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Grandfather's funeral was on an unusually warm autumn day, on which the half-frozen ground reluctantly started to sweat and the dead leaves were stirred zombielike by a feverish wind. The sky looked like old cotton-candy against the rioting red-orange leaves out the church window.
Ellen sat still and looked everywhere but the front of the church. The incense was starting to make her lightheaded; the priest's voice droned in and out of awareness. Someone dropped a hymnal and it hit the floor with an echoing slam. The priest stopped, looked around, then started talking again. A mosquito had bitten Ellen's leg; she scratched and ripped her black tights.
The priest stepped back and Aunt Denise got up to give the eulogy. Ellen knew she should've done it instead, because no one else really knew her grandfather better. But she had known that she wouldn't be able to stand anywhere near the coffin. So she sat and half-listened, staring out the window.
She could feel the eyes of distant relatives sneaking glances at her. They knew her as the sarcastic black-haired girl, pale and quiet except for when she opened her mouth to make some biting comment. Grandfather had been the only one who knew not to take her so seriously.
Outside, everyone filed out of the church and stood around in the parking lot, that violent sun glinting cruelly off of the asphalt. Ellen stood alone with her hands shoved into her pockets, catching snatches of conversation from the groups huddled nearby.
"She could show more respect for her grandfather. He took her in, after her father left and her mother died, remember?"
"Immature as a child. What is she now, twenty-three?"
"Works in a library, I think. Had more going for her as a teenager."
Ellen didn't follow everyone else to the cemetery. She snuck to her car and drove back down the long rubble-covered road to Grandfather's house, where she lit a new fire in the woodstove, made a cup of tea and sat at the small table, sipping tea and staring at the flames as they leapt up.
-- In Grandfather's house there were windows made of old glass that filtered and warped the light so that it fell honeyed onto the floor. After sunset, when the night-train went up the coast, the glass rattled with increasing violence and the lights swarmed and flashed as orange squares rushed across the walls.
Ever since Grandfather had died and Ellen had come to clean out the house, she had become a lighter sleeper than she used to be, and the rushing trains often awoke her. She would usually lay staring at the light-slants on the wall until the house stopped shaking and the train-whistle faded into dark. But the night after the funeral, she couldn't get back to sleep. She went downstairs to get a glass of water and found a phoenix on the kitchen floor.
The phoenix was small and covered in ash-colored down. Its beak was not fully formed, and all it could do with its wings was give a sad flutter. But the odor of cinder that filled the kitchen confirmed that it was a phoenix, along with the inexplicable hallucinations of song that haunted the sound of the night train.
Grandfather had told her that this might happen, but Ellen was still somewhat annoyed. She got the dustpan, a small broom and an empty flower-pot; she went to the woodstove and filled the pot with ashes. Then she used the dustpan to scoop the phoenix into the flower-pot, brought it upstairs, put it next to her bed and went back to sleep.
-- The next day she decided to start organizing Grandfather's study. She took the key from where he used to hide it, inside a broken toaster oven, of all places. The study was made of mahogany furniture and leather-bound books, with two large mullioned windows. It belonged to the college professor that Grandfather perhaps should have been, just like the kitchen belonged to the gas station attendant that he had been for the last few years of his life, and the living room was a relic of the short time he'd spent in the navy before a dishonorable discharge.
Ellen wandered past the bookcases lining the walls, scraping thin fingers over the spines. Plato sat comfortably next to Orson Scott Card, and by an enormous copy of Poe's collected works was a battered family cookbook. Ellen had a sudden aversion to packing away the books; there was something sacred about their haphazard order.
She dropped her hand and turned away.
The most important thing in the study was the stack of papers on top of the desk, held down in each corner with rocks and marked in places by bright plastic page-dividers. It was what Grandfather had been writing in the last year of his life. In his will, he had left it to Ellen.
He had talked to her about it often. "It's about nightmares, myths, how things connect," he had said, and let her read parts. It had been the only time a hint of curiosity had crept through her finely-crafted cynicism.
Ellen leaned over the desk – she couldn't sit in Grandfather's heavy chair – and reviewed the first page. The too-warm wind battered the windows; outside, a metal gate creaked open and closed. She turned around and the phoenix was standing in the doorway, shaking off its colorless feathers to reveal blood-red underneath.
The phoenix stared at Ellen until she crossed the room and closed the door.
-- The coffee pot spluttered and steamed until full, and Ellen poured a cup of bitter coffee with most of the grounds still in it. She hesitated by the cabinet, then pulled out an old bottle of whiskey and tipped a splash into the coffee cup. She took it to the study, but didn't drink it.
The phoenix was following her. It sang a little sometimes, a sound that made Ellen melancholy. Now, it fluttered up onto the chair, then the desk. It dipped its beak into the coffee mug, tasted, then recoiled.
"What the fuck are you drinking?" said the phoenix.
"I'm not drinking it," said Ellen.
