The Wall was not beautiful, but everyone had heard that what lay on the other side of it was supposed to be. And so, the mossy green and dulled silver rocks—piled up on themselves ten feet high and laterally as far as the eye could see—either attracted or repelled, though they were themselves neither attractive nor repelling. The stones attracted the brave, the resolute, and the people at the end of their ropes, some of whom ran courageously to the Wall while others (those rope-enders, mostly) shuffled forward with eyes downcast, their necks numb from looking inward but coming up short, their steps resolute only in the sense that they had nowhere else to go. Strangely, the categories of people repelled by the lichened rocks were of the same ilk: brave and resolute—life in town had as yet been to them either blissful or manageable, whether because nothing much had happened (these were young, usually) or because they only looked inward to find what they wanted and not what there really was, at least not in its entirety (and these necks were upright with pride).
Saoirse considered herself neither—brave nor resolute, that is. The Wall was fearful, certainly—both those attracted and repelled would say the same (even if the upright necks would not admit it)—but it was largely because what was beyond it was unknown, and no one much fancied that. Saoirse’s parents had both been to the Wall several times throughout their sixty years apiece, and they both said the same thing: “No one wants to go, not really, but in going you see it’s a necessary place to be.”
“When do I go?” asked Saoirse once, four years old and tugging brown braids between little fingers.
“You go when there is nowhere else to go,” said her mother, her deep brown eyes glancing sideways at Saoirse’s father’s empty armchair. The conversation had come about because, when Saoirse asked why her father was at the paper mill on a Saturday, her mother had said he had not gone to work, but to the Wall. He would be back, she said, but she didn’t know when.
Saoirse had bitten her tiny lip. “But why?” The idea of Papa not being at home in the evenings to read Adventures of Pipton aloud by the fire, or tug Mama’s ear when he walked by her pressing silver into molds at her worktable, or kiss Saoirse’s forehead goodnight…it was too much to comprehend.
Mama had looked at her gently. “You know why, sweet girl.”
And she did. Four years old though she may have been, Saoirse had noticed her father’s downturned mouth, his eyes squinting into the cottage’s tiny bathroom mirror, hands clenching the sink when he thought she wasn’t peering in from the hallway. He was more tired than usual in the evenings after work, he didn’t clean his boots and his animated voice for the Calloway Bears of Pipton had less playful gruffness and more real gruffness, which made Saoirse come to dread when the bears entered the scene. It had been this way since Uncle Rogan—her father’s brother—had passed away a few months previously. Saoirse didn’t know him very well, as he didn’t live nearby, but Mama had always said that he and Papa were two beans of the same stalk.
Maybe it was Saoirse’s innocence, or maybe it was the little fire that stirred up in her heart when she thought of her papa standing at the towering gray stones for months on end without coming home, but either way, her next question came without hesitation: “Can I go to him?”
Saoirse’s mother could not contain her surprise, thin eyebrows flying up into her curly black bangs, a thin whistle emitting from her nose with the sharp intake of air. “My girl,” she said finally, once she had regained composure. “I do not know that you know what you are asking.”
It was a ridiculous thing to hear at the time, as four-year-old Saoirse felt she knew exactly what she was asking: to see her father. But her mother had forbidden it, assured her that Papa would be back, and that it was best for her to practice the Calloway Bears’ voices so that she could surprise him when he did.
And he did—come back. It was a few months later, and he was different. As Saoirse grew older and witnessed more and more people going to the Wall, she grew to recognize that their returns were always marked by some difference, and some more marked than others. In her father’s case, it was his height: he stood at least a foot taller than before, a fact that was made more accentuated by Saoirse’s mother’s own, unchanged five-foot-four stature as they walked side-by-side to the Sunday market. But her father’s assessment was different—when Saoirse had pointed out his taller measure, Papa had only chuckled and said, “Really? I’ll tell you what, my girl, I didn’t notice that! No, Saor, I’m still sad…but I feel the fire again.” He’d pointed to his chest.
Saoirse had looked down at her own overalls. She didn’t feel fire. She supposed she would eventually, because how else would she grow taller in life, and most people did—though not, she marveled for months and years afterwards, in the way Papa had during his time at the Wall.
But the differences in Wall-returners were always visible to the townspeople, even if all the Returners ever talked about was “the fire.” For Saoirse’s father, it was height, but for Mr. Teagarden down the street, for example, it was his hair—after spending a year at the Wall after losing his lifelong family business, he strolled up his country walk one summer morning with his formerly balding head now covered in glistening hair, cobalt blue and running down his back. Or in the case of Mrs. Cedarssonnet after disease-induced blindness: After three years at the Wall, she returned home in the middle of a winter night, still blind, but now with a voice like a nightingale—a sweet soprano that floated through the town at sporadic moments, charging the air with a honeysuckle hope—most oddly, whether she opened her mouth or not. Other folks’ changes were smaller, but they too were always visible: a bigger left foot, thicker eyebrows, a streak of gold like a tattoo that ran down their chest. The changes both terrified and amazed those who noticed them—which was eventually everybody—but like Saoirse’s father, the changed people themselves never noticed their physical difference, only a pulsing fire, that candle in their heart.
