Wordplay!
by Zoe Roos Scheuerman ’24
This month, The Words is excited to feature Teddy D. Holt ‘22 (he/him). Teddy is a creative writing undergraduate at Macalester College. Their work is steeped in a deep curiosity about the land and their relationship to it, and they write often about mental illness, violence, and living in a body and world that feels haunted more times than not. They hail originally from Kickapoo, Osage, and Wichita land in central Oklahoma, but live and work now on Dakota land in Saint Paul, MN. We hope you enjoy his short story, “Night Phlox”!
Night Phlox
CW: depictions of a car accident, child death, and parental death. “Glimmer, Lantern, Glimmer” is by Lorraine Nelson Wolf, and “Happy Birthday” is by Tom Chapin.
Let us go now, my only companion / Set out for the distant skies / Soon the children will be rising, will be rising
— Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (feat. Else Torp), “Distant Sky”
She woke up cold and with the ghost of gas-fire panic in her chest. There had been music playing… banjo, Daddy’s old band. Starlight blared in her eyes—no, that was a headlight, but the stars were bright and swimming overhead, that was true. The feeling was coming back to her fingers—asphalt, little nubbly rocks, nothing felt quite right. Numbness dominated in flashes. Frogs chorused in the woods. A shadow lifted its dark body from the road—a great crown of branches on its head—the car had swerved—no, antlers—the car steamed into the thin soil. The moose shook itself off. The girl went cold as a broken flashlight all over again.
Crawling to the driver’s side door scrunched against the roadside weeds she could see her daddy crumpled like a November pumpkin she looked back to the road the moose stood she looked back and she was there on the ground her purple dress black and twisted as her little body the moose stood in the body her hands were numb the moose stood the moose stood.
Can ghosts cry? There were only the frogs and the gentle hiss of the car for sound. A diaphragm that no longer contracted heaved inside of her, or didn’t, her spine curved as the stems of the white violets dotting the roadside. Who knows if ghosts can cry. She couldn’t. She could only remember the heave of her stomach as she woke in the passenger seat to fracturing glass, pain. She breathed. She wondered if she needed to breathe. She stopped breathing. She sat.
The moose came to stand over her, gingerly, favoring its back left leg. Mutely they considered one another. The car groaned and popped. She felt the moose’s warm breath as it stirred the blonde hairs on her little head—she jerked away and so did it, surprised. Movement restored feeling to her. She had to get away. She had to get away from Daddy with his tangle of a face. He looked—he looked at her—his eyes were like the eyes of a trout, flat, unseeing. He was a dead thing still breathing. She was just a dead thing. Dead dead dead. She had to get away.
The moose stood at the treeline. Turning its huge head to her, it stood. She stood. They faced each other like they were making a vase of the night. Lumbering slowly on, the moose entered the trees, and the girl followed.
The ground was damp with last year’s leaf litter, and they walked until the road existed only in the girl’s memory. Though there were no lights, she found she could see the ferns and fleshy spring flowers, and this disturbed her. She had never been afraid of the dark, but she had never seen the things that grew in it quite so clearly. She stayed close to the moose, and it took her a long time to recognize that the shapes in the distance were lights—huge lanterns shaped like fish and stars, fairy lights strung in the low branches of the oaks, the suggestion of a huge fire leaping against the shape of a house. Drawing closer—it was a covered bridge that connected the two banks of a broad, whispering stream, although no road led to it. Winged fish limned in silver leaped from the waters.
Sounds of revelry bloomed in her ears as they entered the bridge—for a moment, the world was a dark sky and a bright square of light and singing, laughing. The moose paused in the shadow of the bridge and turned to look at her once more, as if questioning. The girl shook and tugged on the hem of her dress, huddling into the railing. Who was out there? The moose blew out its breath and stepped into the warm light.
