(Originally published in The Djinn Falls in Love.)
The rifle in this story is a rifle full of wishes. Maybe all rifles seem to be that, at least for a moment, when they’re new, before any trigger has touched any finger. Maybe all rifles seem as though they might grant a person the only thing they’ve ever wanted.
At the beginning of this story, there are no bullets. At the end of this story, there are no more bullets left. In the middle of this story, there are enough bullets to change the world into something entirely different.
This rifle is full of anything anyone could want, each bullet a captive infinity, each an ever after.
Bullets may be made, in the old way, of a thin cylinder of any animal’s gut packed full of black powder and attached to the back of the projectile with glue. They may be made of bronze points, of buckshot, with tiny arrows—flechettes—embedded in them to maximize damage on entry. Rifles may shoot anything from orbs to thorns, and these may be propelled, in antique weapons, by a mixture of charcoal, potassium nitrate, and sulfur, or, in certain situations, they may be propelled by the motions of something else entirely.
Thus may one fire a wish. Thus may one shoot a star.
That’s a story people tell, in any case. Like all stories, this one contains lies, and like all old rifles, this one contains the dust of its history.
Perhaps the story begins with a kid behind the wheel of a truck, this same stolen rifle beside him.
This kid, call him The Kid, why not, has big plans. Here at the base of the mountains, he’s been looking up too long, seeing only girls who want nothing to do with him. He stole the rifle from the dumb old man at the pawnshop, who never even saw him coming.
The Kid shot the rifle once, and then—
The Kid’s nothing special. He’s gangle, denim, pustule and pouch. Back pocket of his jeans is full of stolen chew, and his hands are covered in corn chip ashes like he’s been elbow deep in a Dorito crematorium.
Something weird happened when he pulled the trigger, something he’s not thinking about. Something asked him a question.
The something is in the back of The Kid’s pickup truck now, on the dog’s blanket. Maybe real, maybe imagined, maybe a flashback to some cartoon reality seen when he was little. He’s decided not to think about it.
Out here, near the remnants of the reactor, there’s a marker for a massacre of trappers, and there’s a historical designation for the place, their possessions enough to identify them.
In the summer, poison mushrooms leap from the shadows, shape of skulls. The spot is surrounded by cliffs that glow green at sunset, and the hollow in the center feels seen. It’s been declared safe enough, the radiation dispersed, though most people would never come here. It’s a bad place.
The Kid imagines the fire flooding up from it, the way, when the meltdown happened, the sky was pale blue and the tree branches shook, studded with black squirrels. The way ash fell from the heavens, and his mother walked out from the trailer and filled her hands with it, filled her mouth with it, rolled in it like a dog in snow.
“I didn’t know no better,” she says. “Lot of people didn’t. We thought it was some kinda miracle.”
Then she was pregnant, and she swears she doesn’t know how it happened, doesn’t know who The Kid’s father ever was.
He veers left on the highway and drives on the wrong side a while, singing along with the hum inside him. In the seat, the rifle sings too, its bullets rattling, each a distinct tone.
The Kid feels stars inside his chest, burning novas, sparks flitting through his body. He’s a man on a mission to spread the word of the dead.
He thinks about his future: a hero’s journey through the flat earth of high school. He’s readying himself to graduate from childhood and into legend.
•••
Drop back in time to another part of the story, a hundred and fifty years ago, long before The Kid’s born.
Out here in these woods, at that time, there’s a notorious freetrapper who takes all the pelts and all the women. He pays in plague as well as in trade goods, taking the beaver, the mink, the wolves, taking the daughters of chieftains, and the wives of warriors.
He’s a bringer of disaster, and in the years he walks the woods, he takes wife after wife, never for long. Some die in childbirth, and some die in rapids, and some die by bear. One leaps from a cliff. They walk ahead of him, and ride behind him. They are the starwatchers he uses when he can’t see a way out of the wild, and the warmth he relies upon in winter. The animals hate him, and the wives hate him, and he carries a black powder rifle, an axe, and a bottle of whiskey. Anything else he needs, he steals. Every time he takes a new wife, he’s cursed by all the inhabitants of the places he passes through. There are babies left behind after each wife dies, and he gives some to the animals, and puts others out to be collected by anyone who lives in the trees. The trapper wants only wives, not children.
The rifle in this story is the rifle that once belonged to this trapper.
