The November First Selected Story is by Chris Castle

Please feel free to email Chris at: chriscastle76@hotmail.com

BONFIRE NIGHT

by Chris Castle

They went to find the kite three days after the man was arrested. Until then, their parents had not allowed them back into the forest.

The kite’s ribbon ran from the branches of a tree. The tail was red, decorated with  small cloth triangles. The boy found it and pulled on his sister’s shirt with one hand, pointing with the other. The two of them looked at it, and both silently understood that they would never give this discovery to the adults.

“He owned this kite,” she said. She was aware that even though she whispered, her voice carried throughout the forest, just like the voices in the barn did. She sometimes sat in the barn’s loft, up amongst the rafters and heard the men and women who met in secret there talking in whispers just as she was doing now. They feasted on the rumors, amongst their quiet, nervous laugher.

“He flew it on top of Bear Hill,” she went on, and she enjoyed watching her brother pale, his skin sheen with sweat. “After each one, he flew it.”

And right beyond the tree line, fireworks exploded into the sky. Somewhere close by, children sang ‘remember, remember, the fifth of November.’ The fire had not been lit, not yet, but the townsfolk were getting ready. She could feel it in the air, almost like a low, humming vibration.

“A kite,” she said after a long while. “He made a kite out of their skin. He made the wood into the shape of a crucifix and then he sowed their faces right onto it.” She looked over to her brother and saw him looking down into the dirt. She knew he was imagining dried red blood amongst the grains.

“He weaved the teeth into the trail to catch the wind better. Then he used their hair for the ribbons to make it glide. He really made it soar. The string he used was the same one that he finished them off with, around the throat.” She touched her own neck without thinking. “If you held it up to the light, you could see it was red with blood, but otherwise you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”

“How do you know these things? You couldn’t know!” His voice was high and cracking. He stared at her, the rims of his eyes red, like he was almost about to cry. She pointed upwards, to remind him of where she sat in the barn’s roof sometimes. Once, she had led her brother up there and he had sat, opened-mouthed at the things he saw adults do, and the things they said when they thought no one was listening.

“All things flying,” she said in a sing-song voice, knowing that the sweeter she made her voice, the sicker her brother would become. She could tell it was working, because her brother looked up to the sky, beyond the trail and past the tree line, trying to imagine the kite high in the air, the red of the material turning darker with other things.

Then the boy turned to study their find once again. “You don’t know all these things,” he repeated flatly, trying to keep his voice level to appear strong. He put his hands on his hips to steady himself, but he knew he wasn’t strong at all.

“You don’t know that I don’t,” she said calmly, undercutting her brother’s bravado with a sense of fact, or even boredom. She watched him swallow down her words, and then she was about to say something else and was surprised when nothing came out.

Overhead there were more explosions; and through the trees they could see the flickers of dying rockets. Something screeched without exploding and made him flinch. There were not all that many trees to block their view of the events taking place in the town.

They stared at each other until she made a sudden movement; with a gentleness that surprised him, she pulled the kite from the branch, leaving it to softly drop at her feet. The boy waited for her to scoop it up into her hands, but instead she edged away, until she was further from it than him. The boy stepped forward and seized it in both hands, surprised at how eager he was to claim it.

“Check your fingers,” she said, looking down from his face to his hands. Without thinking, he looked to the tips of each one, waiting to see if any of them were blemished red. There was nothing to see, save for the smile that grew and grew on her lips. Slowly, she licked each one of her fingertips, just to make him squirm even more before her. He clutched the kite to his chest and looked back to the town.

“We should get back. It’ll be starting soon,” she said to her brother, and he looked over to her and nodded. The humming in the air had risen; crackling the way the sky did just before a storm. The town’s children had stopped singing, although there was still something like a murmur in the air. The pitch was different now, lower, and she realized it was the adults making the noise; not singing, not quite, but something like it; was it chanting? It was something like the ethereal sounds when they made love or whispered a secret. She knew it should have scared her, hearing grown-ups acting not quite as they should, but instead it excited her. It gave her the same sensations she experienced in the barn when voices slipped away into grunts and the speech broke away into pants of need.

“Are you ready to see?” she asked her brother, genuinely curious for his answer. It was the one thing she didn’t know about him. For a long second he stood still, looking to her, then coughed gently.

“I’m ready,” the boy finally said, and he clutched the malevolent kite to his chest, as if to prove the point. And so the two of them began the walk back to the town. The forest ran out almost immediately and soon they were on the path.

The kite grew heavy in his hands because he kept his fists clenched and his breathing grew labored. She listened to his wheezing until she could stand it no longer and seized the thing off him. He wanted to object but he couldn’t summon up his voice.

She taunted her brother with the sight of the kite now in her capable hands and flaunted how easily she walked with it. But something else too; she wondered if the sounds her little brother made were close to what they had made underneath the killer at the end. What sounds had their throats made just before he had drawn the kite string down over them? She wondered if what she heard was close to dying.

