Fiction:

Fire From Heaven: A Dystopian Suite
By Laura Trunkey

In 1939, Russian electronic technician Semyon Kirlian witnessed flashes of light between the electrodes and the skin of a patient receiving electrotherapy. Determined to capture the interaction, Kirlian re-enacted the procedure, but this time placed a photographic plate on the electrode, and rested his hand on the film while he administered a shock. This was the beginning of Kirlian photography—a process Semyon and his wife, Valentina, claimed was able to record the energy force emanating from animate and inanimate objects, including coins, leaves, and the pads of fingertips.

In 1944, the C-squadron of the South Alberta Regiment made a reconnaissance into Bergen-op-Zoom, with a Dutch resistance fighter perched on the lead tank. German forces had recently abandoned the town and the Canadians were welcomed as liberators. During celebrations in the Grote Markt , or Main Square, a young boy crawled across the hood of a Sherman tank, jarring the Browning bow gun. The gun fired into the crowd, killing two teenage girls. Gunner Gerald Morris ran towards the girls and bent to lift them from the ground; as he did, he felt a burning sensation in his right foot that soon spread towards his calf. His leg would be amputated less than a week later. He was 25 years old.

In 1970, Gerald’s wife, Sally Morris, gave birth to a daughter, Daphne, in Saint Michael’s Hospital in Lethbridge, Alberta. During her labour, Gerald felt severe cramping in his right calf. He sat in the waiting room with his prosthetic in his lap, massaging his empty pant leg. There were only 12 minutes between his daughter’s arrival and his young wife’s death.

In 1997, Daphne Morris’ novel, The Galaxy of Harvey Monk, was published. The book followed an elderly space traveller on his mission to find the shadow-self he had lost on a distant planet during his youth. It was dedicated to her father, whose death from lymphoma had occurred the previous year.

In 2015, in Bam, Iran, four important men stood among ruins that had been a mud fortress, an earthquake zone, a modern city, and then a battlefield, and raised their pens to ratify a ceasefire that none of them expected would hold. As they signed, blue flame overtook their bodies, emanating first from their backs and then from their legs, and within moments (though water was thrown and efforts were made to beat back the flames) they had been consumed entirely, but for a wrist and hand of one, feet from two others, and a head—though shrunken—of the fourth.

It was that night in March that the telephone rang in Victoria, Canada, in the home of Daphne Morris and her daughter, Helen, because Gerald Morris, encouraged by the Kirlians’ phantom-leaf photographs, had used a duplicate of their machine in an attempt to document the energy double of his right leg. And because Gerald’s theories on phantom selves became the stuff of Daphne’s bedtime stories, and stayed with her after his death, she had made Harvey Monk’s shadow-self—once located—malfunction, enveloping him in flames. And because Daphne’s book—though published only in a limited run of 500 copies by a small speculative-fiction press, now defunct—was carried in the butt pocket of one Marcus Spark all through his awkward teens, the pages tattered and smudged. And because Marcus Spark in his adult years (book now toted in various briefcases) served as a member of the entourage of an important man from a powerful country who had become a pile of ashes (and one foot). And because as the event played out before his eyes he did not think to run for bottled water or an extinguisher; he did not think to roll, or drop, but only stopped and recalled Harvey Monk, who had been enveloped in much the same way, and turned into much the same thing.

From the Kirlians to Gerald Morris, from him to Daphne and Harvey Monk, and then to Marcus Spark, who was so impressed by how right D. F. Morris had gotten the whole event, from the colours of the flames, to the smoke—thick and yellow, almost liquid—to the greasy ashes and extremities left behind, that he became convinced that The Galaxy of Harvey Monk was not fiction, but a depiction—an accurate account of something D. F. Morris had witnessed, or, at the very least, had heard of second-hand and thereafter researched thoroughly. And so, while the other members of the various entourages of the four departed-yet-still-important men were contacting scientists, and physicians, and swarms of the typically significant, Marcus Spark tracked down the phone number of a one-time sci-fi writer and present-time mother of one, Daphne Fern Morris.

