Burnt, Buried, and Banished

Carice had no children as most people would define the word, but she considered herself a mother all the same. After all, it wasn’t her fault that Nathaniel hadn’t figured out he didn’t want to be a father after all until after they were married and he’d moved them both away to the top of this mountain.

Never having been the type who could take no for an answer, Carice had taken matters into her own hands. Quite literally, in fact. She had learned the old ways from her mother – the ways of creating something from nothing using only her will, the materials around her, and a little bit of something from within. And that’s how she came to know the short-lived beings she would forever and always think of as her three babies.

*

Burnt started out as a handful of old, singed rags she’d pulled from the restlessness at the center of her chest where her beating heart used to be. She formed his body by tearing the rags into strips and tying them into a series of complicated knots. And by positioning one knot here and the other there, over and over again until she was fresh out of rags, she created the shape of him.

As one might expect of a child born of doubt and various flavors of unease, Burnt’s limbs were twisted, and his face was knotted in a perpetual expression of surly pensiveness. His strange fabric skin was patchy and mottled with dark burn marks, and he smelled strongly of dangerous things that could catch on fire in an instant – sour kerosene, woody tobacco, and something else no one could quite identify. But Carice unconditionally loved him all the same, simply because he was hers.

She tried to teach him to be a good child as he grew and eventually learned to walk and talk. But unfortunately, Burnt was not about to be controlled by anyone, least of all Carice. He was a wild thing with a bonfire’s spirit. And as is the case with all fires, you could contain the one that raged inside of Burnt until you couldn’t anymore. And then you had a problem on your hands.

The larger he grew, the hotter the smolder inside him raged, until one day Carice could no longer lie to herself about the type of creature she was dealing with. Burnt was a creature whose hot breath filled the air with smoke and sent mercurial embers sailing into the air, where they could cause all kinds of trouble. So she tore Burnt to shreds and cast the remnants of him into the deepest abandoned well she could find. And there he went – her first baby and beloved son.

*

Although Carice had dreamed of Burnt for a long time before actually bringing him into the world, it was different with Buried. The idea of her sprang to mind out of nowhere and so much sooner than Carice would have expected, mere months after Burnt had been sent back to the nameless vortex he’d originally come from.

As difficult as Burnt had turned out to be, he had left a vacuum in the space he had filled for the short time he’d been here. And as everyone learns when they are still young, nature abhors a vacuum and demands that it be filled at any cost. For this reason, the creation of Buried was practically inevitable.

Carice was determined that her second child would be softer, calmer, and representative of the more spiritual parts of her being. So she began the process of creating her by pulling a great quantity of sand from the daydreams at the center of her head. She mixed it with several portions of seawater and patted it into the semblance of a little baby girl. And then she channeled a lightning bolt into the center of the girl’s chest to form a little, beating glass heart.

Where Burnt was gnarled and hard, Buried was changeable and soft. She’d shift her shape at will and perfume the house with the smell of ocean salt some days. But other days, her eyes would grow grey and treacherous, and her breath would grow foul, like the sickly sweet stench of seaweed rotting in the sun. And the glass heart at the center of Buried’s chest would flash, saturated with the strange, forbidding electricity of panic and melancholy.

And after a while, it became clear to Carice that this baby, too, would insist on becoming its own being – beautiful and mysterious to be sure, but also potentially terrible as a tempest. She especially did not want to think of what Buried might become as she grew older still, so the day came when Carice decided to end her.

She plucked the flashing glass heart from the little rising, falling chest of sand and ground it to dust against the cobblestones. And she desiccated Buried’s sandy little body until it completely lost cohesion, and the wind scattered the grains of sand to the four corners of the earth. And that was the end of Buried, Carice’s beautiful little daughter for whom she had hoped so much.

*

And for a while after Buried, Carice’s creative drive went dormant and remained that way. As much as she had loved the ideas of Burnt and Buried, the reality of them had been something else. They were supposed to be the best of her, but they instead mirrored her darker traits or at least showed the promise of doing so one day. She did not know what that said about her or about the legacy she would leave behind.

But eventually, the day came when the terrors of the past grew fuzzy and soft as they receded into the past. And Carice decided to try her hand at creating a child once more. one that would be more practical and ordinary, less passionate and changeable.

So she extracted the industry from the bones of her hands and spun it into gold thread on her spinning wheel. And she used the thread to stitch together a wee little form made of sundry fabric patches in every color of the rainbow. Once that form was complete, she stuffed it with dried rosemary from the garden and dried mushrooms from around the side of the house, the kind that sprang up after the rainfall and clung to the earth with their strange, alien roots.

And this newest creation became Banished, a child that defied such boundaries as gender. Banished was a quiet child, the kind of child who is so internal as far as how they express their thoughts that one wonders whether they have clear, coherent thoughts at all. But Banished thought, and Banished felt. And when the shadows grew long and the hours short, Banished would stare into the night sky and speak of planets no one had heard of.

But the more intently and often Banished gazed into the sky, the more pronounced a developing problem he became. You see, Banished had a relationship with gravity that was fickle at best. Sometimes, they’d be as heavy and solid as any other child, remaining firmly planted on the green grass where they played during the day. But then they’d begin to rise and hover in a manner that genuinely disturbed Carice.

And the more Banished grew, the lighter their little body became. Eventually, Carice had to tether them to something solid and still at all times to prevent their floating away into the sky altogether. But eventually, the day came when even the tightest, strongest tethers could no longer do the job.

That was the day Banished floated away into the tropopause, never to be seen again. Carice’s most earnest attempt at building something grounded had ironically turned out to be the least grounded of her creations. But such was life, she supposed.

*

It was at that point that Carice gave up the dark arts of her mother. Perhaps they worked for some people, but they did not seem to be working for her. Maybe it was that the strange energy they leveraged could not be controlled by anyone. Or perhaps Carice herself was too full of unstable energies for something stable and normal to ever be born of her.

She supposed it didn’t matter anymore.

Her hair was beginning to grow grey with age, and the snow covered the mountain where she continued to live with quiet Nathaniel and his endless parade of practical little projects. That was the funny thing about age. You didn’t burn so much from within with the restless energies of the heart, the head, or the hand. It made one more willing to take life as it comes and find meaning in simpler pursuits.

But Carice never forgot her three strange children. Even deconstructed and sent unceremoniously back to the void they’d come from, they were part of her. They’d taught her things about herself and what it meant to be alive that she would carry with her always.

Burnt with his acrid smoldering, Buried with her ozone electricity, and Banished with their ultimately unbearable lightness. Their creation and eventual destruction had taken the horse-like madness of Carice’s youth, given it somewhere to go, and sent it moving onward. And now Carice could move onward, as well. To reality, as it was, there on the snowy mountain that was so very high.