A bonfire crackled with pine sap in the center of a clearing rimmed in light. There were throngs of people—naked men and women with spotted fawn legs, tiny men with backs of porcupine quills, a crooning circle of young women with arms melded at the wrists and ankle-length hair in varying shades. A man with a moose head sat in the dirt with a flock of turkeys, drinking golden liquid from a giant acorn and talking seriously. Squirrels chattered in the branches—the girl saw one with a huge mushroom, surely stolen from the long wooden table heaped with berries and other food, squabble with another squirrel and drop the mushroom on a porcupine man’s head. He cursed angrily as the two squirrels chased each other around the tree trunk.
A loud ribbit sounded from below the girl, startling her into seeing the bullfrog hopping through the covered bridge. It stepped into the light and became a shockingly tall man—gravely, he turned to her and extended a hand.
“This dance, my lady?” Trembling but unsure how to refuse, the girl placed her hand in his. Next to his deep brown skin, her hand glimmered and reflected the firelight, no longer totally opaque. He drew her gently out into the light—she gasped, seeing how her body looked now like the flying fish, silver and wispy.
“Do not be afraid,” the bullfrog man said in her ear as he began to lead her in the dance. Spring peepers trilled along with the drums and fiddles and singular clarinet held by people with furred hands and rosy-cheeked women dripping with moss. Young women and their beaus danced around the girl and the bullfrog man, looking for all the world like humans transplanted from a different century,
except for the maggots bursting from their eyes or the fungi marring their cheeks. Some of the men had strong yellow chicken’s feet poking out from their trousers. They giggled like humans, though, and as the bullfrog man spun her away into the crowd, the girl found herself dancing with the dead men and women, swirling faster and faster. She didn’t know the steps and stumbled often, but the women in calico skirts smiled kindly at her and passed her onto their friends saying things like, “Be careful—this one’s a little firecracker!”
Finally she reached the end of the dance and tumbled from the mass of dead lovers onto the other side of the bonfire. A woodchuck in red overalls chittered with a goose that was rapidly falling asleep; a huge lynx opened one sleepy eye from beneath the food table. Exhausted and overwhelmed, the girl backed to the edge of the clearing and stood with her arms tightly crossed, mouth wobbling as the sounds of the party smashed over her.
After a moment she saw the bullfrog man with his green shirt and tight curls duck out from the dance and head towards her.
Kneeling down in front of the girl, he said, “Come. Your friend is waiting for you.” What friend?, the girl wondered—surely there was no one she knew in this horrid place. Allowing herself to be led to the edge of the ring of light, however, she saw the moose, waiting for her once again. Its right leg had been bandaged and the air around it smelled of dill and honey. “Go, little one. These festivities are not for you,” the bullfrog man told her with a smile. Wide-eyed, she nodded and stepped once more into the darkness with the moose.
There was no path that they followed, not at first, but soon the debris of the forest floor parted into a deer track, and then a proper path. They crossed a burbling brook—the moose through the water, the girl precariously on a fallen log. The terrain formed a bowl around them. The girl kept breathing hard only to realize again that she no longer needed to, and the feeling sparked a little bit of panic each time it happened. By the time they emerged from the depression in the land to see a little cabin with a fenced garden and murky pond, she was almost immobile with fear.
The full moon shone clear and strong on the house, and she could see an old man working in the garden. The moose made for the pond, but she was frozen, watching the man from behind the trees. She could hear him singing:
Glimmer, lantern, glimmer! Little stars a-shimmer
Over meadow, moor and dale flitter flutter elfin veil
Pee-wit pee-wit, tick-a-tack-a-tick, roo-coo-roo-coo.
Glimmer, lantern, glimmer! Little stars a-shimmer
Over rock and stock and stone wander tripping little gnome
Pee-wit, pee-wit, tick-a-tack-a-tick, roo-coo-roo-coo.
Slowly and shyly, she crept closer to the house. The old man remained fixed on his gardening—tomatoes, the girl could tell as she crept closer. He did not look up even as she laid her pale hand on the low gate, but he did stop singing.