HELEN—SEPTEMBER 2014

It’s just a blur at the edge of things: blades of grass, the wings of seagulls swooping the garbage bins, Mom’s head turned towards the remaining treetops of Beacon Hill Park. Like whoever’s in charge up there was doing some kind of kindergarten art project and outlined the world with scraps of blue wool. But I just see it with my bad eye, and even then only when I focus hard, which I try to avoid doing when Mom’s around because the second she sees me staring it’s either a) the end of the world because the surgery didn’t work, or b) the end of the world because now I’ve got glaucoma. “One in four cataract patients....” She’s been reduced to one of those motion-sensor alarm systems and all I have to do is walk near her to set her off.

“Helen, should I make an appointment with Dr. Frey?” she’s asking now. And this time I’ve brought it on myself because I have my hand in front of my face and I’m waving like a retard. But there are sparks leaping between my fingertips—light blue, cobweb thin, and tingly as static.

At least with her eyes on me they’re off the crew stringing cable from the Douglas firs, building scrap-metal watchtowers among the top branches. Or, more precisely, off their ringleader: the bare-chested man with the scar on his neck. Mr. Clarke from across the hall says the tree platforms only protect the fir-termites, allow them to multiply, mutate, and decimate the rest of the island’s trees. That the real problem is these bleeding-heart sympathizers. But Mom claims he’s wrong, that the Herons are the only ones doing good for the parks. It’s obvious by the way she stares at them, though, that it’s not the trees she’s mooning over, but the biceps of the Heron honcho. Even now, her gaze is shifting slowly towards the group. She blinks, shakes her head, then repeats her question.

“The doctor? I’d rather vomit.” Dr. Frey has these thick lips that collect spit when he talks, so that by the time he’s finished one of his spiels it’s all beaded up and ready to drip on you. And besides that, minus the blue, my eye is fine. And if it weren’t for the pirate patch over my good eye, and the fact that my mother is escorting me to the first day of seventh grade, I might even resemble a normal human being.

“I’d just like to meet your new teacher.” The supposed reason she’s with me, but it’s a lie. Mom knows Mr. Perry well enough to chase him from the Safeway meat section to the bakery just so she can press her hand on his arm and spew off about windstorms and water levels and the price of produce as he gazes at her all wide-eyed and amazed. But she’s not coming in to flirt either, which might even be preferable. She’s coming to deliver the “one in four glaucoma risk” lecture and to impress upon him the importance of me looking like a pirate until the doctor gives me some reprieve (presumably after I have suffered irreparable damage to my social life).

“Daphne,” Mr. Perry says, somewhat breathlessly, once Mom and I arrive at the classroom and he’s combed his fingers through his hair and dumped the stack of math books off the chair beside his desk. “And Helen.” An afterthought.

I stand at the aquarium and try to tune it out: “Of every four....” When I do look I see this thick blue around Mom—like the edge of her is puffed up and leaning into Mr. Perry and sort of licking at him—which is pretty disgusting if you stop and think about it. And so I watch the fish instead, the tetras Mr. Perry claims he bought when it was legal to import wildlife from overseas. Their fins glimmer, and I’m still standing there watching them when Morgan and Emily arrive, dressed head to toe in red, including so-long-it-must-have-taken-all-summer-to-grow-them perfectly crimson fingernails that they flutter at Mom when Mr. Perry finally walks her to the door. I keep my eyes on the tank, even as Mom blows kisses at my head and sweeps a blue sparking wave towards me.

“Hey,” I say, when Morgan and Emily wander over. Like I don’t give a shit that our trio is now a pair and neither of them has returned a phone call since the middle of July. Like I haven’t noticed that they’re dressed like mini versions of the Beacon’s spaced-out followers. Emily smiles, but Morgan just smirks.

“What the fuck, Helen.” She yanks off the eye patch and slingshots it at the aquarium, but Mr. Perry is erasing pencilled pornography from math book margins and doesn’t look up. I grab the thing and shove it in my pocket, but all of a sudden Mr. Perry is attentive.

“Helen,” he says, pointing at his eye. “Remember.”

At recess Morgan and Emily are out the door before I’ve even made it to the cloakroom for the pride-and-joy bruised apple Mom bought as a first-day treat. They’re on the side steps, but when I sit down Morgan says, “We’re trying to have a private conversation here.” Which is what she used to say last year. To the other girls: the Freak Squad and the Ordinary Nobodies.