The phoenix turned around once and settled down on the stack of paper.
"I suppose you want to know all about death and whatnot," said the phoenix.
"Not really," said Ellen. "I just want to get out."
"Of what?"
"Don't know," said Ellen, using the back of her hand to gently push the phoenix off of the papers. It moved, then sat near the edge of the desk, staring at her in a way that seemed both smug and questioning, its eyes black except for occasional hints of red-orange.
-- Ellen did drink some of the whiskey before bed that night – just enough to make her head fuzzy and her thoughts disconnected. Getting to sleep was too difficult, in that rattling empty house. She was starting to finally drift when a rush of feathers and a sharp talon somewhere near her hand made her sit up and fumble for the light-switch.
The phoenix – blazing, even under the dim lighting – settled down onto the bed.
"No need to be so jumpy," said the phoenix. "What, did you think I was going to claw you to death in your sleep?"
Ellen did not think it merited a response; besides, she felt too incoherent anyway.
"Turn the light off and go to sleep," the phoenix ordered, and for some reason, Ellen obeyed.
-- When the night train passed, as usual, Ellen woke up. But that night she woke up to warmth and a presence beside her, the sound of breathing. She stared until her bleary eyes made out a figure beside her – a woman with red hair. I should be afraid, she thought, but instead she just went back to sleep as the train-whistle faded away.
-- In the morning, Ellen remembered the woman as a figure in a dream. She tugged herself out of sleep, stared across the room and out the window. Grey wool clouds rushed by; jagged tree-limbs shook. Eventually, Ellen got out of bed and went downstairs, bare feet padding across the lackluster hardwood floors, the grey outside pressing into every window.
And then the red.
A woman stood in the kitchen, naked, with bright red hair and dark eyes. Even across the room, Ellen could feel her unnatural warmth.
"Good morning," said the woman. She picked up a cup from the counter. "Coffee? Non-alcoholic."
"No," said Ellen. "Thanks."
The woman put the cup back down and Ellen watched her, like the woman as a phoenix had watched Ellen. Her hair fell down to her lower back, and against the bright red, her skin was pale. There she stood – blood-red hair and white skin, standing in a space of light in the grey room. When she moved, it was with a curving grace, interrupted by sudden shifts, like a stirring of feathers.
"What are you looking at?" the woman said with a smirk. "You could offer to let me borrow some clothes, you know."
Ellen looked at the floor. "Oh. Sure."
"Nah, I was just kidding," said the woman. "Your clothes would be too small anyway. And they're all black. Not my favorite."
Ellen kept her eyes locked on the floor for a while, but then they drifted back to the woman, who was still smirking.
"Do you… want to go for a walk or something?" said Ellen.
"I want you to read me the story in your grandfather's study," said the woman.
"That's private."
"No, it's not. You'll never read it, if not to me."
Ellen led the way to the study. The two women leaned side-by-side against the desk; Ellen was conscious of the blazing warmth beside her as she fumbled with the papers.
"I read the first page when we were in here the other day," the woman said. "You can start with the second."
Ellen turned the page and read her grandfather's words, the pain of loss sneaking between the spaces. The unfinished book was about the different gradient shades of night, catalogues of mysterious things, and myths, always myths. Figures from mythology, lingering in the minds of people, never leaving.
"Are you just in my mind, then?" Ellen said.
"Do you think I am?" said the woman.
"No." For some reason, it came out as a whisper.
The woman leaned closer and put her hand on Ellen's – warmth. Ellen felt herself coil up inside – her usual reaction to physical contact – and then unwind.
"Why," said the woman, "did you tell me you wanted to get out?"
Ellen felt a little foggy; it was difficult at first to find her voice, inside this strange prism of warmth and touch. And how could she express it – the vague feeling that had been with her since childhood, when her mother had died – that she didn't want to belong in a world where there was death?
The woman moved so that she faced Ellen and pressed herself against her, knee between Ellen's legs. What had been warmth was now a deep burning. The woman leaned forward and kissed Ellen, softly.
"That's why you thought of me," she whispered into Ellen's mouth.
Cautiously, Ellen raised her hands and placed them around the woman's waist, feeling her smooth warm skin, the dip and curve.
"What do you want?" said the woman.
Ellen's mind was blank, for the first time she could remember. No words, just warmth and the scent of cinder, and yes, desire, but mixed and languid. Desire for something – what the woman could see, when she was a phoenix. The burning; the lighting of brush-fires down lonely autumn roads. Ellen opened her mouth.
"I know," said the woman.
-- Bending over the rickety, haphazard house was a stick-bone tree, spindly and grey in the autumn wind, growing colder. Two birds were perched side-by-side in the tree – one red and orange, the only bright colors in sight. The other bird was a small black crow, with a torn piece of scribbled paper in its beak.
The train whistle approached, and the birds stirred, ruffled their feathers and flew away.
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