Saudade

Alba hadn't seen Olaf at the houselands for a few weeks. The longer he was gone, the more regularly she looked for him. Over several months she had been meeting with him every few days or so to have a talk and she brought him sandwiches... "You can't live on sunshine," she would say, which made him laugh. Now it had been nearly a month since she last saw him and she was worried.

When she last saw him, he seemed to have been talking to himself. He had spun around in circles when she arrived, not saying hello to her right away but instead acting like he was following something invisible on the ground... He was smiling, and despite the clearly strange experiences he'd had and the things that she had seen, with his chronologic window and wild claims, she was beginning to think he had gone finally and utterly insane.

"Hello Cadejo," Olaf had said, kneeling down as if talking to some phantom gnome, "How has our mistress been?" Olaf jerked his head back slightly as if at some noise and then reached out to scratch at the open air with his fingers. He stood and she asked him what he was doing...
"I was talking with your dog... Obviously Alba, what a question!"

Alba had asked him what he did, out here in the houses by himself so much. He told her it helped him think. Actually, what he said was that he liked the houses - because being around them helped remind him to remember what hasn't happened yet. Alba knew that Olaf and sense were not commonly acquainted, and it often took her some time to piece together something like a narrative, no matter what he was saying... He went on to say that this kind of remembering helped him because he could do it before the time in which he forgot everything, since it was always easiest to remember things before they were forgotten.

Alba blinked. "What made you forget?" she asked.
"Oh... I forgot." he told her.
He went on to say that something had happened, and he was only now starting to piece things back together the way they should be.

"You mean something will have happened?" she said teasing him.
"No," he said turning to look at her... "something happened, but something will happen again - and that's why I have to remember. We may know the end of something, we may even discover the beginning, but those are two small things when compared to the universe of time between."
Olaf had taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves when they sat down. While they talked, Olaf kept throwing sticks out into the houses... He would reach down and suddenly have one, and then throw it away again. She had no idea where they were coming from. "How did you get the scar on your arm?" Alba asked him. Olaf looked down at his wrist, then at the stick he was holding in his hand. He smiled and said that he'd made a trade once. He threw the stick and said that he'd do it all again.

That was over three weeks ago.
She had searched his house last time she was here. She had stood on the doorstep for a long time, not wanting to enter. It was harder to look around inside once she had. Every step and every corner felt like an intrusion, as if she would walk through a door and see him, but she feared he would be angry at her for being there. She found nothing, the house was empty and silent save for lonely gusts of wind through the attic, and her own footsteps on the planks of flooring.

Today she was startled to find the house was entirely gone. Every stick.

She rushed out into the field but there was nothing but wild flowers and grass. Nothing to mark the passing.
She sat for a while, wondering what it meant, watching the flowers bend in the breeze. The rooftops in the ground around her seemed especially hollow today.

She got up and as she was brushing the grass from her skirt she noticed something that looked like crown molding sitting a little bit away. She walked over and picked it up, pulling something larger from the grass.
Alba had found one of Olaf's windows. It was dirty and paint-chipped, and had been in the rain.
She walked it back to the car and drove home with it... wondering what had happened to her friend.

Sorina & The Incident

Sorina tried to follow the New Boy from Kacper’s house, but her allergies flared up. Irenka put her in the shower and she was fine, but everyone agreed it was scary, so Sorina got some extra ice cream of her choosing and the New Boy even said he’d stop by sometime to play some games.

