Holly paced the room in a tight circle, occasionally tripping on the small flap of carpet that had come loose from the rest of the flooring. They had put it in together only six months ago once they had finished the exterior of the cabin, but their cat Alice had decided to ease her boredom by tearing apart their hard work in small doses. Adam kept thinking Holly would notice the obstacle and alter her path, but she was too absorbed in her phone conversation to even register the occasional hiccup, let alone fix a problem that seemed all together irrelevant when faced with the crisis that was now screaming at her from the other end of the telephone line. She kept giving Adam distant sideways glances; like she was casting a net for help without really caring where she threw it or what she might catch in response. She had been holding that silly contraption to her ear for what felt like an hour but was probably only a minute without speaking. He still had no idea who she was talking to or what the barking voice on the other end might be saying to make her pace in such a frantic pattern.
He could see a tear starting its journey down the right side of her face. She didn’t seem to notice, just tucked her chin into her chest and continued her tight circle march: stomp, two, three—trip; stomp, two, three, four—trip. It started to feel like a ritual dance to Adam. He attempted to focus on her steps and use them to calm his brain to a meditative-like trance while he waited for Holly to part her thin lips and let out any indication of why she and the voice on the other end of the telephone line might be so distraught. Suddenly, she stopped, dropping the phone as she tripped one last time on the loose chunk of carpet and floating to the ground like a popped helium balloon. He glimpsed a tiny crack in the screen as he stepped forward with outstretched arms, trying to gather her deflated limbs into a ball. Brand new phone, he thought, and then wondered why his mind could even consider such information when something much larger was obviously happening to Holly and probably to himself.
Holly’s eyes were closed, like she was daring sleep to overtake her. He knew she was conscious; she had fainted on occasion when they were younger. Like the night he had decided he loved her, when she had crumpled to the ground and landed flat on her back. A group of them had been standing in a tight circle, staring at the stars and smoking, and suddenly, he was watching her fall with uncanny grace. His heart had misfired at the thought of her smallness and her fragility. Like he could protect her from gravity if she let him. She seldom let him.
But here she was in his arms: vulnerable, soft, distant. He was unfamiliar with the wrinkles that now formed her expression. He called her his little warrior, although never aloud. She would’ve hated the diminutive, always wanting to be larger than the room that held her. Her eyes met anyone’s with intensity. Her smiles were warm but controlled. Her words were pointed and original. He rarely saw her melt. Even when she lost the baby. Even when her mother called her a whore. Even when they got evicted and lost their car and had to sleep on their friend’s floor for a month until she found the only job she could cleaning toilets even though she understood quantum physics and Hemingway and music theory.
“Holly, dear”
He often thought of the elegance of Holly Golightly. “Overdone,” she would snip back. “Everyone loves her, but she’s flighty as a bird. And fake too. I don’t want to be associated with anything so far from grounded.” So he thought it in his mind instead, especially when she wore all black and piled her hair atop her head, stealing long puffs off her cigarette out the upstairs window when she thought he wasn’t watching.
“Hmmm,” she protested.
She felt like a warm knot of dough in his hands. Her limbs seemed to relax into his with a melding force he hadn’t known possible. It was like she was giving herself away to him. He began to knead her softly, beckoning whatever horrible truth that lay behind her eyelids to empty out in a drizzle form, hoping he could forego the downpour that she had just received. How selfish, he thought. I should want to shield her, tent up, bear the floods and keep her dry. But they were equals, and he was just as aware of and frightened by life’s fragility as she. She was the one who always spat out chivalry like day old bread.
But this moment had nothing to do with masculinity, just love and the need to wear away his own skin for the sake of hers, so he pressed his palms beneath her shoulder blades and lifted her torso’s almost dead weight until it hovered all on its own. She looked a bit like she was meditating again, with her deep belly breathing and effortless posture. He watched her in amazement, the serenity of the moment. He did not want to pierce it with sound. In fact, a sound may shatter their entire world that had begun to disintegrate just minutes ago before the carpet flap and the fall and the end of the barking voice. So he waited, staring at her fluttering eyelids. She knew he watched her. Then, the cat meowed.
