When Fire Splits the Sky by Tyler James Russell
They’d had fun once, hadn’t they? He can hardly remember it now—even though it’s only been, what, a year and a half?—but she used to smile when he walked into a room. Often enough it felt like one big laugh, which helped make up for the times it wasn’t. Like when she suddenly had no interest in sex anymore, or when she said—out of the blue—that she probably wouldn’t live much longer.
Or when she set out to Anchorage in the middle of a goddamn disaster, driving a fucking luxury sedan, and wouldn’t even tell him why.
They’d met at his company’s Christmas party, in a pseudo-swank banquet hall where she worked part-time. She made good money, actually, with the semi-performative talents she seemed unendingly capable of. They didn’t use drink trays, but she could carry four glasses in one hand—one between her thumb and forefinger, another across her middle and ring, a third in the palm, and a fourth stacked on top. It looked effortless, like everything else she did. She could usually take seven tables before she even had to rush—whereas the other girls topped out at four.
For the record, she approached him. Just sat down with a burger, still on the clock, still in uniform, and started eating.
“Fuck,” she moaned.
When Ben raised his eyebrows and laughed, she covered her mouth. “Sorry,” she said. “Hungry.”
They hadn’t talked after that, but at one point in the evening she walked past him and trailed three fingers across his back. A totally unnecessary thing. For the rest of the night he couldn’t think about anything else.
On the other side of the channel, it’s another world.
“Jesus,” Ben whispers.
There’s a swath of felled trees as far as you can see, like an enormous machine dragged over and pressed them flat. On either side, the ones still standing are either actively smoking or glowing with ember-veins. The air is choked, the mountains scabrous and raw. Far off, the fire sounds like something chewing.
Maranda insists on driving awhile. Neither of them speaks. Ben has his hands in his lap, staring straight ahead. He pulls his phone out and checks it. He has the urge to call the pharmacy, to let them know he won’t be back until tomorrow, probably, but the signal’s periodically unreliable and the battery’s already dwindled to 15%. It’s insane anyway, of course nobody’s there, but being stretched this far from the normal-everyday makes him feel dried-out and snappable. He shuts the phone off, puts it away.
On the ferry, he’d covered the rear windshield with duct tape and a flannel blanket. Crudely done, but it keeps the air out, flapping noisily as they drive. Every so often you can hear the glass strain.
Otherwise, the car is filled with an unnatural quiet. There’s nothing to do but talk, Ben thinks, but if they start talking there’s really only one way the conversation can go—other than, you know, the fucking world being on fire—and that’s toward him cheating. He’d like to skirt the edge for as long as he can, at least until the bleeding’s stopped, and maybe eventually she’d realize it’s best to just throw dirt over the whole thing and pretend it never happened. Let the past be the past and they can move on.
After a while though, not talking starts to feel loud. He worries that if he doesn’t at least try, she’ll feel victimized by that too.
A Chevy with a beat up cartop carrier passes them going the opposite way. Ben twists in his seat to watch it evaporate into the haze. A minute later two other cars approach side-by-side, and Maranda has to slow until they merge and pass.
He clears his throat, thinking it a small act of courage, but before he can even get out a word Maranda punches the radio on, filling the car with snowy noise and blare.
Ben sinks back. You work up your courage and that too isn’t enough.
She twists the dial, and the sound shifts, like wind is blowing through the static. Soon it clears to a man’s voice, flat, unaffected.
“…cause is still unknown. Forest fires…sweeping westward, and east toward the Northwest Territories…in many places…”
There are the accompanying sound-effects of a news bulletin, which Ben finds a small comfort. The normalcy of it. It emboldens him enough to reach up and turn the radio off.
“What?” Maranda says. “What are you doing?”
“I want to talk. About Axel, the others. All of this.” Ben leans against the door, facing her.
“Well, I don’t. That’s why I turned the radio on.”
“Hey, c’mon.”
“That’s right. That’s right.” She nods, pantomiming already. “I forgot. We talk when you want to talk. You fuck when—who—you wanna fuck.”
“You always say we ought to talk. Get it out there.”
She’s not even listening, just going on with her act. “That’s right. I forgot how this relationship works.”
“So let’s just get it out there.”
“Nothing matters except you, I forgot.”
“Listen!” His voice goes louder than he intends.
Maranda blinks long.
Taking a breath, Ben gets a fist around his anger and tries to muscle it back down. “I think I deserve to know who’s living in my wife. Do you even know?”
Her head twitches once, twice, to the left. The car drifts slightly, vibrating as the tires hit the rumble strips.
“Great,” Ben mumbles. He reaches over for the wheel.