The Commonalities of Blood and Soil

Alba had tied her shoes tightly and taken her neighbor's bicycle down to the railroad station. She had long thought if they just put the trains in opposing queues on parallel tracks and ran them one after another people would get a lot more races in. As it was she really only had the chance to race once before she got hungry and headed back.
When she got home she had a new Nephew or something.
"Alba, this is the new boy..." Frau Holda said as she introduced her to a wooden boy standing where the old Cedar had grown, which was now just a fresh, moist stump beneath his shoes. "Bérénice stopped by while you were out and carved him. He was running around naked so we had to put him in some of your old clothes..."
Frau Holda went back to her chores and left Alba with the new boy, who stood atop the stump of Cedar which she and Bérénice used to play under. Alba took this in. She realized her hands were tired from gripping the bicycle's handle bars. "Bérénice didn't stay?”
“No,” he said.
“I liked that tree,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said.
That wasn't quite what she meant. “Did she say anything?”
“She said that sometimes to save a thing you must destroy it...”
“Oh. Anything else?”
“She told me to ask you to name me. But she said you wouldn't know what my name was yet.”
“You're not named Tree?”
“No. ...not anymore.”
“Oh. Well. I suppose it's nice to meet you then.”
"Hello." The boy replied. His voice had a sort of soft flute quality she decided. He smelled like the tool shed after a rainstorm... While she wasn't quite listening he asked her how her morning had been. She considered him, wondering if he'd stay on that stump forever. She set the bike down and sat in the grass, "I was in a race. I lost. How was yours?"
"I got cut out of myself," he said.
"What's that like, being created?"
"Itchy. Mrs. Frekke says she has some linseed oil for me to bathe in later."
"Have you stood there all day?"
"No... I ran around a lot in the beginning. Whenever I stop moving though it feels strange ...being someplace else."
"You'll get used to it, I'm sure. We all do. Why didn't Bérénice name you when she made you?"
“She didn't make me. She just cut the rest away from me. I've been growing for a while.”
“I know. We used to play under you...”
“I saw. Why did you burn your house down?”
After some confusion, she realized he meant the playhouse. "It wasn't completely burned down. I was trying to bake cookies," she said a bit crossly.
"I'd like to try cookies," he offered.
"I was lighting the stove..."
"The wooden stove?"
"It was a stove. That is what stoves are for. It was stupid to make it out of wood." She hadn't realized what she'd said until she'd already said it, and added quickly, "I didn't mean anything by that... just that things that are supposed to hold fire shouldn't be wood..."
He nodded, looking at his fingers as he flexed them... "No it's true... Fire is dangerous."
“My friend Cici says that trees have bones. Is that true?”
“I think it is now... so yes... except I'm not a tree anymore, so maybe not.”
She watched him sit down on the stump next to her, “Listen... what kind of name would you like?”
“I already have a name,” he corrected her, “You just haven't given it to me yet. What's your dog's name?” he asked.
Alba was confused. “I don't have a dog. There are some chickens next door, and Holda has cats...”
“No,” the boy said, “You have a dog. Maybe you haven't met him yet.”
They both noticed it was getting late. She asked him, "Do you like sunsets?"
"Yeah, but sometimes," he said while stretching his fingers out towards the horizon, "they make me a little hungry."
Alba went inside and got some sandwiches. They both sat and watched the colors in the sky.
Boy discovered he liked cucumber with cream cheese.

Apples of the Fallen

Down the street from the Milesian house lived an immigrant family that had been close friends with Alba’s father, Japheth. The husband, Mr. Kacper Nowakowski, was engaged in the import and exportation of goods and (though Alba never quite understood it all) some business with the navigation of international laws. His wife Irenka had been a nurse, and Kacper’s moderate success in business afforded he and his wife the ability to care for a number of children of peculiar needs from various localities.

Today with Mr. Nowakowski’s help Alba took a photo of a sleepy baby named Nicolae who was staying with them, along with his older sister Sorina while their parents were out of the country on business.
Mr. and Mrs. Nowakowski had set up a special room with two big picture windows - one that let in night and one that let in day. Mr. Nowakowski put up a bed sheet over the day window, and according to the instructions left by his parents they both took turns holding baby Nicolae up to the filtered sunlight for a few minutes each hour, just until his hair began to smoke. Eventually Nicolae would be able to play in the yard in broad daylight just like his older sister.

Olaf's Window to Gone World

Alba visited the Houselands for years, sometimes running in the fields between rooftops, trying to get enough speed to break free of gravity. Sometimes she would spend hours in the grass, just watching the clouds, listening to the wind and writing in her journals until she could see the lights come out to play in the twilight.

Today she stopped at an outlying house… a worn, rundown thing. She wondered what type of lights would live there, beneath the paint flaking from wood and the worn gaps about the edges when the front door opened and a man walked out.