“Hello?” she whispered. Her voice sounded so strange to her own ears—it sounded like the voice of a live person. Her stomach lurched, and she shrank behind the wood of the fence until she was just barely peering above the bushes on the other side.
The old man put down his trowel and sat back on his heels, and then he looked at her for the first time. His eyes were ghost-silver like the girl’s body, but the wrinkles on his face and the dirt underneath his fingernails and crusted on his flannel seemed living enough.
“Hello, there,” he said in that beautiful tenor voice he had been singing in. “I’ve been expecting you.”
“Why?” the girl asked, her fingernails digging half moons into the soft wood of the fence. “Why am I here?”
“You’re dead. That, and tonight is a lucky night for dying,” he said and pointed up toward the moon.
“I don’t feel lucky,” she said and a great wave of tiredness rolled through her body, and she sat heavily down on the damp grass.
“Why don’t you come in and sit inside, where it’s a little drier? I can’t see you through this rose bush anymore,” he said from through the slick leaves.
“Okay,” the girl agreed—what else was there to do in this situation? The moose was now wading in the pond, bowing its heavy head to eat the vegetation that grew there. There was no way she could find her way back to the party without its help, or the road, but she didn’t want to return there anyway. Her stomach flipped picturing the road, picturing the twisted car and the man inside. Slowly she rose and undid the gate latch.
The steps leading to the green wooden door were old and worn, and the girl saw two finches nestled snugly together on the railway, dreaming. The old man held the door open for her, and she saw a cozy space with just enough for the kitchen, a table, and an armchair, and with a ladder leading up to a darkened loft.
“Here, sit,” he prompted her and pulled out a chair from the table, leaving the door propped open to let in the cool spring air. “Would you like some hot cocoa?”
Sitting in a chair in a real house with a real person who was, at least mostly, normal was too much for the girl. A dry sob shuddered its way up her throat. She clapped her hands to her chubby face and shook like an aspen.
The old man sat gently across from her, and he watched her cry. She could feel him looking, but it did not feel bad. He sat and watched until her breathing smoothed out and indeed until she realized again she did not need to breathe, and then he rose and lit the stove.
Alone and unscrutinized for the first time since she had died, the little girl looked at her hands. There was the scar where Milo had dug his back claws into her trying to get free, and there was the special freckle her daddy kissed when she went to school. Her hands were pure silver now. So was the rest of her. When she pushed her finger into the table, it went through. Yelping, she cradled the digit to her chest, although it had not hurt.
The old man returned with two steaming mugs, setting one before her and keeping one for himself. A scant few marshmallows floated in the chocolate; she took a sip. It was too hot, but at least she could feel it.
“How can I drink this if—if I’m dead?” she asked.
“A good question,” the man said, smiling faintly. “When I want something to happen in my cabin, it happens.” He waved his knotted hand and flowers appeared in a yellow vase on the table. They were small and white, with bloodred underbellies. “See these? They only bloom at night. I could make them bloom all day long, but I don’t.”
The girl stirred her cocoa sullenly. “Well, I think you should make them bloom never.” She didn’t know why she said it—it just came out. Her head hurt somehow, without any pain. “If they never bloomed, they’d never die,” the man said.
“Exactly.”
“And, if they never died, I’d never remember them. But they’re beautiful, and they smell good, and it makes me happy to remember them.” He touched the flowers then, and they withered gray and contorted before her. He withdrew his hand, and the ghost of a flower danced through his fingers.
The girl gasped. “How could you do that?” She was mad. She was so mad. She stood and flung the vase from the table, and it shattered against the wooden wall.
“Because I wanted to,” the man said, unmoved and still smiling that little smile. The girl quivered with rage. The man opened his palm, and the ghost of the flower dissipated into the air. The girl gasped and tried to catch the sparks of light like snowflakes, but like snow they merely dissolved on her bare skin. She looked lost in the lamplight.