“Fine.” I stand up and walk past the portables to the chain-link fence at the edge of the field. Grass green and aquamarine, and puffs of turquoise through the petals of the daisies. The arrow on the terrorist-alert sign at the edge of the field is halfway between amber and red, and someone has spray-painted Burn in Hell Raghead on the boarded window of the house that belonged to Mr. Abdul, last year’s pock-faced custodian. Then Morgan and Emily are by the goalpost and Morgan is whispering something in Emily’s ear, and rolling her eyes, and laughing, and looking away. Emily’s blue is so faint it’s like there was no wool left and all she got were some strands of thread, and Morgan’s is puffed up like Mom’s except that near her head there’s this streak of spitting orange.

“Morgan, your head is on fire!” Which I honestly believe it is before my brain catches up with my stupid big mouth. I flip up the patch for an instant and see just her thick black curls.

But I’ve shouted it loud, and half the kids on the field are turned towards me, the pirate loner. Morgan turns too, whipping her head from side to side, a shower of sparks, red whirls licking at her ears and down her neck.

“Fuck, Helen,” she says. And louder, to make certain I can hear her. “Freak.”

DAPHNE—MARCH 2015

The doorstep of The Emily Carr, Daphne and Helen’s apartment building at the corner of Simcoe and Douglas, looks onto the cluster of lodgepole pines that fringe the Beacon Hill soccer pitch and the rusted football tackling-sled tipped sideways behind the bleachers. Beyond this, to the south, a pale strip of horizon divides sea and sky at Dallas Road, and the Olympic Mountain Range rises in a wash of greys. These are the things that have always been.

But other things have changed. The Herons, a rotating roster of men and women from the Elk Lake commune, now live on platforms among the branches of the park’s last standing Douglas firs. In the north of the province, entire forests have been destroyed because of fir-termite infestations. Daphne sides with the Herons. She has little sympathy for the city’s cover-of-darkness tree-felling campaign—especially now with reports that the demand for silver-streaked termite wood has skyrocketed in the Asian market. She has memories of those trees; when Helen was a toddler they used to collect eggshells from beneath them, dropped from the nests of the real herons. The park road is lined by rows of stumps, and though it is said that the chopped trees were burned, she has seen new fir desks and coffee tables in the offices at the legislature—in fact, sat in a silvery fir armchair while waiting to deliver a stack of proofed correspondence to the Minister of Forests, temperate responses to outraged environmental advocacy groups about the city-park clear-cuts across the province. Her co-workers and neighbours would be appalled if they knew, but sometimes she bakes batches of shortbread cookies with jam-filled thumbprints—birds’ nests—and at night ties bags of them to the lower branches of the firs for the Herons’ breakfasts.

Beneath the closest of these tree platforms is the strip of cement that was a water park before the restrictions, and before 17 Canadian geese fell from the sky (paralyzed, but still in V-formation) during a lightning storm that saw the city lose its power for 11 days. The birds did not recover, and Daphne was hardly surprised when Helen came home from school a week later with theories about the Muslim community adding poisoned breadcrumbs to the piles of offerings left for the birds, targeting them because of their patriotic name. Though Daphne tried to talk some sense into her daughter, Helen refused to be part of a conversation in which her mother sided with terrorists.

Children these days seem to Daphne to be more impressionable than before. And this is what worries her. Helen and her classmates turn their televisions on each morning to see whether the terror alert is amber or crimson, hide beneath their school desks once weekly during simulated terrorist attacks, and have gas masks stuffed inside their lockers. It’s not surprising that the Beacon, with his alarmist preaching, has found an army of supporters. She wishes he had set up camp elsewhere, but his green-plastic prefab garden shed is less than three blocks from their home, beside the bronze Terry Fox monument at Mile Zero. Though she isn’t certain if it will make a difference, she has forbidden Helen to go near the man. She is worried about her daughter joining the Beacon’s throng of crimson-clad teenage followers who pace the strip beside the cliffs like zombies, droning about the apocalypse to all who will listen. In fact, she is worried about Helen going near Dallas Road at all. The tides are rising and the dirt cliffs have been paved with cement, but she knows that when storms come the ramparts will crumble and those nearby will be swept out to sea.

