The Warm Hands of Ghosts

by Katherine Arden

Armageddon was a fire in the harbor, a box delivered on a cold day. It wasn’t one great tragedy, but ten million tiny ones, and everyone faced theirs alone.

But 1914 was also the year her mother had fixed as the world’s last, and she would not leave the subject alone. “I read it in Zion’s Watch Tower,” she told her children. “We must be wary, we must be prepared.” She filled the house with tinned food, and read the papers with dogged intensity.

“Try to understand them,” Freddie had added. He was kinder than her too. “Look at the world now. It’s terrifying, isn’t it?

In a way, it’s easier to imagine the world’s going to end. At least there’s a certainty to it. End—bam—done. But change—where does change stop?”

Don’t you understand? The world ends with high explosive, not trumpets, and even if an angel existed, it would be shot from the sky like an aeroplane.

Laura got up, felt the rumble, the nervous tremor of the machine between her knees. Mary let out the clutch, gave it gas. “Don’t let go.” They shot off. Laura shouted. She could feel Mary laughing where Laura gripped her round the waist. “Maniac!” bellowed Laura, but her heart was racing with delight. However much the war had cost, it had paid with this freedom: to run a hospital without interference, to ride a motorcycle without judgment. Strictures belonged to the old world too.

Magic’s just science we don’t understand. What if a man a thousand years ago saw one of the flying contraptions that we have winking about everywhere? He’d think it was magic.

Ghosts have warm hands, he kept telling me, as though it were the greatest secret in the world.

It was the poet’s alchemy, to seize the intangible or unspeakable and drag it, real, into the living world.