“Your father is going to die,” the old man said, not unkindly.
The girl’s face crumpled. “He can’t.”
“He will.”
“When?” the girl’s gauzy form wavered and flickered. She wanted him to hold her, to tell her he would protect her. To kiss her special freckle. She buried her face in her hands.
“Before the sun rises. Our friend out there, in the pond; he only brought you here to wait—he is good at knowing where people need to get to. But now we should return, before he leaves you all alone.”
This filled the girl with sadness like a flash flood. Deep and churning with memories of her mother in the hospital, her daddy playing banjo, blueberry picking, the funeral, crows in the firs, church bells, all like debris washed down the mountain. Her daddy promising he’d never leave her as they stood outside the Dollar General in the rain, snot crusted to the inside of her jacket. Her daddy telling her she was too good for this world. Falling asleep in the passenger seat to the sound of the banjo… his ruined face.
The world outside of the old man’s door glowed brighter. She staggered to the doorjamb. The night forest was alight with silver—every stitch of grass hemmed in with it, the stars blinding, the willow tree staggering under its weight.
“What happened?” she asked, half in horror and half in wonder.
“They’re just memories, memories that have lived longer than you or I ever will. They can’t hurt you,” he replied from behind her. “You’re one of them, now, aren’t you?” The girl touched the beams of the porch that were lined in silver, and she shivered. She could feel every dead thing. Every memory.
“We should get going,” the old man said, grabbing a shepherd’s crook. “The sun will rise soon.”
Dazed, the girl followed him out of the door, down the stairs, and back into the night.
By the time they reached the clearing of the party, honey-colored light was beginning to reflect off the bottom of the clouds overhead. Many of the revelers were asleep on the ground or had left. The bullfrog man, sitting quietly with the clarinetist, nodded to the pair as they tiptoed past, toward the covered bridge.
Through the covered bridge, the girl could see the road. She was sure it had been forest before. But it was the road. The lightening sky showed thick dark skid marks on the asphalt, the spray of dirt where the wheels had spun before slamming into the splintering tree. The girl looked at everything that wasn’t the car, the silver car. Trees. Wildflowers. Road. Other trees. The only thing left was the car.
“Tell me a memory,” the old man said out of the bluing silence. “Of your father.” The girl couldn’t help it. She looked at the car. She looked at her father’s arm splayed out of the crash, the pale light sweeping soft fingers over the scene and making it horrible. Horrible to look at it. Horrible to feel. Her stomach climbed into her mouth and stayed there.
“His hand is cut right now,” she said, “he can’t play the banjo. He loves the banjo.” “Tell me a time he played for you.”
“He plays me birthday songs. Every birthday he sings for me.”
“And how old are you?”
“I’m eight. Eight years old.”
“Eight birthday songs. That’s wonderful.” The sun peeked above the horizon of the road. The girl looked at the old man. He looked at her and waved his hands.
A man stood now in silver relief against the hunk of damaged metal. He looked around wildly, his body spasming, falling to the ground, crying out in pain flickering upright his face contorting his face smashing in his face. He had a face. He had a face again. Her daddy. His face.
The girl ran from the covered bridge to him and flung her arms around him. He knelt and she could feel his rough sweater and his beard and smell him even though he was dead and she was dead she remembered the feel of his hands. She remembered she remembered he loved her he held her the sun rose. They stood the sun rose. The girl turned. The old man waved, winked, one silver eye, the sun rising. The covered bridge gone. The edges of their bodies glinting away in shards. “Daddy, can you sing me a birthday song?”
“Oh, my baby, my baby girl, of course I can,” he’s saying, crying into her soft hair. “Oh, my sweet girl.” And then the sun is rising, and her daddy is singing her a song.
Happy birthday, happy birthday, we love you.
Happy birthday,
And may all your dreams come true.
When you blow out the candles,
One light stays aglow.
It’s the lovelight in your eyes
where’er you go.