As Daphne waits on the doorstep of her apartment building, listening to Helen’s frothing about being dragged to a fucking war zone to be killed by fucking terrorists, she thinks of these new things: the Herons, the Beacon, the lightning storms, the rising tides. These are what make her believe that anything is possible. That a man named Marcus Spark is coming to fly her and Helen to Iran. That Daphne is being sought for her expertise regarding classified matters. That she, a woman who has spent the last two decades typing letters in defence of programs and policies she doesn’t believe in, is finally being asked her opinion.

POVED—OCTOBER 1944

Today the Moscow doctor and my husband discussed my treatments. Beside them I sat in my blue dress—a fox, a wolf, and me a sheep already slaughtered. On the desk: thick volumes, water glass half-empty, yellow handkerchief, and at the edge a photograph—an imprint of a hand, thick smudge of prints with gauzy luminescence spreading outwards. I touched the fingers with my own before the doctor moved it from my view.

“What is that?” my husband asked, and so was passed it.

“From Semyon, the electronic technician. Just a photograph he exposed with an electrode. His hand.” The doctor traced the shape in the air.

“The Blue.” I had my husband’s wrist, pulling it towards me, asking him to share. But he did not.

“Poved and her colours.” He patted my thigh, his fingers bristling. “Everything a colour.” But he is wrong. Nothing is coloured now.

DAPHNE—FEBRUARY 1995

The woman in 11D offers me a stick of Juicy Fruit for takeoff, unwrapping it for herself but then holding it towards me, moon-shaped grooves in the centre where her fingernails touched. And then—once the plane levels—falls asleep with her head tipped back and jolting towards my shoulder, her smell a mix of disinfectant and bad perm. The stewardess gestures with the coffee pot, How are you this morning ? and scuttles away when I start to cry.

Across the aisle is a boy who looks like Ben Adelman from the third grade (who instigated a fistfight when he declared: Your dad’s so old he’ll be dead before you finish high school . A jab to the stomach for the cruelty of the statement, a broken nose for making me realize it could be true—months from 60 already and there was more hair showing through the neckline of Dad’s undershirts than on his head). This kid is equally chinless and beady-eyed—Gameboy clutched in fat fists, a smirk as his feet stab into the back of his father’s seat. And I could lean over and smack his face and say: Appreciate what you have, you little punk. Because someday you’ll be alone on an airplane, wanting to buy back seconds from a God you don’t believe in .

I should have moved back to Lethbridge when he first told me: “Harvey Monk is on his way out. Dying of cancer.” “Are you still telling those Harvey Monk stories?” I asked instead, but in the beat of silence that followed I realized what he meant. And then the air turned liquid in my lungs and I was drowning, but still I thought I knew the most important question: What exactly had Dr. Waters said? But Dr. Waters hadn’t said a thing, because there had been no appointment. Not necessary, Dad claimed. Diagnosis or not, he knew what he had.

I admit: The second I hung up I dialled Mrs. Neang, who I hoped (despite the live-in crew of grandchildren) still spied on Dad over the fence. And she said that each morning like clockwork he filled the birdfeeders and just the day before he had delivered grocery bags of tomatoes to the neighbours. She claimed he still unhooked his leg from time to time, to the delight of her offspring’s offspring and their friends. Don’t worry, Daff-a-nee . And I did stop worrying, because the next time I called he didn’t say a word about cancer. There was nothing malignant until Christmas, when I arrived for a visit to find the house furnished with little else than stacks of labelled boxes. And even his machine dismantled, the photographs that had always papered the basement wall filed away. There he was in his gutted study, watching the Discovery Channel and eating dry-roasted peanuts from the Melmac camping bowl because the Corningware was ready for me to take when I left. And still not an appointment with the doctor.

And to me he looked the same. Not sick at all.

“Cancer of what?” I asked. It wasn’t my intent to humour him. I wanted a record that I could pass on to Dr. Waters.

I wrote down what he said on the back of a receipt I still have in my wallet: “Bones, blood, marrow. I don’t know where it started, but it’s everywhere by now.”

Behind me a baby is crying, and the Adelman look-alike shoves his fingers in his ears and whirls around to send eye-daggers in its direction. Dad always said: Before you board, count the babies . Like he could cure my fear of flying through his faith in the kind of God who spares infants from tragedy, the kind of God who is calculated and rational. He’d eye the strollers in the security line, pointing them out as he clutched his empty pant leg and hopped through the metal detector.

