a short story in a half-fold chapbook, with linocut cover art
an edition of seven
tasting notes: garnet red, snow, sand, the ineffable, family
It was a morning early in the new year when my father shook me from sleep with a finger over his lips. By the faint light that tiptoed in from the hallway, I could see that he was already dressed in sweater and snow-pant. "Dress warm," he confirmed, giving my shoulder a gentle squeeze before leaving me to it.
The rest of the house was asleep as I made my way downstairs. Even the dog continued to doze by the embers of the fireplace — although the cat was, predictably, nowhere to be found. I met my father in the kitchen, where he had a rough breakfast ready — hash, toast, a sliced apple. My portion was as much a reduced mirror of his own as I was, generally, of him.
He offered me a small cup of coffee with a wink and although I, at that age, found the drink untenably bitter, I smiled and sipped it all the same. "Just us today," he told me, and other than that, we ate in silence.
Once we had wolfed our food and were fully suited and booted, he unlocked the kitchen door and led me out into the pre-dawn cold. I thought we might be heading to his workshop, a large barn-like building set some ways back from the house. It was rare that my sister or I were invited or allowed to visit and I admit, in that moment as we walked past the heavy door, to some disappointment that this day was not to be one of those special days.
I looked up at it as we passed but the lights were off and the door was securely latched and there was no sign of the activity I usually associated with the place, not even a stir from my father's approach.
Down beyond the edge of the workshop, past the bottoming out of the low hill on which our house stood, we crossed into the forest just as the sun began to glow in the sky behind us.
The snow from the end-of-year storm was still thick on the ground, despite several sunny days, and more than once I placed a foot and found myself swallowed to the waist. Laughing each time, my father would grab my arms and pull me from the powder, swinging me forward onto the faint path before us.
There were blazes on the trees as we walked and I knew the turns of the trail from regular summer hikes but I had never walked these ways in the winter, never considered that such a thing might be worth doing. Now, I found the familiar landscape turned alien and strange, wiped clean to be remade again in the warmer days to come.
Ahead of us, in the blue shade quickly being erased by the dawn, I saw naked trees shift and sway like giant mantises stepping carefully through the snow. Ice crinkled underfoot as we crossed what had once been a steady flowing stream.
A tremble ahead of us caused my father to put out a hand and stop our steady forward motion, just in time for three deer to come bounding over a boulder in full sprint. One of them turned and saw me and it looked as confused as I felt I must've. Both of us, united in the question of why on earth we were out from our warm homes on this chill morning.
My father murmured something I didn't catch, or know how to understand, as he pulled a handful of sand from his pocket and tossed it in front of us. Whatever followed the deer — and something did — flashed past us in a blur, moving with speed and weight enough to shake the trunks of the nearby pines.
After a few breaths, my father nodded that we could continue on. "Only a little farther, but we have to move quick," he said, his long legs barely holding back in their stride as he turned us from the trail into the unpathed wood.
I had refrained from asking where we were going, pleased as I was to be out on an adventure with only my father. My curiosity compounded as we threaded our way through drifts untouched; my father did not waste time, he did not waste words, he did not waste. Everything had its purpose, so what would this journey’s purpose be?
The object drew my eye as soon as we crested the rise, even before my father drew my attention to it. How strangely it stood, this statue, its color and its position out of place amongst the dull browns and bright whites of the winter wood.
We were about twenty feet away when the object, the statue, lit up with such splendor that the clouds of breath that had trailed around my head dissipated altogether. What's more, I heard the same thing happen to my father.
We stood, marveling, in breathless silence.
The statue was solid garnet, deep red in color, and stood about the height I would've been if I were sat on my father's shoulders. Smooth curves and confusing entwinements gave it the appearance of motion, even though it was quite still. The rising sun, I guessed, had caused it to glow — except the glow turned inward, as though something at the statue's core was consuming the light faster than it could be replenished.
New facets of the impossible shape were revealed to us as the sun continued its steady climb over the horizon and it seemed that all the world had fallen away, leaving only my father and I and these woods and this statue, only what we could see or feel — and that even that could be questioned.
"Ready now," my father murmured and I tensed by his side, unsure of what I was meant to be readying for. The glow in the statue before us rose still further, filling my heart like a bubble ballooning in my chest. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
And then, much like a bubble indeed, it was gone.
No implosion, no pop of phasing out, no cosmic terror of an object that ceased to be; it was just gone, leaving us looking at only the ordinary once again.
My father looked at his watch and nodded. He pointed behind us, into the sky, and I turned to see that the sun had finally cleared its final hurdle into the sky. "Sun's up," he said with a smile. I believe I saw a tear in his eye, a sight almost as shocking as the beauty of that strange statue.
"What...?" I asked.
"I have no doubt you'll find all kinds of answers when we get home," he said, turning to me and kneeling down to my level. "I don't mean to dismiss your question, but I'll tell you instead what my mother once told me: understanding will be there whenever you find it, but until then, it can be worth living in the unknowing if that unknowing is itself something beautiful.”
It was such a striking thought, all the more so that it came from my father, who embodied to me the full pursuit of knowing.
I nodded, after a time, and he nodded back.
Then, with a weighty and reassuring pat on the shoulder — a moment of grounding, one I surely needed — he stood and led me back out of the woods.