•••
Downwind and upriver of the trapper’s territory, there’s a pack of company men with a bag of sugar and a bag of tea, a pile of pelts tied to horseback, the riders chewed over by the tilted teeth of the mountains. Each green cliff glints with ghosts, and each new place is written on a map of the men’s making.
Silk has not yet taken over the world. It’s the trappers’ mission to bring back fur and carry it into drawing rooms where the pianos are made of wood from other conquered places. At night the men circle, make their fire, boil the river, steep tea leaves, drink it hot and sweet, the only rightness, their ragged remnant of civilization. It’s a strange civilizer, the formalized drinking of brackish water.
They write journals of their expedition into forbidden country: caverns narrow and full of black wings, pine trees sharp as knives pressed into soft bellies. Each man has his spoon. Each man has something gold hanging under his shirt. If they chisel into the stone they find only dark muddy green, stone the color of swamp, no emeralds. Above them, mountain lions stalk the white bone knobs at the back of each man’s neck.
One of the men’s got a monkey with him, the only source of comedy, brought from his lady at home, and he sets his monkey off into the woods. The monkey chitters high and holy, telling him where the beavers are building their dams. That trapper comes back rich in oily pelts, the decapitated heads of beaver strewn on the path behind him, ghost tails slapping the water while the men sleep.
One day a woman appears at the edge of their camp. She carries two pistols and wears trousers made of leather. Her eyes have tattoos of tree lines along the lids.
Call her The Hunter.
With her is the French Canadian freetrapper, whose legend the men all know. He’s the Bluebeard of the Rocky Mountains, and his tales travel, but something’s wrong with him. He rides on the back of her horse, sidesaddle. He sucks at the insides of his cheeks, spits in the dirt, and bows his head. He wears a brilliant blue blanket around his shoulders, and shivers, even when he’s near the fire. His beard’s gone half white.
The trappers decide he’s no longer a man. Something’s gone wrong, and whatever it is, they won’t ask. They decide never to speak of him again. Bad luck.
“What are you doing here?” the leader of the company men asks the woman. “What are you hunting?”
He’s already given her all the tobacco they’ve brought, though he doesn’t know why.
“What do you think I’m hunting?” she asks. “Don’t you know where you are? What do you call these mountains?”
They tell her their name for them, and she laughs. “That’s not their name. I’ve been following them around the center of the world. I’ve been hunting a long time.”
“Let me tell you a story,” she says.
The men carefully fail to listen. The only stories to tell nine months into a trapping are stories about women, not stories spoken by them. Girls on their backs, girls on horseback, girls in horsehair. No man wants to risk drawing the attention of his own ghosts, not this far in. The longer they travel in this country, the more fear travels with them. The women in these mountains are dangerous if they exist at all, and the men pretend they don’t, in favor of the few women working up in the gold veins and silver valleys outside the tourmaline range. The men make progress toward them, gathering pelts for payment at bars and brothels.
The story The Hunter tells them is something about a magical creature in the trees left here by an earlier expedition, offloaded from a wagon and chained in a room made of metal out in the woods, all alone.
“I ran up on the last man from that expedition, and he told me they put their monster where nobody would ever find it,” she says, and the men shudder.
“Next time I saw him, he was turned innards out,” she says, “and hanging from a tree. He was missing all his mains. So I guess they didn’t cage it well enough, now did they? You haven’t seen it?”
They haven’t seen it.
When she rides away, the freetrapper looks back at them, and they pretend not to notice. All is well. Pelts and then home.
One morning, though, the men come upon a gathering of the dead, skeletons sitting in a circle, drinking tea. Cups shattered in the snow, gilt-edged smiles, brown stains in the ice. All the dead are dressed in furs, layer after layer of them, beaver, bear, and wolf. The skeletons are wearing the claws of the animals, the teeth of the animals, the tails of the animals.
The monkey leaps from its man’s shoulder and runs to one of the dead. It shrieks in recognition.
One of the living men kneels beside one of the skeletons, and touches the skull with his fingernail, tapping it. With that touch, the skeleton blooms, regaining all its lost flesh, young and strong and fat with feasting. It is a body full of brilliant blood. It is a familiar body. Each man sees himself there, and shudders in time, himself living, himself dead, all in the same moment.
There’s a whipping wind now, and hailstones. The fire rekindles in green flames, and there is a voice, and the voice tells them to eat.
There is The Hunter with the trees tattooed on her eyelids too, but she doesn’t arrive until somewhat later, and by then, the thing she’s hunting is gone.