Last month he waited with me in the snow for the cab to the airport, grabbed my shivering arm and reminded me to count the babies. Standing beside him on the doorstep in front of the Neang kids’ snow angels, there was so much I could have said. But a week with him had drained me and I wanted to press fast-forward on the little time that we had left. I was thinking past the flight home. I was thinking about what I’d tell Dr. Waters when I called his office, begged him to drag Dad in for some tests, to prove him wrong.

Two weeks later, I came home from an English exam to a message from Dad on the answering machine: his diagnosis. I screamed until the downstairs neighbour pounded her ceiling, then shoved the contents of my laundry basket into Dad’s old rolling suitcase. But on the phone, he said I shouldn’t come, that I should finish the semester at UVic because he wasn’t going anywhere. He sounded so good I wanted to believe him; I wanted to believe there was time.

Now I try to form a picture of him in my mind and just hold it there, but I can’t remember him the way I want to. All I see is a shrunken moon-coloured person on a hospital bed, bleeding from his ears. My father in his final moments; my father as the matter-of-fact nurse at the Regional described.

And then we hit turbulence and I’m doing the thing I’ve always done, my legs hugged to my chest and my knees pressed into my eye sockets. And the humming. Any particular tune you’re after , he’d say, but still his hand would be there on my arm. And I’m thinking about that. About not having that. And then I feel a weight just below my elbow—a thick warmth that makes my whole body breathe.

That’s when I see him. No moon-person and no old man either, but Harvey Monk himself, ready to fight the forces of evil on distant planets. He’s got a fishbowl over his head and a jumpsuit like a bag of Jiffy Pop—puffed up and silver. His hand is raised and he might be waving or he might be doing the countdown to liftoff. This is all the goodbye I get.

MARCUS—MARCH 2015

“Harvey Monk felt a searing pain below his knee, like the sting of a nest of hornets, and looked down to see a flame—thin and blue, the width of a wisp of candle smoke—shooting from his leg. And yet his pants were not on fire.”

Marcus read this passage of The Galazy of Harvey Monk repeatedly on the plane to Victoria, and reads it again when Daphne and Helen are in the car—a 2012 Chevrolet

Levatio, the only bio-diesel vehicle manufactured in Canada before GM closed the Oshawa Car Assembly for good. Marcus glances at Helen.

“What do you think of that?”

Still turned sideways, glaring at her mother, she shrugs her shoulders.

Daphne, her body a fruit basket of all things swollen and ripe, is so unlike the D. F. Morris he had imagined that Marcus feels awkward around her. He is directing most of his attention towards her sullen and mostly mute kid seated between them as a barrier.

Outside the car window, past the conference centre, the Empress Hotel slumps sideways—propped against a row of metal girders. The place is deserted now, the view nothing more than the wall that holds the ocean at bay, and besides, who comes to this city anymore? Only the transients escaping Prairie drought and Eastern ice storms, their tarps and shoes spilling from the once-boarded, broken windows of the Crystal Gardens. Even with the car windows rolled up, Blanshard Street smells of human shit. Further on, members of restless flocks stand waiting their turn in the line-ups outside St. Andrew’s Cathedral and the Temple Emanu-El.

Marcus remembers taking the Port Angeles Ferry to Victoria on a high-school band trip. He had marched down Douglas with his clarinet in the Victoria Day Parade, and afterwards, he and his friends had followed a group of local girls along the Inner Harbour, talking loudly about the qualities of their asses. They meant to snare the girls with these compliments, but the redhead called them Yankee pricks and wanted to know why all Americans wore tube socks pulled halfway up their calves. Before his group left the next morning, he bought a six-inch wooden totem pole in a gift shop, and didn’t notice the Made in China label until his mother thanked him for the gift and peeled it not-so-discreetly off.

He wants to ask Daphne about Harvey Monk’s spontaneous combustion. But he’ll wait until the jet, when he can send the aides to the back, out of earshot. There are two of them, the skinny one driving, the other seated in the passenger seat—trying to look busy with stacks of paper but holding on to every word. And what if she did invent the entire thing? What good would his expert be then among the scientists?

“Science fiction writer?” they repeated when he pulled the book from the side pocket of his suitcase.

“A witness,” he clarified.