Though Saoirse hadn’t noticed it when she was four, she noticed it as she got older—that chest flame. She noticed when it was strong and she noticed when it was weak, often fluctuating with the circumstances and seasons of her life. Sometimes, she forgot it was there at all, and then something would happen to make her notice it: When she was 13, finding a puppy whining in a ditch in the woods and nursing him back to health (he was now her aging but still vivacious hound Ragtag)—the flame yearned and leapt!—or at 17, seeing Aengus from school kissing another girl—the flame was near to out in the two weeks she spent crying in bed.
“You go when there is nowhere else to go.” In the years since her father had went to the Wall for those three months, both her parents had gone a couple more times, though neither for very long—a few weeks at most. Though her father’s longest departure had been a direct result of Uncle Rogan’s passing, Saoirse didn’t know the cause of the other times. She only noticed the changes when they came back: Her father’s new star tattoo on his left forearm, her mother’s translucent-silver hair curl, which was buried under the rest of her black (but greying) mane.
People came and went to and from the Wall—some more than others, and others not at all—it wasn’t so much a rite of passage as a part of life in the town, at least in the neighborhood where Saoirse lived. There were other neighborhoods where travels to the Wall were completely uncommon—where the upright-necked people lived mostly—and these spaces were expanding, up the hillside and further and further from the Wall. Once, when she was 15, Saoirse climbed the cliffs (with Ragtag barking at her down below) to the Upper Hills, where the upright necks lived, and when she hauled herself up over the edge and turned to look, the Wall was only a thin, dark line in the distance, ever-expansive but too far to even be real. She’d squinted against the whipping wind, the flame in her heart leaping higher when she realized that, from this vantage point, she might be able to see what was on the other side of the Wall without climbing it herself—which all the townschildren earnestly talked about doing, but, when push came to shove, they found that they simply…could not. Even if they wanted to disobey the adults’ admonitions to stay away from the Wall “unless they had nowhere else to go” (and this made no sense to any child), even the feisty Ballard boys in the neighborhood found that, even under the cover of night and with hushed excitement, their feet could only propel them so far down the slope toward the hulking grey mass that was the Wall before, quite suddenly, they stopped. However curious they were to see it, their flames would not let them, they discovered, and it was too mysterious to analyze beyond that. Saoirse herself had tried once, Ragtag bounding at her heels, but while she did not feel the “terrifying leaping fire, oh it BURNED my throat!” that the Ballard boys had sniffled on about, she found in her stopped tracks and the chill that ran down her spine some other, unnamed reason she could not descend the slope to the Wall. And before she could try to name it, riding on the night wind came sounds from the Wall: crying and moaning and the scraping of rocks, and these made Saoirse’s blood run cold and her feet spin and her legs propel her through the darkened streets of the Main and up the way to her cottage home, where her parents were asleep and would never on Saoirse’s life find out what she had done.
As afraid as she was of “the wall within” and the sounds she had heard from the Wall without, Saoirse was still curious. But, at 15, as she gripped the precipice to the upper hillside and leaned as far forward as she could without making Ragtag howl down below, she was surprised to find that whatever lay beyond the Wall was enshrouded in mist—she couldn’t make out so much as a single blade of yellow grass.
“What’s on the other side of the Wall?” she’d asked that evening for the thousandth time, her soup untouched in front of her at the table. Across from her, Papa had looked at her over his spectacles, his towering frame hunched over the newspaper. He sighed and folded the paper shut. Behind him, by the fire, Mama sat twisting metal into a necklace chain, and Saoirse saw her lips flicker into a smile.
“My girl, I really can’t tell you. You’ll go when—”
“—there’s nowhere else to go,” Saoirse had finished. She’d heard it all the times before.
Papa had nodded, his glasses glinting in the low light that spread from the hearth of the little cottage. “Besides, it’s different for everyone.”
Saoirse’s head had snapped up. This was new information. “It is?”
Papa had tipped his head back and forth, as if trying to find the words. “Well, sort of,” he’d said. “The flame…well, you know.” He’d gestured a hand towards her. All the children in town knew about the flames and the physical differences and the peculiar phenomenon of Wall-returners noticing one and townspeople noticing the other. But lore beyond this was as inaccessible to her as the Wall itself, as Saoirse was then finding out.
“No one knows what is on the other side for him when he goes to the Wall,” Papa had said. “As resolute or brave or numb as he is, a man—or woman” —Papa had amended as, by the fire but listening, Mama made a noise— “a person gets there and realizes…they don’t know. Those stones are fearful, when you’re up front and close. Overwhelming, I guess you might say. The only thing a person knows is that there is where they must be. Some people take stones out. Some people try to climb. I guess I don’t know much about all that—only what I myself did—but my girl, each Wall is different, so I don’t know that I can say too much about how the Wall really is.”
That had made no sense to Saoirse. Papa was talking like there were several Walls, but all she ever saw was the long, grey barricade that separated the town from…whatever was in the mist beyond.
“People camp by their Wall,” Papa had continued, “or take a look and go back. But those who truly know it is the one place left they have to go will stay there. Until they are through.”
“Through where?”
“Through,” Papa had said stubbornly. “Through, and then they come home.”
“Different,” said Saoirse.
Papa’s eyes had blazed in that moment, matching the fire that crackled in the hearth, or—Saoirse’s own flame flickered as a new thought came to her—perhaps her father’s eyes matched his fire within, the change that Saoirse could not see.
“Yes,” Papa had said, pushing his glasses back up his nose and picking up the paper again. “They face the Wall and, changed because of it, they come home. Different and through.”
~
Photo by Jhoel Rojas (Pexels - free photos)
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