•••
What do we hunt but each other? A hunter might go on an expedition, might map the forest and mountains, but what they’re truly looking for is their own broken heart hidden inside an elk, their own lost lover hidden inside a wolf, their own dead child hidden inside a bear. A hunter is always looking for wishes to come true, and if it takes blood and rending to get them, then it does. There is a magic in the explosion, in the black smoke cloud, in the way whatever one is hunting runs off, the way the hunter is left standing there, inhaling powder.
All most people wish for is more, wishing forever until tongues are parched and hearts are tired of beating. Love is a kind of wish.
Wishing for love is the same as wishing for more wishes.
•••
Snap forward in time again, a hundred and fifty years. Now there’s a pawnshop down a dirt trail, deep in the woods, near the spot where the trappers died.
There’s a man named Yoth Begail behind the counter, scraggle jaw and white yellow beard, tin of chew in his front pocket and stretched tendons in his neck giving him the look of a scarecrow gone sentient. There’s pawned off precious in the glass cases, dust on everything thick enough to epic it. These are the gun hoards of suicides from the local police repo, snuck out of that room by janitors looking to buy other things, trading them over to Yoth Begail for the time being, taking his cash off to dealers and alimonies.
Yoth’s been out here sixty-five years give or take. Pawnshops are robber beacons, and people come in couple times a year to gunpoint Yoth, who pulls his own weapon from undercounter, no hesitation. Yoth’s got no town rules to live by. He sells things no one else can sell.
Got a case of stones brought in by the woman out near the reactor. Bunch of folks that way went to heaven and left their blood behind, crystalized into little geodes, and the woman, only one still out there, has been selling them for years. They left bones that look like milk opal too, centered with garnet marrow and Yoth’s got some of those as well. The woman tried to sell him a skull, but he didn’t want that glittering thing around, the stony brain visible inside the opal casing. All of it was like to get him sick. Rest of the stones out here are hunks of green tourmaline, but the muddy kind, and tourmaline is rough luck.
Oh, Yoth’s got the usual pawn glories too. All the things people come to him to forget. He’s like a confessor in that way. BINGO-bought prizes and family heirlooms, forlorn valuables traded for canned good grocery dollars. Pearl necklaces bought in Tahiti on the only vacation, engagement rings wrung off arthritic fingers. Televisions and trophies, couple of gold bars somebody brought in from a hoard, pennies on the dollar, cause you can’t spend gold at the Walmart. He’s got a gunshop license, and he can sell whatever he wants, to anybody he likes. These guns have been used to kill all kinds of things, animals, trespassers, ownselves.
Up high on the wall, there’s a glass case containing Yoth’s best rifle. It’s a black powder model, so in federal terms it’s not even a firearm. It can be sold to anyone, held by anyone. Black powder doesn’t need a license. When Yoth’s in the mood, he turns out the lights in the pawn, drinks a beer, and lets the rifle shine. Under the fluorescents it looks like any old firearm, dents and pits, but it came with weird copper-cased bullets, and the bullets are hot to the touch, even now, unfired since the 1800’s.
Or rather, fired only once, by Yoth himself, and he got what he needed.
It’s not for sale, but the pawn ticket’s out there still. Brought in by a young woman with tattoos on her eyelids, who said there was no place out far enough that she could be sure people wouldn’t find it, so she was entrusting it to Yoth Begail and his pawn palace for the time being.
“Welp,” said Yoth, who was familiar with people trying to keep their fingers on their valuables from afar. “I’ll take it off your hands, then, ma’am.”
“You have to keep it safe,” she said. “It’s a damned old thing and it’s been in some trouble.”
“Nothing’s damned without it’s had human hands on it,” Yoth said. “That’s just a black powder rifle. It’s the man with bad aim that’s the problem.”
“So you say,” she said. “But you’d be wrong. I’ll be back for it. I haven’t slept in a while, and it’s that thing’s fault. Every so often, I need a rest bad. There has to be a bargain made.”
Yoth considered that. He was a young man then, and he thought for a moment he could consider a wife like her, if he’d consider any wife, but in her stare, he saw nothing he liked. Woman looked like a wild dog, and when she shut her eyes she looked like a rattler. She was wearing clothes so old you’d have thought she lived in a cave, and she had white fur draped around her shoulders, fur of some animal he didn’t know. Leather pants so filthy she might’ve been an animal from the waist down.
“You a hunter then?” he asked.
