Words spoken through blood-wetted lips, old words older than old stars rolling cold and heavy across the calloused skein of the sky to ends unknown, to wherever stars go, wherever they end, or so she had been told. 

I’ll Be With You Soon

Outside was winter, the forest all in snow and ice, in the blue-dark night, where the trees massed naked in a clattering horde and the wind out there a furnace of cold chasing rabbits to their deaths. 

She had been for days in mourning. For days, and months, and now a year. In her bower of stone and wood in some dark and wild place. Always she kept her hearth hot lit, the smokestack through the thatching of the roof with its funerary smoke grey and doleful into skies each season passing. 

She sweats there now before her smoking fire and she cuts upon the heated hearthstone small game killed that day in the forest. A hare, a fowl, a fox all split in twain by that dressing knife red here in firelight and redder yet in blood. Entrails hissing on the stones. Words spoken through blood-wetted lips, old words older than old stars rolling cold and heavy across the calloused skein of the sky to ends unknown, to wherever stars go, wherever they end, or so she had been told. 

She wears her long hair long, and her dress smells of her, she in blood and firesmoke, this grievous widow whose husband died bayoneted and dead. Widow of the hills in brambles and bracken. 

Mice given to her fire now. Small hearts to sizzle. She peels her dress from off of her, angles of hips and ribs and skin cruddled by soot and earth and here and there small thickets of fur. The sharp tang of her sour body. She winds herself tight in a white linen sheet upon the bare wooden cribbage of her bed. There to sleep as the fire lapses low and shadows push back the last repulse of emberlight, dimming, and dimming into dark, into darker dark still, and silence then, of the sky, of the wheeling sky, the big and wheeling sky. 

Outside is all wind and cold where he moves in soldier’s vestments through the mooncold trees, this dead lieutenant blood-starched and stiff in his wire shape dark and bent against the gentle stifling snow. 

Stands now before her bed in the failing heat of the once-fire, cruent man lambent in moonglow. She stirs in dreams of alleyways of stone, wrapped amniotic in her linen when he unsheathes from twixt his ribs the blade shorn in the house of his soul. 

He draws the steel up through the cloth that wraps her. Cold steel splitting through fibres to find her there in angles of bones and skin, her small hand reaching, her long hair long. His grievous wife. Rising from split linen. 

She is silver in the light from the round and little window, her hand at the wound in his side where she pulls back his blood-stiff coat and moves warm her mouth across his pierced mortality as though she would breathe life back into that slitted fissure. His mouth wet in hers as she unclasps the cold metal of his belt where stiffens and aches below the length she takes from his trousers. 

His hands in her smoke-filled hair. Her skin dimpled in the cold. Her heartbeat pulsed against his fingers where they push into the warm wet of her squeeze. The smell of her saliva bitter where she bites into his neck. His arms thick about her. She touches his face, her head thrown back at the first half of him, relaxing to take the rest as he closes the distance between them. 

She will speak his name into his ear, and he will try to speak hers. These names like prayers once said. Like spells. But slowly he is forgetting. Her hands about him reaching through air, reaching to hold him. Reaching to hold. Hands passing through the shape of him. The shape that is not there. In her bed alone again. The fire long cold. The stars overhead. Snow through moonlight falling. The vapour of her breath like the ghost that was. 

There is an ocean somewhere in this world, beyond long corridors of stone, where wait the dead for the ship that will ferry them. And do you wait there now? 

Outside are fiddles heard, and drums and pipes, and voices lifted. 

Her dress is cold where it lay upon the packed earthen floor, like a scabbard of ice pulled over her body. She wraps herself in blankets too and steps into the white and frozen world where out there in the night leaps fire in the woods.

They have gathered here to dance, these wandered wastrels in antic shapes about their fire dancing, and at her coming they embrace her, for she is known to them. Orange and yellow firelight over narrow trees bent down from greater dark above. Here is passed the bottle, and she has raised it high and drunk deeply, and in the arms of women she dances. Soon will come the morning, but she has no need of it, for the night is sufficient to her. Her bare feet in snow as she dances at the fire. Her long hair dancing with her.

But this was all a long time ago now, when there was yet dancing in the hills, and fires, and flutes, before every fire dimmed and went out and only the stars rolled on in silent cavernous cold, to latitudes of the dead.

***

Jacob Wiebe is a filmmaker, artist & writer. His films have played at Fantastic Fest, National Canadian Film Day, the Soho International Film Festival, and platformed on Film Shortage. His painting and drawing work was recently given a solo exhibition at The Plumb gallery, along with a retrospective of his films.

Kindly visit Jacob Wiebe’s Instagram or this post to view his art.