Bone Fire by Mark Spragg Page A

swallowed her mouth tasted of baked alkali. She pinched the mask away, sliding it up over her forehead, whispering, “A rose is a rose is a rose” because she liked the velvety resonance of the phrase against the coarse firebrick lining the interior.
    He’d been waiting for her when she returned home from Paul’s this morning. He was sitting at the kitchen table in the same clothes he’d worn the day before, his sweat-stiffened hair standing in tufts, his dirty hands worrying the corner of a laminated placemat. He smelled of smoke.
    She asked if there’d been an accident and he slammed the flat of a hand on the tabletop, knocking the saltshaker over.
    “This is my goddamn house,” he shouted. Her diary and a dozen photographs were stacked by his arm, and now fanned toward the table’s edge.
    “Why don’t I fix us some breakfast?” she said, and he smacked the table again, but this time recoiling from the sound as though he’d just regained his hearing.
    She’d seen him like this once before, in the garden this summer, pawing at the soft earth and pushing her away when she tried to help him to his feet, his eyes gone wild and blind to her.
    He slumped in the chair. “I believe I’ve had all the breakfast I’ll ever want.” His mouth gaped, his jaw quivering.
    When she turned her head as though she might be looking at her diary, he opened his hands and reached toward her as if he meant to accept some object she was handing to him.
    “I didn’t read it,” he said, folding his arms on the table, resting his forehead against them, weeping with the abandon of a child. When he was able to sit up again, he choked out through the sobs what he’d done, what he’d burned. He offered to walk her up the hill and show her the newly mounded grave he’d made of his life.
    Now the afternoon seemed hollow and she turned on the radio so the jazz on NPR would keep her company. She settled on a stool at the work island in the middle of the room.
    Arced across the table before her was a ceramic spinal column, its ribs arranged alongside by length and, nearest to her, a pelvis that appeared to have belonged to a woman or a small bear. Each piece was a chalky white, the surfaces pitted, in places roughened.
    Behind her was a bank of windows, the panes small and unwashed, and below them the tiered plywood shelving where she’s racked the raw-fired pieces and arranged her shaping tools, the buffed-steel rods and dowels she uses for her assemblages, the colored bottles of glaze, the spools of copper wire. Her slab roller was pushed up tightly in a corner, and next to it the big trough where she reconstituted the dried clay. It was the clay that possessed her, the feel of it, from the very first time. When she’s kneeling at the trough, up to her elbows in the wet and slick and seemingly torsional muck, it is as though she has reached down the shaft of a muddied well and gripped the body of some ancient creature—a feeling at once horrible and intimate and thrilling.
    She held her hands up in the yellow afternoon light and closedthem into fists, dropping them finally onto the table and sitting there quietly, trying to summon the conviction that she would be able to care for him if his mind collapsed completely. Feed, bathe and dress him, reason with him. Keep them both safe from these episodes of sulking infancy.
    The door stood propped open and a magpie strutted through the glare of the workyard, stopping at the edge of the studio’s porch with its head cocked and turned, neck feathers ruffed, the black bead of an eye glistening. Then light flashed off the glass of a car turning into the drive, and the bird stepped back and rose into flight.
    She untied her utility apron, lifted it over her head and hung it on a hook by the door.
    A dog ran to the edge of the yard, cocking a leg up to pee, and when she crossed the porch he came toward her wagging his tail. His chest and legs were white, his body brindled in overlapping