“Am that,” she said. “Been hunting in these woods years now. Trapping too.”
“Why haven’t I seen you before?” asked Yoth. She couldn’t have been much older than he was.
“I was out a long time this last one,” she said. “Years. Got any tobacco? Can’t smoke when I’m hunting these.”
“Animals don’t care,” said Yoth, passing her a cigarette, lighting it for her. This was before he took to chewing, safer in a pawnshop.
She looked at him and laughed. “What I’m hunting likes the smoke. If I smoked, it’d find me before I’m ready to be found.”
The tattoos on her eyelids were faint enough to be scars, but Yoth could tell someone had inked them in. Tree lines on top of the mountains out here, recognizable peaks. A map. He looked at them secretly as he wrote out her pawn ticket.
“You keep that rifle for me,” she said. “I’ll be back. Don’t fire it unless you want to call up trouble.”
He peered out the window to watch her go. She was on horseback, the horse draped in an unlikely blanket the color of bluebells, a piebald black and white mane. Her mount moved like someone dragged up out of an armchair to dance to a song he’d never heard before. There was a little monkey in a vest sitting on the back of the saddle. The woman, the horse, and the monkey disappeared into the trees, and not long after that, snow piled up against his windows. Time he managed to dig himself out, Yoth Begail had decided to forget about the strange tracks her horse had left, nothing like hooves.
That was sixty years ago. Yoth keeps the glass of the case clear, and the rifle oiled, but otherwise he leaves it alone. It’s loaded, unlike the rest of the pawnshop guns. It’s always been loaded. He took the bullets out once and held them, but he got a terrible feeling, and when he put them back in, there were burns on his palms. They took weeks to heal. That time he went to a doctor, who gave him some goat shit-smelling ointment and told him not to play with matches.
At night he can hear singing coming from inside the rifle case, but he’s no fool. He’s not tempted.
Yoth’s four drinks into the dark when The Kid comes through the front door, slipping in without ringing the bell, loping over to the desk where Yoth is sitting. The Kid says “Old man, give me your best shooter.”
“You’re not old enough to own a gun,” says Yoth. “I only sell to people old enough to aim.”
“I’m older than I look,” says The Kid. “And I’m not what you think. I want me some magic.”
Yoth eyes him.
“Mind out of here now, kid,” says Yoth. “I got the right to refuse service.”
Yoth Begail is eighty-six years old when The Kid steals the rifle off the wall of the pawn palace, and shoots him dead.
•••
The Hunter wakes with a start in the middle of a blizzard, her cave filled with grey light. She’s been sleeping a long time. Her hand is clenched around a slip of paper, and her mouth is dry.
Her heart starts up again, and she waits as blood circulates through her body, locks opening to let salmon through. Now the fish are running, red and pink and silver, bright fish in a bright river. Her horse is there in the entrance of the cave, his blue blanket over him, his mane whiter than it was when she was last awake. She shoves her boots on. The cave is lighter now, and icicles fall from the entrance, spearing the snow, cracking and groaning as they give themselves over to water again. Outside, flowers explode. The hunter stretches her arms and checks her weapon. Her pawn ticket is still legible.
“Up, horse,” she says, and the horse stands, and shakes himself. She straightens his blanket. “Up, monkey,” The Hunter says, and the monkey comes out of the saddlebag and looks around, eyes shining.
“It’s hunting season,” she says.
•••
Another story from the history of the rifle: Yoth Begail fired this rifle just once, twenty years after he received it, into a stick-em-up who’d opened the door of the pawnshop while Yoth was on the can. He grabbed the rifle without thinking, and pulled trigger into the robber.
By then Yoth was forty years old and in love with the priest from down in the river valley, the one who traveled cabin-to-cabin spreading God like margarine.
Yoth had his own secrets, and his own once a year trip away from the woods to a city where there were bars to drink in, and men to drink to, even if he had no way with words. Sometimes he opened his register and looked at the ticket, and wondered if The Hunter was ever coming back. Yoth was starting not to sleep for thinking of the black powder rifle, worrying that someone would steal it, and he wondered if what she’d told him was true, if it was the thing’s fault, or if that was just his mind running wild.