Alba froze as she realized he noticed her. His clothes were stitched where they were cut, splattered in paint, grease. They would have been bright once. He wore a hat and matching vest that would have been smart once too, back in another life. His eyes were wide, magnified by his goggle like glasses. She wasn’t sure if his expression was surprise or blindness.
“Well hello! Alba! How are you?” He waved her over.
Alba waited, her lunch basket hanging from a hand in an awkward way against her hip.
“I’ve never seen you before… when did you get here?” She asked.
“Yes you have…" he corrected her, “we will have had lunch and watched the sunsets… it was quite nice while it lasted.”
“No – I don’t remember doing that. How do you know my name?”

He smiled, it was disarming. Alba, never one disarmed by disarmament, didn’t like it at all. He said, “You always will have had problems remembering the things that haven’t happened just yet. You’re like me in my old age… just… in reverse.”
She tilted her head to one side, as if trying to better aim an ear that would understand him. “Tell me your name.”

“I don’t remember what they will have called me,” he told her, “You call me Olaf though… you will have said something about Czarnków, thinking I might have been born there in a book of yours. You tell me a story about a temple I would have built by shaping earth over my clenched fist and then removing it. You think you know me but you get it wrong, It’s rather peculiar.”
Alba stared at him.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I mean it will be a fine story. It’s just the situation will be peculiar because I will have no memory of right now, you see. So I won’t know why the story is important. I won’t know why many things are important. Oh! The windows!”

He rushed over to pick up a crude square of wooden planks roughly nailed together. He told her he’d made it. He made a window to what had already happened. She asked him how that worked. He explained he couldn’t use it anymore because he couldn’t remember what to look at. “I’m stuck, I’ve been having problems… sorting things out, lately.” he said, “I only seem to go forward these days, and the window - it only looks backward. I’m getting old. I survived war you know!”
“Which one?” she asked, certain he meant the great war.
“All of them I think. It goes dark.”

Alba nodded sympathetically for this old crazy man. He seemed nice, he seemed harmless and confused and mostly kind of lost. He seemed trapped in a prison in his head, trying to fit things that didn’t exist to a mold of the world. She could only imagine the private loneliness of wondering why imaginary things weren’t nicer to you… didn’t love you more… never came around. She felt truly bad for him. She looked at his framed piece of empty air and watched herself yell to Bérénice to get some water because she’d just set their playhouse on fire trying to bake some cookies when she was seven.
Alba dropped her lunch basket.

Bérénice and the Great Osanna. (For George Tiller & Stephen Johns... may you get home.)