“Marla, that was Marla. She’s not sure what’s happening, but the house is on fire and so is the neighbor’s and the Smith’s old place and Sam’s and Beth’s and everybody else’s, really. Everybody who matters.”
Her voice sounded unbearably even.
“But it’s winter.” Fire and snow had always felt strange to him. When they had a bonfire, the snow would melt, forming a moat around the flames. It looked like an impossibility, like the fire had grown out of water. He wondered distantly if the houses now had moats. “Is everyone okay?” he ventured.
“No, I don’t think so. Marla thought it was a chimney fire that started hers, but it doesn’t make any sense that all of those houses would be burning at once, if that’s the case. They are acres apart. She said even the main building is in flames. You know how small her place is, she got out quickly and started running towards the neighbor’s but then it was on fire too and she saw smoke in the distance and didn’t know where to go and she was in the middle of asking us to meet her with the snow machine when I heard her scream and the line went dead. I couldn’t even get a word in, her words were so frantic and winding and then she was gone and I tripped and…what the hell are we going to do?”
Adam opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out but an odd squeak. The cat looked at him anxiously. “I don’t think it’s safe for us to leave. I can feel something bad coming from the hillside.”
Adam nodded slowly. He could see the familiar look in Holly’s eyes, the way she stared at the air as if she could see through it or inside of it to the individual configuration of its atomic make-up. Her eyes squinted, shifting side to side, and then closed tightly while she placed her fingertips lightly on each temple and began to rock as steadily and smoothly as the rocking chair that he had made before she lost the baby.
She was special. Yes, because she was beautiful and intelligent and a bit hardened in a good way, a way that protected her from life. But she also had a gift or a cursed peculiarity as she often called it. She’d seen an abundance of specialists about it, some smacking it with a curiously complex psychological label that few people recognized, something called Mirror-Touch Synesthesia. Others told her that, like many women, she was just extremely empathetic. Of course, that only excited her inner feminist. “So you’re saying I’m a woman, that’s what’s wrong with me?” She would punch the previously pleasant air with her words, causing the (always male) doctors and neuroscientists to squirm in their chairs at the thought of being accused of sexism.
Her own interpretation was tied with quantum entanglement: she believed that the particles that made up her neurons entangled themselves with those of any person who was inherently bad. Before Holly, Adam had never believed in a true difference between evil and good, thinking all humans led a life that mixed both, erring on the side of good intentions but often blundering through life like a bulldozer, unaware of the havoc they wrought. But Holly always had a deep sense of conviction upon meeting strangers; it only took her ten minutes with a person to uncover their inclination towards good or evil. For their first year together, Adam had thought it all too cliché, like a Narnia book from their childhood, too biblical and straight for his San Francisco upbringing. But time and again Holly proved right. Most often newcomers and visitors to their remote village proved good, and she would glance at Adam with her controlled smile and eye-locking blue gaze. But every so often a bad seed planted itself in their wild haven. Once the thought solidified, their presence became distressing and filled her with impatience. She would shift her weight from foot to foot and casually vocalized the long list of chores that awaited her at her own cabin.
Usually the bad seeds were just passing through, so her powers (as Adam called them) were never perfectly tested, but when an unkind stranger did stick around, Holly never failed to predict the distress they would bring with them. There was Johnny from Ohio, who everyone else perceived as charming and engaging but elicited Holly’s unease. After two months of living in the village, he shot two neighborhood dogs who had unwittingly stepped on his garden seedlings. And she was right about Sarah too, their friend Sam’s ex-wife, who left him a month after his wedding with only one phone call to request half of his inheritance and the stuff she had left behind.