They drive past the soggy garbage dump that was once Swan Lake and continue up the highway to Elk Lake, which the younger aide informed him had been taken over by a group of back-to-the-wild environmentalists. A tarp city with communal meals of steamed skunk cabbage and twig tea. Clothing is optional, by most accounts, and instead of attending school the kids learn from their elders how to construct water-filtration systems and start fires with sticks. Marcus has read about similar groups across this country and his own, and tries not to speculate on what they are preparing for.

“So what was this classified thing that happened?” Daphne asks.

But instead of answering, Marcus flips to another section of Galaxy .

“'Everybody has a self made of matter, and a self made of energy.’ Did you research this? Was this something you determined on your own?”

“It’s fiction,” he hears Helen muttering. “Like as in not true.”

“My father discovered it through the use of Kirlian photography.” But Daphne says it with a little smile playing at the corners of her mouth. Why? Because it’s something that’s obvious? Or is Helen right, did she really make all this up?

Marcus skims the paragraphs as field after defended field flips by through the windows, a row of soldiers standing at the edge of the highway, guarding carrots and sheep.

GERALD—AUGUST 1994

In London, before they shipped me home, I woke one night with a cramp in my leg so goddamned unbearable that I grabbed the closest thing to the bed—a crutch—and pounded at the mattress until the Scotsman wrestled the thing away. The nurse with the mole above her lip got the job of changing the bandages, but the stump wasn’t the problem and I told her so in no uncertain terms.

In bed last night it was worse. The dreams in their usual sequence: using up all my rounds putting Kraut horses out of their misery, mangled heaps of them littering the roads. Mason and I coming to on the side of some ditch in Holland, flowers covering us like we were a couple of corpses. Liberation of Bergen-op-Zoom, the Browning triggering in the town square and two pretty girls dead on the ground. In my dream, I’m leaning over the bodies and it happens just the same as it did then—some kind of raging inferno inside my boot so that I’m stamping it on the ground and shrieking like a lunatic. I woke feeling like someone was pounding my calf with a meat tenderizer.

Even still, it took less than 30 seconds before my mind was in focus, the covers were off, and I was hopping down the stairs to the basement. Because for the past three months there’s been nothing more than an itch. I had the machine out, the lights off, was feeling around in the dark for the film, but by the time my stump was propped up on the damn machine the pain was just a throb, and fading even as I flipped the switch. Three images of the stump, and then one of my arm thrown across the film when I slipped as I pressed the charge.

I sat in the La-Z-Boy and watched infomercials, hoping for another cramp. Every time I closed my eyes I saw Mason dragging me by my armpits into the goddamn tank and ripping off the boot. It sure as hell wasn’t trench foot or some kind of diabetic infection; it was burned right up.

I finally decided not to bother waiting and processed the film. And it was clear just as soon as the negs were on the light table. Three stumps, a shadowy blur of luminescence—nothing like the phantom leaf and nothing new either. But here’s the thing: In the image of my arm were these wild flares, sparking and tangled. A giant asteroid of a fuck-you barrelling towards an old and crippled man.

HELEN—MARCH 2015

From the window of the jet, Iran looks like the rippled beach sand Helen remembers from her childhood. Everything beige and creased. She is sitting alone; her mother and the sci-fi geek Mr. Spark have moved to the front seats of the plane and are whispering to each other about some sort of classified whatever. Or most of the time they’re whispering; about a quarter of the time, Daphne sits with legs gripped to her chest, her head shoved into her knees, humming. Which would be embarrassing if there was anyone around who mattered.

During one of these musical interludes, Mr. Spark came up the aisle to warn Helen that, though the jet was landing on a US military base, they wouldn’t be staying there. Meaning, of course, that they would see Muslims. And not the first-world Muslims in internment camps in the Interior—who didn’t seem like real Muslims anyway, waving maple-leaf flags and writing love poems about Canada that were always run in the newspaper, half the women not even in hijabs. These would be the Muslims with explosives strapped to their chests, ready to detonate themselves and fuck virgins in heaven—maybe virgin sisters of the women they threw rocks and acid at in life, the women they lit on fire. It seems to Helen that someone other than her should be alarmed about this—like her mother, whose responsibility in life is to protect her, or Mr. Spark, who must be somewhat important if he’s able to procure not just plane tickets but a private jet. (She doesn’t know anyone who has taken a plane in the last five years, and certainly she never expected to set foot in one with her mom’s salary as it is.) But Mr. Spark maintains that all Muslims aren’t actually terrorists, and that many Muslims—the ones she will meet, for example—are learned men and women, and most of them pacifists. Muslim pacifists? Excuse me , Helen wanted to scream the first time he said it, but Canada has been on red-alert for a year straight and all our Muslims are under armed guard . What kind of person willingly travels to a country composed entirely of terrorists? She stared hard at Marcus, to show him she knew he was lying, and as she did the flares spit and crackled around his head. The blue was dim in places, faded to almost nothing at his shoulders. She thought for a moment she saw a thin wisp of smoke hovering near his collarbone, but before she could tell for certain, he had wandered off again towards the source of the humming.