One day, Alba’s sister Bérénice asked her to join her out at the Houselands. They packed lunches, got in the car (Bérénice was the only one who could drive) and filled an hour or so with gossip, idle talk and speculation about the nature of an Antarctican summer.
Alba had always enjoyed the houselands… it was located somewhere near the meadowlands, not quite next to the grasslands, along Crick Rd. No one exactly knew why the houses started growing there… or even if it wasn’t, as some had suggested, that the houses were in fact sinking there. Alba and Bérénice would go there when they had the day to themselves and take pictures among the halfway houses, scrape weeds away from window panes and generally explore. Bérénice carved her name in an attic once, kneeling on the grass inside, while Alba ran her fingers along the inside of the roof and joked that she would come back in twenty years to see how tall Bérénice’s name had gotten.
“You can’t even recognize one from the next whenever we come,” Bérénice teased.
“I can’t help that they grow,” Alba had said scowling, “Or … maybe that they change. I think they get done growing and that’s why we dont see them again.”
Bérénice turned the car onto a dusty clearing and parked beside a pretty little Bungalow that seemed nearly complete. They got out and ate lunch on the porch, kicking at the dirt as they talked. Bérénice seemed distracted, hardly touching her sandwich.
“What is it?” Alba finally asked.
Bérénice turned from the housetops, all lined in rows and jutting at angles and said to her, “I have to go. I’m a little scared, but I told Dad I would.”
Alba stared. “Dad’s dead, Bérénice.”
“I know. But I still talk to him. Don’t wear that face because I know you do too.”
Alba was looking at the pretty wooden heels on her white shoes as she scraped them across the dirt, making a two lane express road in her mind, one that could lead to anywhere at all. “Where do you have to go?”
Bérénice thought a moment, “All sorts of places. Some I know. Some I don’t think have even been made yet. Grandmother gave me these… a long time ago,” Bérénice reached into the lunch basket and brought out an old handkerchief, folded over something. She opened it up and Alba saw tiny little silver sticks. No - not sticks, she saw… they were tiny arrows.
“Grandma Artemis gave you those?”
“Yeah… she said these were special, and that it was my job to put them to good use one day. I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately.”
“What’re they for?” Alba asked, not liking the idea at all.
“They’re,” Bérénice’s face darkened, “They’re for the hunt. But not like the way Gram used hers. These are for the others. The wrong hunts. The ones that aren’t supposed to happen, that shouldn’t happen. The ones we’d take back if we could…”
“Do they hurt?”
“No… that’s the point. They don’t hurt - they’re just like Gram’s. She said to use them to help. Use them in the second breath, so they won’t feel the last. Use them to steal the quarry away”
“…And then what?”
“Then I take them home, to where they were supposed to go” she said, turning to smile at Alba.
They spent the afternoon together, talking around in circles while walking in the tall grass. Alba would almost forget their talk at times, and then be starkly reminded by a mention of the future, of teasing husbands or children or holidays. She said, quietly, during a lull in conversation, “You’re going to miss my birthday…” and then Alba started to cry quite uncontrollably.
“Hey… Hey I won’t be far.” Bérénice said, “And I’ll always write you letters. You can visit me on my island”
“Will it be big?” Alba asked, not quite reassured.
“Big? Why it’s going to be ENORMOUS!” she yelled, throwing her arms out to take in the whole of the countryside, “My house will be on a cliff, and it will be huge!” she yelled it out until the echoing came back and shook the window glazing around them. She told Alba about all of the animals she would keep for her to visit, whenever she wanted.
They said their goodbyes, finally, and Alba asked her where she was going first.
“South. I think I’ll be going south for a while,” she said sadly.
Alba taught herself how to drive on the way back home, to the detriment of one fender. The neighbors never saw Bérénice again, but if they wondered why they never seemed to bring it up around Alba or the family. Alba visited the houselands regularly, and always by herself. Sometimes at night she would see lights, soft and blue, move through the rooms just beyond the windows. There were less and less houses as time went by. People noticed in her pictures, and asked her why. “They got full. They floated away to someplace else,” was all she would tell them.
Alba would get letters every now and again. Some years kept Bérénice busier than others. Those were bad years. Alba got only a single letter during the war. It was from Poland. Bérénice only wrote, “I miss home.” …That was the entirety of the letter - one line.
When she was old, Alba would take vacations - always by herself - to an island somewhere. She would never say where. Friends never understood house shopping with her either. She would always demand upon looking in the attic before seeing anything else. In fact she would hardly ever look at anything else. She’d just go house by house until she came down from a particular attic of a particular house that looked just like all the others she’d looked at, smiling and saying, “Found it!"

Alba & Yinepu Have Grave Troubles

A third dog had come to live with Alba and the family, but he was mostly visible. Alba named him Yinepu, since she said he was a half border collie, half sokar mutt.

The thing was… whenever she took Yinepu for a walk, they would run into the restless dead. This wasn’t normally too bothersome, as Yinepu had an affinity for fetching their still beating hearts from their smoky, incorporal chests and then worrying them like a bone and smacking them on the pavement until the blood of their death was spent and splattered. Sometimes he’d growl.
Generally this had a positive effect, in that the spirits burst and swirled in the wind, sailing away like puffs of smoke carried off to “lands of forgotten sorrow,” as Alba would say. She also noted that it was good excercise for Yinepu, keeping him trim and fit. Restless Dead made his coat shine.
There was a hitch when they visited cemeteries though. Yinepu would get terribly distracted by all the commotion and had difficulty focusing on any one unclean spirit. When he and Alba went to visit the Manatham family tomb with the neighbor spinster ladies, Ethel and Lillian (they weren’t really sisters… no one talked about it. It was known and accepted) to leave an offering, Yin had one of his fits and Alba had to hold his neck until he calmed down. Alba was mighty cross, saying “So help me if I have to put down a restless corpse in my good saddle shoes…”
Lucky for everyone Lillian had a swell incantation that did the trick neatly.