Fire on the hills
The hills are on fire. Flames spread deep into the water and waves over the sound of the dark foghorn that cascades into the night in a single, long hum. Together everything makes a symphony of crashing matter and lichen and discarded cigarette ends, populated by coniferous trees that stand sturdy amid the temperate blackness. There is no silence here, but everything is quiet. Everything has a moment where it belongs in the chorus of light and dark.
The flicker of my lamp in the corner of my bedroom as I’m reading Wuthering Heights for the fifteenth time catches my gaze, and I dare the power to go out on this September evening. Mom and Dad are already in bed and I’m stuck up in a makeshift tent under my covers. I used to have a flashlight that I’d read by, but the batteries died long ago so the lamp it is. It has a fake flame too, like the hills, but the fire on top of it doesn’t glow the bloody red of the hills. Rather, it’s a soft trickle of light that reminds me of peaches, sitting on the edge of the desk and making me feel just a little bit like having breakfast.
I flip the page over in my book, a crinkle of paper, reading the next line of Heathcliff’s dialogue to Cathy.
“I have not broken your heart – you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.”
Something about that strikes me, like the chord of a guitar in one of those rock songs my brother listens to much too loud while he’s in the shower. It only takes a moment before I realize that the sound of the chord isn’t imagined, but it is real, drawing closer, nearer to the fire on the hills, closer to the pretend flame of my lamp. It exists in the crests of the waves outside my window, the same window that’s open to let the breeze of the night in.
The chord grows stronger, the stringed melody getting louder until I can’t bear reading any more. I crawl from my coverlet and pad across the hardwood floor toward the window when I spot lights falling from the depths of the blackest, starless night. They tumble in lines from up high, faster than I’ve seen something move – a shooting star never made so much noise in my life that I’m aware of, and that, like the hills, is made of fire. Fire means loud; stars are quiet, like that lamp flame.
Then, the sound ends. The lights disappear and I am shrouded in the night like a wool cardigan, together with the waves and the single hum of the foghorn. It isn’t until morning when Mom tells me that Dad had to go off on a Search and Rescue mission that I realize what it is that I saw.
It isn’t until Dad doesn’t come home, one with the sea and the sky now as Mom says, that it strikes me what the line from Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights might have meant.
“I have not broken your heart – you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.”
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