Of Darkness and Light

by Joe Ducato

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    Wander kept the universe tucked away in the corner of his eye. Whenever he wanted to see it, he tilted his head, un-focused his eyes and it appeared - small and beautiful just the way it looked in his book. When the 14-year-old told his mother about it, she bristled.

    “Foolish boy! You’re just straining your eyes and making shadows, illusions.”

    “But it looks like the universe to me.”

    “That’s because you have a very large imagination,” his mother explained, “That’s not always good. Strange things can happen to people who have very large imaginations.”

    “Like what?” Wander asked.

    “Like take your Great Uncle Fred. He had one of those imaginations and when he was around your age, he started growing hair in his ears and by the time he died there were bushes on the sides of his noggin. They had to squeeze his head into the coffin with shoe horns.”

    She winked at the boy, but the seed had already been planted and the great war “was on” inside the boy’s head between what’s real and what’s not. They circled each other like 2 hawks in a mid-air fight.

    ‘Great Uncle Fred was disgusting for sure,’ Wander thought, but Wander also knew he couldn’t stop using his imagination. He kept a legal pad and Number 2 pencil under his bed and often wrote stories until 1 in the morning.

    ‘Now,’ he told himself, he’d have to make sure to check his ears.


    The girl came around almost every day. Her name was Claire but everyone called her Belle. She didn’t say much. She wasn’t a cut-up like Chet Zazo. Chet Zazo could make a skeleton clutch its stomach or at least clutch where its stomach used to be. The girl was no Chet Zazo.

    On the warmest day of the summer Wander was sitting on the grass looking at the veins of a rose petal when Belle came around, this time with a letter. Wander knew it was from Belle’s older brother, Vincent. Vincent and a few others, after graduation, had boarded a long train heading for boot camp. That happened a lot in June back then, older boys boarding long trains heading for boot camp. Some came back, some didn’t. Some came back hollow, some came back dead, some nearly dead. Some came back without souls and did unspeakable things. To Wander, it was all part of the great fight between the hawks.

    “What’d he say?” Wander asked.

    Bell held up the letter.

    “He said that he and the Francis boy, the night before they left, went to The Ghost to ransack it and they did. They ransacked it good.”

    The Ghost was a long-ago abandoned ranch that sat alone in the over-growth below the ridge in Carver Meadow’s - a fossilized dinosaur and a pretty good make-out spot for those brave enough to go inside. Years of abandonment and weather had turned the ranch a ghastly white. It took imagination to see the ghost. The 2 large windows in the front made for its eyes and the winding porch, its mouth. The Ghost had been tagged and posted because it happened to be sitting on the very spot the new strip mall wanted to sit.

    “Why’d they do that?” Wander asked.

    Belle read from the letter.

    “Because those of us from the meadow should be the ones to deliver the first blows, not some excavators from Duluth. First blows should come from love.”

    “He said that?” Wander smiled.

    “Yes.”

    “That’s pretty good.”

    “It is.”

    Belle looked at Wander.

​    “He dropped Poppy’s ring in there, the Army ring Poppy gave him when he signed up. He’s sure of it, sure it must have slipped off his finger.”

    Belle swallowed hard.

    “They’re sending him,” she said soberly.

    “Where?”

    Belle answered with her eyes. It made Wander look away.

    “He needs it with him,” Belle said.

    Wander felt the hawk of reality lunge at the hawk of imagination.


    It was nearly sunset when they crouched behind the hollow tree near the top of the ridge where the big kids made their fires. Wander looked up at the few stars that had already pierced the fabric. Below and away sat The Ghost, solemn and still.
     
    Belle ran her fingers through the ashes of a recent fire. Wander had no words. They stared down at the ranch. Wander thought he heard galloping horses but it was far off thunder.

    It wasn’t until darkness had conquered light that they noticed the glow in one of the ranch’s back windows. It was like discovering a beating heart in a lifeless body.

    Belle looked at Wander.

    “Doesn’t matter,” she whispered as she stood, “I need to go.”

    Wander leaned on his hands. Fear had nailed him to the earth.

    “A devastating, destructive force,” he muttered under his breath.

    “What?”

    “Shakespeare, about war I think.”

    “So now you think you’re Shakespeare?”

    “Well, no, I mean we’re both writers.”

    Belle folded a dead leaf and turned towards The Ghost.

    “All writers are cowards,” she said to the air.

    Wander didn’t budge.

    “Stupid words,” Belle snickered and walked off. Wander tried to see the universe but couldn’t. He realized that light was the essential ingredient. He watched Belle trudge through the over growth and down the slope towards the ranch.

    “All writers are cowards,” a night bird sang.

    By the time Wander found his courage, Belle was already inside The Ghost. She had brought a book of matches and 2 candles. She lit one of the candles and set it on a broken table. Shadows from the candle light flickered and played scenes from old black and white movies on the walls. The Lone Ranger rode again.​

    Belle reached down and picked up something then straightened to see Wander. He had somehow unnailed himself.

    “Did you find it?” Wander asked.

    “No,” Belle replied then held up a chunk of jagged steel.

    “What is it?”
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    “The link from a convict’s chain,” Belle said.​

    “How do you know?”

    “The boy has so many questions,” Belle whispered.

    Wander moved closer. Their hands touched but they quickly pulled them away. They slowly went to the doorway of the room where they had seen the glow. Leaning against a wall was an old oil painting of sheep being led up a hill by a lean, old gentleman with a kind face and a bent stick. The glow was cast from the paintings ornate frame.

    “I’ve heard about this,” Belle said, “In science class. Paints used a long ago, after time, develop an ability to gather sunlight and then they release the light when it’s dark.”

    “Magic,” Wander said.

    “Chemistry,” Belle replied.

    Wander brushed away dirt with his foot.

    “Suppose you don’t find it?” he asked.

    “I’ll come back until I do.”

    “When they tear this down?”

    “Then I’ll find it in the rubble.”

    That moment a girl earned her warrior wings.

    “We should take the painting” Wander said, "...it’ll be destroyed with everything else.”

    “Can’t destroy something once it’s been seen,” Belle said and the writer’s heart knew it to be true.

    Wander realized then that even though darkness had fallen, the universe still burned bright in a boy’s very large imagination as well as a young girl’s warrior’s heart and maybe even brighter in an artist’s vision of how beautiful the world could be. It even brought warmth and comfort to the condemned and peace to the soul of the hawk. Wander knew at that moment that his mother was wrong, that he would not grow hair in his ears and more importantly, that the universe was in him, in everyone and in everything, and that it was good.

    Led by Belle and her candle, they began their search.

    Far away on Old Dix Road someone walking their dog stopped and looked across the meadow. The eyes of The Ghost were alive.

  
Joe Ducato is a writer based in New York.