But it wasn’t just disaster hiding inside people that Holly could predict. She found it inside time and place too. They’d once taken an overnight trip to an old abandoned bunk house from the area’s mining days, a steep scramble up a scree-filled drainage and a beautiful descent down an alpine ridge line. The view was magnificent, and Adam had planned to tell her all about his hopes and dreams for their future while they camped inside a building filled with so much past. But as soon as Holly entered the structure, she began to shift uneasily, finally letting out a sigh and telling Adam she needed a breath of fresh air. They descended rather quickly thereafter and Adam slipped on a jumble of slick rocks, spraining his ankle and forgoing two weeks of construction work because of the injury. Later that night Holly told him about the overwhelming sensation of dread that had overcome her in the building’s doorway. They’d only heard stories of slight magic about the place from friends, that the view was beautiful and that the 1920’s objects that scattered the bunkhouse felt alive, as if the miners would come back any day to retrieve them.
But Holly began to research the place more thoroughly, sifting through online archives of news articles and personal accounts. The Anchorage Daily News had written an article in the 1950’s about an unsolved kidnapping and raping of a young woman in that very structure, her body discovered weeks later, already beginning to disappear with time. Then she found the story of the fatal fight between two miners over an adulterous wife back in 1935. The brawl took place inside their living quarters, atop the mountain, in the same exact bunk house. And through conversations with neighbors, she found out a mass murderer had bunked up there for weeks in the ‘90s until he finally descended for supplies and was pulled over for speeding on the long drive to town.
Adam hadn’t dismissed the idea that the crimes were mere coincidences, that any place with a history is bound to be attached to some aspect of human horror. He’d never even glanced at the world of pseudoscience embraced by the San Francisco hippies he grew up with, preferring the certainty of logic, mathematics, and science (although the more he studied science, the less certainty he felt). He did believe in human intuition, however, and now thought he and those hippies may be referring to the same concept from different angles. Holly was intuitive. Uncannily intuitive. His doubt about the hocus pocus of her feelings, her mirror touch synesthesia or quantum entanglement or psychic powers or whatever you wanted to call it, faded more and more each day.
Which is why he did not immediately grab his jacket, slip on his boots, and rush out the door to start the snow machine. Ordinarily, if any of their friends or neighbors faced trouble, he was out the door in a minute, no questions asked. They always did the same for him, if he ran out of gas or got stuck in a snow bank of the way home. And Marla was not just any friend. Marla was their savior, the one who had brought them to this magical haven at the end of the road. If it weren’t for her, Holly might still be cleaning toilets, and Adam might still be drunk.
The thought of Marla running from flames through the darkness, through cold and snow and who knows what kind of danger almost made Adam jump to action. Holly even put her coat on absent-mindedly while she stared out the window at the hillside with a wild and distant look pulsing beneath her cold blue irises. But they both trusted Holly’s intuition too well to take off without a second thought or a third or fourth. They sat at the kitchen table in silence for what was not an hour but could have been given the urgency of passing seconds during their moments of contemplation.
“It doesn’t feel good,” Holly cut through thick, tense air. “I think we would be risking everything if we ventured over the hill to help her. That’s how it feels. Like light and breathing are at stake.”
Adam stared past her into the inky depth of the outside world.
“My phone’s stopped working too. Just dead air when I try to call.”
Adam hadn’t even noticed the way her fingers had been punching away at her cracked cell phone screen. She’d been doing it so consistently, so casually, like she was knitting a new bootie for the lost baby, something she’d done almost neurotically for two months after she miscarried. He was used to her hands being busy, didn’t even notice the distracted air of her attention. He reached out to stroke the tips of her fingernails, his gesture toward calmness. But she slipped her hands into her pockets like a turtle retracting its limbs inside its shell. He wished back to the moment when he had held her limbs in the basket of his arms.
They both moved like turtles, slow motion, resisting the heavy air with smoothly-struggling movement. But then, a crack and a flash of light, as swift and precise as a Bull’s Eye dart. In that moment, the molecules that clouded their small cabin split apart. Their cat began a high-pitched and rapid meow more like a baby’s gasping sobs than that of a full-grown animal. Adam grabbed Holly more out of fright than protection. They smelled the burning before they even opened their eyes.