The silent

I remember him saying “We’re much like the steam, non?”. I stop pulling weeds from the field, hardy and stubborn old weeds, from the field.

He fumbles, “I mean”, he strains his brow, “…the…”, he kicks the air, “the punch of it.”

I think I understand. I turn.

Our gigantic boyhood shadows stretch over the fields. There, over the weeds and the corn and the crusted fingernails, our machines fume down in the valley. All is grey: the ground, the sky, his eyes. Even the sound of the black insects, screaming. But my family’s machine keeps vomiting white holes. It’s our steam. Thick and creamy, white potato mash, it splutters out of our chimney into the sky. Da always says it’s a caravan. A caravan of fists.

Fists. I watch my reddish knuckles, let my eyes wander further back. To his family’s machine. Their chimney sighs. A single thread of steam, near transparent, all upright, stitching together the earth and the sky and the grey. So thin. So weak.

“Yeah.”, I say, licking sweat of my lip, “Yeah, you’re a wispy one, yeah.”

The weeds rustle as I throw them into his face.
He doesn’t move.

“…oh, come on, Henry!”, my fist is empty now, so I fill it with his shirt, “The others are waiting.”

He looks down at my fist, but doesn’t move. “I told you. It’s Henri.”
There’s a mole on his neck. He’s warm.

“Oh-ree looks nothing like how you wrote it, though. It was like Henry, just with i.”

“Yeah”, he says, “But my h is silent.”

“…huh.”

I let him go. I feel the fabric slipping over my fingers. He’s sombre now. There are shadows on his face. I feel something. But it isn’t fear. It isn’t fear, I say. I leave his collar crumpled.

“…my h is silent.”, he repeats, but this time with a searching tongue, his wide eyes fixed on the steam.

Did he touch his hipbone then? I don’t remember.

I remember me, shouting. Rough hands and face blackened with soot, insides lined with soot, eyes filled with soot, shouting, “Don’t be ridiculous, Henry!” And he is mild, so mild, he’s condescending.

“Don’t be ridiculous!”, I am a broken machine.
He strains his brows, still mildness, still the holding thread.

Uncage it. “You’re ridiculous!”
And it snaps.

“You always say that!”, it lashes; it smarts, “You always say that whenever you cannot strain your little brain beyond its pathetic confines! Have you ever considered that there is more to the world than what you see? Have you ever considered that the fault could lie in your faculties and not in my actions? Have you? Have you?”

I take a step forward. My voice is low. “This is not the time for one of your goddamn lectures, Henry!”, a soot print lines his collar now. Fire jolts through the logs of wood and the dried weeds behind us. Gases arise, flush through the furnace, mingle and spark. And steam.

We breathe.

I see every drop of sweat on his face, feel his breath on mine.

My voice turns like a feather. Almost vaporizes in the scorching room. “…just …tell me why… Henry…”

He steps back.

My hand slides down his shirt.

At the end of a soot trail, it falls.

“I told you...”, the fire’s shadow dances around his neck. “…I told you… my h is silent.”

The heat sears into me. I could have taken much, but not this. Never this. I clasp his shirt, and he leaves me a single white scar down my face. I give him a potato mash steam cloud colouring his jaw to remember me by.

Did he touch his hipbone then?

I can’t remember. I can’t.

I remember me, grown, kicking the air in our cornfields for want. I remember weeds thrown into the fire, hands running over my neck and my eyes and tough breathing. One day, I started walking towards the sky, where he’d gone. I didn’t stop walking.

Why did he come here?

My fists are jammed into my pockets. The longer the trail of soot behind me, the white and whiter turn the fields. My red nose buried deep in my collar, I think about the machine. What da will say when he sees I’m not there. Why did he come here?

I know his silhouette. He sits in the snow, outside the city, his back against a hollow tree. I almost laugh. I know his silhouette. I do. My footsteps draw a black line next to his, faster and faster and when I touch his shoulder, he doesn’t move.

Wide eyes fixed on the black smoke over the roofs of the city, his chest rises, descends, rises with exhaustion. It creeps back upon the houses. Shelters them. Chokes them.

“Like a fat cat.”, I fall into the snow, next to him.

Our arms touch. He’s hollow. Wreathed into more layers than a living man could ever need.

His voice is a ruptured thread.

“…or disease.”

It’s so cold. My hand needs to move. I touch his cheek, turn his face towards me. He lets me. Grey eyes stare at me with blind habit, fingers cramped around the fabric on his hip. I ease them open, adjust his collar. I let my thumb trace the mole on his neck, the steam cloud I left on his jaw.

“I didn’t want to be right.”, he whispers, “…I wanted…”

“I know.”

It really was not fear. It wasn’t. He grips his flesh now, knowing that the smoke that billows beneath it would never be steam. “…nothing worked… you… ”

Maybe he winced. I don’t remember.

I never listened. I never saw what he saw in the rifts in the sky. I never understood why he wanted to bridge heaven and earth so very badly.

Maybe he winced.

I only remember that Henri’s age was silent.