Three times Helen went to the bathroom in the cubicle at the front, and twice she was able to walk quietly enough that she had a moment to hover behind her mother and Mr. Spark, a moment to eavesdrop before one of them turned around. The first time Mr. Spark was asking her mother about cases she had come across in her research. And did it always occur in the same way, with a greasy pile of ash? At which point Daphne coughed loudly and turned her head towards Helen. And the second time her mother was talking about Helen’s grandfather and the fact that he had only one leg. Which didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything. Her mother an expert on something? News to her. And broadcasting the fact she was a science fiction writer? What could be more disturbing?

The plane starts its descent, and Helen sees the fence that surrounds the army base, and the specks of vehicles and people on the cement. She imagines the possible purposes of their visit. Maybe Daphne sitting with a group of Muslim sci-fi fans, all shedding their veils and cheerfully sipping tea. Which would be something no one at school would believe for an instant. A picture of her mother in a chador on the front of the newspaper. Science fiction ending the Jihad.

POVED—OCTOBER 1944

The soldiers came at night to kill our neighbour, Sanya. The shadows had matted into heavy dark; there was no moon. I heard boots on the stairs—the cries of Sanya’s daughters. Pressed against the window, I watched the men: swarmed by a whirled and clouded Red. Sanya thrown to the ground—dear Sanya—the Blue sparking as it struck. The shots: a pair of crimson ribbons blazed a path through the night. The blast of sound and then the Blue of Sanya a river running past, over stones, along Gertsena Road and spreading until there was Sanya in the trees and Sanya with the pigeons, Sanya with his wife on the stoop. And still the sky blazed arcs of fire.

In the morning, the fire raged still, so that I had to walk the children across the street and to the corner before I let them race to the schoolyard. My husband—hands to my hips, he pulled me to him—reminded me he had said that trouble would find Sanya, but that the children and I would be safe. Safe from the soldiers, he meant, but of soldiers I was not afraid. I had watched from the doorway as Sanya’s daughter stood at the edge of the steps, the sky-fire scalding her. I asked him please not to pass Sanya’s house. I was afraid for my own.

But I watched my husband’s path along the street; the arcs sparked towards him and still he did not slow. And that evening I saw the Blue of him had been singed. He was impatient with the children, his tongue grown sharp.

Was it not right to warn the others?

MARCH 2015

The armoured jeep driven by Marcus Spark stops in front of the ruins of the Arg-e Bam, where a tarp city of government men and women, of scientists and physicians, stands over four piles of ash and extremities. Marcus Spark holds the passenger door open for Daphne and her daughter, but Helen’s face is pressed against the tinted window and she makes no move to leave her seat.

Helen’s eyes throb with a vision that slowly takes shape—an orange maze that blazes in the sky, arc after arc of fire that spits and bristles. She cannot see a clear path to the large white tarp, and so she clutches for Daphne’s hand, yanks her mother hard towards her.

A second vehicle pulls to a stop beside the ruins and an important man—a man seen often on television and in newspapers, a man who was the second-in-command to a pile of ashes—exits. With the slam of his door Helen turns, sees his sharp, thin frame, and something else: a thin blue that changes to red at his shoulders, a mass of writhing scarlet. She knows what will happen even before he steps into the arc of flame. The shape of him is charged, rearing up.

She closes her eyes, as if not seeing will make a difference.

POVED—OCTOBER 1944

One must not confess to colours. For the doctor will strap you by your legs and arms. He will carve your sight away with wires, until the world is grey and flat and you are as blind as he.

And now our sons march across Europe—our continent a constellation of flames—the world seared of Blue. It cannot be long before our children are burned. Before they ignite. And who will see it coming? Who will see?