when she rests against my shoulder. The first rafter of the cabin tilts and then collapses and I feel her shudder, though I know she’s not scared. I know, with each new flame, what she feels is joy.

Angelika will never tell me why we’ve burned down this place and I will never ask. I could never fall in love with somebody who didn’t hold any secrets in their heart. For me, it would be like running a finger over a body with no lines or scars; either unreal or remote as a glacier. I know, deep down, that this place has hurt her and it not being in the world is important, not just for her but for others, too. She has a pain in her that makes me fear for her as much as love her.

I adjust the way I sit and her body sways with me, as if we are woven together, like two ripples in the same strip of cloth. Angelika will forget more than I’ll ever understand; from the time a bullet loses its velocity and falls, like a dead fly, to the dirt, to the formation of a snowflake. But she tells me that I understand her body like no-one else has ever done in the world and that makes me feel as if we are the only two people in the world that who know a secret, a secret that shapes the planet, that only we are privy to.

The flames rise in the sky and climb almost impossibly high, ready to touch the moon. I tilt my head as she tilts her and I watch her make a wish. I see her lips move, though I hear no words and I make another soundless prayer; to always be with her and never forget this moment. When I mouth ‘amen,’ I see a flame shimmy and then snake higher into the stars and pretend my wish has been granted.

The cabin starts to break apart in huge, flaming pieces and I realise what Angelika has wished for; for this to be over. As if in response, the fire spreads, hungry and quick, tearing down the last buttresses and pillars until the whole thing collapses. It does so with barely a sound, so her sigh when it falls is all I hear. I feel a searing jolt in my palm and realise she has gripped my hand. I squeeze back, as the fire splutters out of life and the first dirty sparks begin to gather in the dirt; embers of oak or ashes of something more? I listen to the sound of the cabin as it crackles out of life and fizzes into the ground and the dirt. Her hand softens in mine and I listen to her sigh again, the pitch in keeping with the fire, her voice a part of the flames. It is Angelika’s Song and I close my eyes to follow it, as it carries between us to the deserted fields and then higher, into the stars.