The priest—let us call him The Priest, in the tradition of this kind of story—came to the pawnshop one day in spring and knocked on the door. When Yoth opened it, he was startled. Man of god. There was no god out here. That was why he was in the woods. There was only the new reactor, fenced and barb-wired, patrolled by trucks, and the old places, the missionary buildings going to crumble now, nobody worshipping in them anymore. Hunters holed up eating beef jerky in the wood churches these days, pine needles and pitch, rabbit bones splintered beneath the sign of the cross. Piss graffiti on the walls. Yoth himself had spent some time with a smokejumper in one of those shacks, before he stopped that sort of thing cold. Mob of neighbors at the pawn, that was what his kind of love led to, and he didn’t want it.
“Heard tell you were up here alone, Yoth Begail,” said The Priest, and smiled. He was a rangy man a little younger than Yoth, wearing a string tie and a black suit, and holding a bible in his hand. His face had an openness normally found in fools, but there it was, on him, a man with a clean shave, nicked jaw, and eyes that showed evidence of a history other than prayer.
“Am that,” said Yoth.
“Heard you might be looking for the Lord?”
“Heard wrong,” said Yoth, who could hardly speak. His throat had a lump big as a cocoon in it, and he had no idea what wanted to emerge. Words he’d never say. “You’re new out here,” he said instead.
“I came from Missouri,” The Priest said, with palpable awe. “On a train. I’m the new man of god out here.”
“You are that,” said Yoth. “Got a name?”
The Priest blushed from beneath his collar, his face heating to the color of a coal in a woodstove. Yoth felt himself blushing too, but he was in the shadow.
“I’m Weran Root. Not ‘The Priest.’ I don’t know why I said that. This is my first assignment. I’ve never been to a place like this before. It’s far between people. I’ve been walking this mountain since yesterday looking for you.”
Weran Root came in uninvited and sat down at the jewelry case, gazing in at twenty years of Sunday best. He picked up a red stone and held it to the light.
“What kind of gem is this?”
“It’s from when the reactor melted down,” Yoth tells him. “Twenty years ago. All over the news. You remember.”
Yoth could hear singing coming from the rifle. The jangling noise of a wedding in the wood, a charivari. Coins thrown into the apron of a bride, groom lifted and shaken upside down, laughter, fiddles and howls, whistles and shrieks of ecstasy. He tried to ignore it.
“What’s that on the radio?” Weran Root said. It was a Sunday, but there was nothing church in the song. He looked up at the case on the wall in wonder.
Yoth looked at Weran Root in similar wonder.
Everything was new.
Six months later, when Yoth was grabbing the rifle from the case in the dark, he heard the singing louder still, and as he fired, the singing reached a pitch of tambourine and cymbal, rattling bells, all that louder than the noise of the shot itself.
“Wait! I’m here to save you from the devil!” cried the intruder, reaching for the barrel, but Yoth’s aim was true, and it was already over.
The smoke was dense and final, a black cloud in his eyes and lungs underlining each cell, a fog like a forest fire. It took a moment to clear, but by the time it did, Yoth already knew what he’d done.
He’d put a bullet in the heart of the thin man in the white shirt, string tie, and black suit, a bullet from a singing rifle pawned over by a hunter. On his back on the floor lay the love of one man’s life, his heart something unclaimable by ticket.
Out of the bullet casing came the singer Yoth had been listening to for twenty years, smoke like a roomful of pipes, and in the center of it—
Yoth fell on his knees as something, someone, expanded from out of the wound in the chest of Weran Root, toes still in the place where the bullet had entered, fingers stretching long and gleaming, body undulating up.
“Are you the devil?” Yoth Begail whispered. “Am I the devil?”
He was weeping, his hands full of bent wedding rings and crushed cash from the box, things to bribe back his beloved from the land of the dead.
You get one wish, the smoke said.
And so Yoth wished.
•••
Forty years after Yoth Begail’s wish, The Kid drives down the highway. All he can think about is lack of love. He tells himself a story a night. Girls walking past him in the hallway of the high school. When he prays, he prays to the god of lost causes. He’s a lost cause himself, born bleak in a trailer out in the woods near the reactor, and his mama is a scavenger of skeletons. She smashes them up and makes craft glue mosaics out of them. He wishes she’d smashed and glued him into the shape of some other creature, but she didn’t. Now he’s this. It’s her fault. Their trailer is surrounded by fake white wolves made of cement and paved in mosaics of glass and bone.
Everyone living left this area after the accident that didn’t happen, the fire that wasn’t. He and his mother stayed. Some people make peace with disaster, and his mother’s that kind. Maybe The Kid’s not, but he was doomed before he was born.