They reached the end of the path and stepped into the town. Everywhere was filled with hazy smoke now, fireworks either roaring into life or dying out on the ground around them. As she stepped through the mists, she became aware of a fire being lit, the crackle of the torches being brought into life. The earth was upside down; the ground was covered in clouds while the sky burned bright. She smiled at the feeling of confusion this brought, smiled so hard she almost burst out laughing. This is what chaos feels like, she thought happily, looking all around and seeing her brother’s hands shake by his side amongst all the confusion.

She made out the shadow figures of the adults, all of them making their way to the barn where she saw them come alive at night. The first torch exploded into life, becoming a beacon for the rest to follow; slowly the shadows fell into a sort of order behind the fire and the townspeople marched into the barn. She followed them in, her brother by the door, so she could see just enough of what was about to happen. Some of the adults stepped out of the shadows, as if to shoo them away; and then they saw the kite in her hands, but they knew that she kept their secrets and so they looked away, pretending to ignore what she held as best as they could.

The man was at the center of the barn, tied to the cross with straw at his feet. His mouth was gagged, but he was not trying to scream. Instead, he simply looked from one face to the next, taking them all in. There was dried blood on his forehead, one eye was blackened and swollen, and his ear was torn. The sheriff had spent three days with him and had left his mark.

The sister looked around amongst the mists to see who were now in the barn for justice: the sheriff was there, as was the judge, all of those who had sat in that cold, grey room to bring forth a sentence; and so were all of their families.

The man who held the torch made his way to the heart of the barn. Three others stepped into the center, each clutching torches. The first torch-man turned and carefully lit each oiled rag that was stuffed into the kindling wood, the flames making the expression on the condemned man’s face clearer. As the killer on the crucifix bit down on the gag, every twitch was clear to see, even as the fires kept the crowd hidden in the half light.

The chanting of the adults grew louder, almost drowning out the noise of the explosions outside. It was as if the whole town was ready to ignite, the sister thought, her heart racing.

Finally three townspeople crept forward, each of them adding their torch to the kindling, building the blaze. They stood back, as if to give the rest of them a better view, but then one lunged forward again, jamming his torch into the gagged mouth of the killer. He was pulled away by the other two, the crowd dissenting, wanting to see the murderer suffer and burn. The gag burned, so the man looked as if he breathed fire, but it did not spread over the rest of his face. Instead, even as his tongue burnt away, his eyes stayed open and wide, still looking from one adult to the next.

Trying to remember them, to find some sort of sorrow from the depths of her being, the sister could not go there in her mind, so she was unable to stifle her excitement which was almost growing into a form of ecstasy. She was not able to hide the smile on her face, even as the smell of the burning flesh began to carry out into the air, overwhelming even the heavy fumes of the smoke.

The entire town watched as one as the killer burned alive. Around the edges of the flames were the adults; moths, the sister thought, like moths around a reading lamp. She gripped the kite tighter, feeling the tautness of the material underneath her fingertips. She listened to the sound of the kite as she ran her nails along it, over and over, until it started to weaken and fray.

The killer’s body moved and convulsed, as each part of it was eaten up by the fire. The twitching came soon after, as if at the very end, he was trying to shake the fire off his bones like an itch that could not quite be scratched. But all the while, the sister noticed, his head did not move, even as his body writhed. Instead he stayed a witness, not only to his own death, but also to see the faces of his executioners, until, at last, the flames moved over his skull and ended him.

She stepped out of the barn and into the town, aware that her brother was still following her. The fireworks still crackled into life, but there were fewer now; the noise not as great. The adults began to leave the barn, knowing that soon the mists would fade and they would no longer be protected by anonymity. They streamed out all around her, bustling against her, some of them coughing and clearing their throats. None of them spoke, the murmurs dying away, so there were only the explosions of the sky and the crackling of the body inside.

No longer paying attention to the shadow adults around her, the sister began to unfurl the kite. She ran it into the breeze, until it hoisted into the air. When it was good and high, she handed the sting to her brother. He took it without a word; he was pale now and changed forever by what he had seen and she knew it.
He looked over to her and the question of what was in her other hand formed in his eyes but not on his lips. Instead, the boy silently drew the kite in, raveling the string back into a ball as the kite descended from the sky until it fell back to earth, and he retrieved it. She leaned over and then threw what was in her hand onto the center of the red kite. She smeared it in with her fingers, so it was good and ground in. Then she took hold of it, stepping away from her brother and instantly forgetting him.

She launched the kite back into the air, watching it soar as the last firework of the night flashed around it and made it visible. Then there was silence all over the town, as she watched the kite soar higher and higher, and above the trail of sparks that still shined, the color of the kite was different now and somehow brighter for it.  

Chris Castle is English but works in Greece as a teacher. He has been accepted over 150 times in the last year and a half, ranging from sci-fi to horror to straight drama. He has also been published in several end-of-year anthologies. He is currently beginning work on his forth book. His influences include Stephen King, Ray Carver and PT Anderson. He is also working on a poetry collection.