In the House in the Dark of the Woods

by Laird Hunt

For I realized fire too had always been my friend. How many times had I spoken to it, murmured to it, told it my secrets? My husband and I had always agreed on the subject of fire. If I asked for a fresh log he always knew what size and shape I had in mind. If he asked for kindling I knew what weight of it to bring and what kind would serve the moment best. There is pleasure real to be had in keeping just the right fire. He and I had frequently spoken of it. Often, when he returned from one of his trips abroad, after we had knelt and prayed together, he would tell me first about the fires he had lit for himself, about how well and long they had performed. Sometimes he stopped at the remains of a first-folk fire and studied them and then told me what fuel they had used and how they had piled it and how brightly it would have burned. It was true that I liked to build the fire in our hearth bigger and brighter than he did, but he never stopped me and sometimes even shared my laugh or smile as I filled our little house with heat. A small fire was just as nice.

I brought it to my nose for a sniff, found there an aroma of cinnamon or some other fair spice grown up out of the earth and gathered and sold to tease the noses of us born half the world away.

It is one of the oddest things about the world, that it wants constantly to drop something onto you, some small reminder of itself, branch or stone or seed or dust. You might think we were born to become midden heaps and not engines for hosannas and hard work.

he told me he had only heard of them in stories and did not know just what they might have said, only that it was all twists and riddles and wouldn’t it be grand to stand off in a corner and, while the king or queen took their entertainment, just wait there quietly, with nowhere else to be and no one to trouble you, and listen? What a journey that would be, to hear such jokes and stories!