The Kid thinks fondly back on himself now, before innocence became experience, before he knew there’d never be any forever for him. He used to walk up and down the road, picking up souvenirs of crystal bones, and holding all that hard blood in his hands, counting it up like he could build something out of it. He had visions of everything back then. Now no one notices him.
Girl’s eyes slant away under lashes, electric blue liner, and who’s that for? Their skin under tight jeans, and who’s that for? It must be for someone. Why not for him? Not for him because it’s never gonna be him. The Kid’s got no future. He’s only past. There’s nothing for him but hands out in the parking lot of a gas station or in the urinal, head against the wall, looking for salvation in a hot air blower and any drug buyable from anyone who’ll sell to invisible boys.
Magic doesn’t make anyone love you. All The Kid can do is start a fire in the palm of his hand and that’s a trick he ordered from the back of a magazine.
Something offered him a wish after he fired that shot in the pawn shop. He’s thinking about it.
•••
The forest is deep winter now, and the caves are full of sleep. Animals uncurl from corners, bears in the backs of mountains and bats in the tops of caverns. Out in the ice where the reactor was, there’s a hot, sulfurous spot, and beneath it there is a sound like coins in the pockets of the world. Steam rises from the cut into the frozen air, a cookpot. Out around that spot in the ice there are three black wolves, sitting on their haunches, their winter coats full and their bellies fat, unlike the other wolves in the area. These wolves are fed.
Wolves are only recently back out here, after years of ranchers and strychnine, and years more of rumor. Wolves speak in howls, and when one is killed the rest know it and walk at night, grieving past the bodies on the fences, past the tufts of fur caught to the barbed wire. Now there are twelve wolves running over this mountain, living on deer meat and rabbit. They eat hot-blooded things, and an occasional bone, brought to them in payment. In the place where the reactor was, there’s heat and smoke, but the ice hides it.
•••
The motorcycle The Hunter’s riding is gleaming black with white trim, a blue blanket stuffed in the gear bag. The monkey clings to her shoulder, its own little helmet buckled tight. There are rotting snowdrifts in the road, and fallen trees, and sometimes a dead animal starved and picked clean. A recently done deer looks reproachfully out from the roadside, flies hatching in her nostrils. The Hunter rides along this highway with its silver stripe down the center, her bag jingling as she goes.
When she gets to the pawnshop, it’s full dark, and there are no lights to say this is a palace. The spot sings out with heat, though, and she has no trouble finding it. It’s loud as a wedding in the woods, if it’s what you’re looking for. She dismounts and takes the monkey in with her, steps over the rubble and rank, the pool of blood, and finds Yoth Begail on the floor.
The monkey hops down, stands on the man’s forehead and peers into his mouth. It knocks on Yoth Begail’s chest and his heart resumes beating, like an engine that’s got too cold.
“You’re not dead,” The Hunter tells Yoth Begail. “You just think you are. Where’d it go?”
“Who?” asks Yoth, bleary.
“The one who came out of the bullet,” The Hunter says. “I see you got shot. Did you shoot yourself, or did someone shoot you?”
“A kid shot me, and took the rifle when he went,” says Yoth.
“Did he make a wish?”
“I don’t know,” says Yoth. “Boy was a strange customer, and I was well and truly dead. I regret I didn’t see him coming.”
She goes. The bike growls, and leaves tracks like a man running barefoot, like a horse galloping in gypsum, and then the tracks are gone again, white hollows in an evening world.
Yoth turns his head to look at the vision beside him, a tall man in the string tie. All the gemstones that were in the case are on the man’s fingers, and all the music in the shop is played by his hands, and if he is not quite visible, if he lives in the crack between night and day, it’s no huge matter. The shop is as fine a place for shadows as anywhere.
Yoth’s wish was a switching of places, his dead beloved for the living djinn. He was left with a lover made of smoke.
“I thought I was over with,” Yoth Begail says.
“I thought so too,” says the man who was Weran Root. “But you’re not, and I’m not, and here we are, in the dark, without the devils.”
“The rifle’s with the Kid,” says Yoth.
“If I were still a praying man and not this, I might pray,” says Weran Root. “He’s going to shoot til he’s done. That’s his notion. It was written all over him. But we have a wish too. I planned for this. We don’t let boys bring down the universe.”
“We?” says Yoth Begail.
Weran Root opens his hand and reveals a bullet, the creature it contains still singing from inside it.
“I took this one years ago,” says Weran Root, with the peaceful Missouri certainty he’s always had, from long before he was a djinn. Weran Root never worried, even when love took him over and remade him. When he was changed from flesh into smoke, the love continued, blazing through Yoth Begail’s lonely life, making the entirety of it bright. Yoth looks at his husband, and feels his own heart beating. He takes The Priest’s hand in his own.
“The legends lie. Wish granters are not only makers of palaces full of beautiful girls, and of forests in the desert,” Weran Root says. “Wish granters sometimes reverse things.”
•••
This is the beginning of this story.
Backward in time, a thousand years. Here’s a girl in the desert, enslaved to a sultan. She wanders in and out of the shadows of a roomful of oil lamps, stepping on a stool to reach the highest ones and bringing them all down at once for polishing.
She knows what they are. She knows what she is and is not supposed to do with these lamps. She doesn’t care.
She sets everything free at once. Why should they not be free? Why should she not? She frees herself from the job of story. She’s been the girl who tells tales nightly, the girl who memorizes the histories of every star and whispers them into the ears of the sultan in hopes of keeping herself from being killed. She frees herself from the job of guiding men through the dark.
Forward in time eight hundred years, that same girl, now a woman, walks the woods of this part of America. She runs into a trapper, wearing a blue blanket stolen from his last wife’s people. He’s drunk, and he’s been traveling alone too long. He’s a man in a pile of pelts, bear and wolf, beaver and mink, all the heat of their fur divorced from their blood, and she has no use for him.
“I need a woman,” he shouts at her across the snow. “My woman died.”
“I don’t need a man,” she says and keeps walking. Deep snow and snowshoes, leaving tracks like she’s two flat-tailed beavers walking side by side.
“You need me,” he insists, but she keeps walking.
He runs up behind her and grabs her by the hair, pulling the braid away from her skull, tearing the roots, and she feels her own blood sizzle on her cold skin.
That’s all he gets from her. Her heart is a copper lamp, and inside it is black smoke.
She made a wish a long time ago, and it was granted. She walks in safety.
•••
The Hunter’s eyelids are marked with the trees from a smoke tower, the place she sees if she looks over the woods and watches how they turn to words written on white snow slates. Everything is written somewhere, and all the languages of the world are here, in the bird tracks and the wolves dragging bloodied rabbits.
She should have buried her captives when she needed to sleep, not pawned them, though the old rules said the pawn should have kept them safe. She should’ve left them alone in the metal house in the woods, far from anyone, but last place like that, she found empty. A thousand years of searching for the wishes she set free, and now she only wants to find the last of them. They don’t stay caged in copper.
She wonders. Maybe the things she hunts, if she left them to their own devices, perhaps they’d carry the old to their beds and the dying to their graves. She’s been hunting too long to tell if the world is worse without wishes than with them. She’s seen some wishes made, though. She feels guilt for her part in history, and so she hunts the djinn, trying to bring them back into captivity.
The Hunter rides past the site where the expedition ate itself. There they were, their hands full of blood, their mouths full of bone. She rides past the reactor she didn’t keep from melting down. It wasn’t her fault. She was sleeping, and she didn’t know what was living inside it.
She’s behind a truck now, on the highway, her motorcycle whining, the monkey’s paws twisted in her hair. Rifle rack on the back of the cab, and The Kid’s driving on the wrong side of the road.
She can hear the radio, The Kid playing loud to drown out the noise as he heads toward the high school floodlights in the middle of the field, the peeled paint coming off trucks like onion skin, the smell of metallic sweat, sleep and chemistry labs, the smell of the reactor’s effects continuing forward into the future, each generation on fire, brightness continuing through them, turning the children into something other than children. Now she knows that wishers are everywhere.
The Kid turns in at the high school. As he does, he looks to the thing in the back of the pickup truck, and makes a wish.
•••
There are reactions and reactors and spills in the river, there are trees growing up out of white dust, and children born dazzled, with hearts full of black smoke. There are wishes inhaled in first breaths and exhaled in final ones.
•••
The Kid has barred the door of the high school with an axe handle, and no one knows it yet. He is walking into the cafeteria, his denim making the rustle of rough animals brushing against one another in a pasture.
But outside the cafeteria, Weran Root, a priest made of wishes, cracks open the casing of the bullet, releases the djinn inside, and makes a wish, calling a reaction from the reactor.
In the woods, there’s light around trees, and heat steaming from the earth. There are three black wolves, and with a howl and a leap they fling themselves into the sky and become birds. Out of the reactor emerges a djinn, hidden in this place for a hundred and fifty years.
The Kid is walking toward the girls. They’re seated in a row of shining ponytails and for a moment he thinks he’s walking toward a stable, and then—
Girls on their backs, girls on horseback, girls in horsehair. Old stories from an old expedition. Stories he’s told himself about happiness, all of them failures, all of them involving being lost without a guide, wandering helpless and hopeless, lonely forever.
I need a girl to look at me, he tells himself. That’s his wish. It’s a wish many have made before him, and it’s never turned out well.
The cafeteria is, in an instant, full of wild horses, snorting and prancing, galloping, chestnuts and dapple grays, blues and reds. The Kid stands in the midst of all these girls who are no longer girls.
There’s only one real girl left in the cafeteria, and The Kid, despairing on his mission, his legend shrinking, raises the ancient rifle, and balances it on his shoulder. He’s surrounded by horseflesh, the smell of horses wearing drugstore perfume, horses with hairspray in their manes, horses stepping around him and treading on him, rearing up, neighing.
The girl has tattooed eyelids and a monkey in her arms. She looks at The Kid. He’s crying. He has his finger on the trigger. The Kid is somebody’s wish, somebody’s son, with his hardening blood and brightening bones.
“Come over here now,” The Hunter says.
Around him the horses of the high school spin, about their own business. The Kid is constituted of despair. He aims the rifle, shaking, at her.
A cloud coheres, standing between The Hunter and The Kid.
The Hunter looks at the smoke, her old companion.
“There you are,” she says. “I heard you melted something down. Heard you made some things.”
This djinn, the first to emerge a thousand years ago, has been lonely a while.
I heard my son was up to bad wishing, says the smoke.
The Kid looks around, bewildered as the smoke wishes him backward in time, sends him back to his childhood, to his mother, to the mosaics in the yard made of bones.
He flickers for a moment, in his denim and misery, and then he’s gone.
The room is full of stampeding horses and then the room is full of stampeding daughters, and then the room is full of the children of this part of the mountains, all of them made of magic, all of them the drift that comes of wishes falling from the sky like snow.
“Come with me,” says The Hunter to the smoke. “At the end of every story, there’s another story. I’ve been looking for you a long time. This is the story after the hunt.”
The smoke regards her.
There’s a world inside every wish. There are miles inside every lamp. There are places in these mountains where everything may dwell at once, guarded by wolves.
The two of them, old lovers, old stories, a Scheherazade and her secret, leave only a scrap of paper, a ticket exchanging one thing for another, and a little monkey that springs up and drops a handful of copper casings on the ground as it departs for the forest.
•••
Yoth Begail is driving out of the woods, and beside him, covered in a cloak to keep him in shadow, is Weran Root. Yoth’s eighty-six years old and recently dead. Death doesn’t bother him. He’s smoking a Cuban cigar brought out from someone’s humidor, a pawnshop perk.
“Remember when I was The Priest?” says Weran Root. “Remember when I held the word in my hands and tried to put it around your finger?”
“Yep,” says Yoth Begail. “I remember.” He passes Weran Root a brooch made of blood and bone, and the old man made of smoke causes it to appear and disappear in his fingertips.
“What did you wish for?” Yoth Begail asks Weran Root.
“No one tells their wishes,” says Weran Root. “Those are the rules of this kind of story.”
They are two old men in love, freed of their obligations, in possession of every ticket for everything left in their keeping. They are driving out of the mountains, and toward the sea.
•••
The Kid is wished into another story, a hundred and fifty years before the beginning of this one. Now he’s a newborn baby found in these woods, the forest bending to look down at him. He’s the child of a dead woman, and his father is a freetrapper, but none of this is his pain.
Someone who will love him picks him up. She carries him away from the ice and into the green mountains, holds him beside a fire, sings him a song that tells a story about spring. Now he’s raised with love instead of fury.
The wishes in this story are wishes built the way wishes are always built, and the way bullets are built too, to keep going long after they’ve left the safety of silence. Each person is a projectile filled with sharp voice and broken volume, blasts of maybe.
The hands outstretch, the hearts explode. The chamber is the world and all the bodies on earth press close around each bullet, holding it steady until, with a rotating spin, it flies.
Everything living is built to burn, of course. After the close, dark chamber comes the cold, bright world.
And after the world? After the world is a cloud of smoke, and in the center of the cloud, a whispering flame.