For a second it seems like she’s actually sleeping. Her eyes are closed and her hands are offering no resistance whatsoever. He bites his lips, too momentarily furious to be afraid. How the hell is he supposed to manage this? How can she be this goddamn helpless? But then, even as this is going through his head, she cracks her neck and opens her eyes, immediately, fully present. She glances at his hands until he takes the hint and sits back.
Her lips are pursed to a tight line. Her posture’s so straight it’s almost unnatural.
“Relax,” she says, flatly. “I’m not Axel.”
It’s only when she says “relax” that Ben realizes his hands are shaking. Each switch is like standing in front of a door with no idea of what’s going to come out. Inside, every time, he wants to hide.
“You can call me Guardian.”
“Guardian?”
“Mm. Check the glove compartment, please,” Guardian says.
Ben hesitates. He imagines opening to a gun Guardian will snatch and train on him, but all that’s inside is a vinyl insurance book, an old map, and a glasses case. Guardian takes the case and polishes the lenses on a shirtsleeve before donning them.
“I didn’t even know she had glasses,” Ben says.
“Neither does she.”
The glasses are thin and frameless, could be men’s or women’s. The same as Guardian, but Ben doesn’t know how to ask that. He’s pretty sure, at least by the voice—restrained, buttoned up—that this was the same person who was out during what he’s now thinking of as the mix-up at the ferry.
“Guardian,” Ben says. “Like an angel?”
“No.”
Ben opens his mouth, closes it, nods. He unfolds a panel of the map and pretends to study it. It’s a lucky find, with his phone and all, but all it shows is a mostly blank green anyway. A few squiggled roads here and there.
“You’re from Tennessee,” Guardian says.
“Kingsport.”
“So you’re just as green out here as we are. Maranda’s been around but…well.”
Most likely he—she?—means “been around” as in travelling, but still. It’s a loaded phrase. Ben folds the map back up.
“What’s in Anchorage?” Ben ventures. “What, uh, what happened to her?”
“That’s for her to tell.”
“Isn’t she, you know, you?”
Guardian sighs, lifting a hand from the wheel and drawing a halo-like circle around Maranda’s head. “Do you want to know how this works, Ben? The whole thing?”
He’s still kind of irritated about the business with the radio, honestly, and with how goddamned complicated everything is, with how he can’t just be a guy with a normal relationship, but he tries to swallow that as best he can.
“Sure,” he says.
On a nearby mountain, the world burns. A veil of smoke holds clouds to earth, and every so often an arc of flame plashes upward. Ben watches that instead of trying to maintain eye contact with Guardian.
“During repeated instances of trauma, usually sexual…” Guardian glances at Ben. “You knew.”
“Some. She doesn’t like to talk about being a kid.”
“During repeated instances of trauma, a person’s psyche starts to fragment. Into pieces. At least, Maranda’s did. It’s too much, literally, for one person. So her mind made others—us—to share the load.”
“So, like, after. After, one of you...”
“An alter.”
“After, an alter would form?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes during. Sometimes one of us went through it so Maranda didn’t have to.”
“Jesus. I knew about…I’ve met Klara before.”
“More than met.”
“She doesn’t…doesn’t seem to mind.”
Guardian shrugs. “No. She’s a sufferer, though. Don’t let her fool you. It’s easier to like sex than fight it. And now Axel. You’ve met Axel too.”
“And Chipmunk. But you seem different.”
Ben expects a smile, a flattered ego, but Guardian emits nothing.
“I’m the gatekeeper. You can ask to talk to any of us, request someone, but I have the final say. Who gets to go out, when, what situation.”
“You’re the C.O.”
Guardian makes a face, like the title doesn’t quite fit. “We all have different roles.”
“So, what, like Axel comes out when she’s stressed? Klara for sex?”
“It’s more complicated than that. I try to make sure the person coming out is suited to deal with the situation. There have been a few messed up situations at hand. Sometimes they just need some time out, in the light. Sometimes the person coming out may seem anomalous but they’re the right one, the perfect one, for the job, so to speak. I’m good at what I do. There’s a rhyme and a reason. But from the outside, it doesn’t always look like that.”
“She’s not normally like this. All the switching, I mean.”
“No.”
“But now it’s, like, constant?”
“Are you asking why, or if it’s real?”
Ben thinks a moment. “I think I’m asking why.”
Guardian nods. “Look outside.”
Ben does, sees a whip of fire tendril up and disappear, leaving an after-image of smoke. “Okay.”
“We help Maranda cope with chaos and trauma. And right now, being in this car with you is just as much a threat as anything outside.”
Ben doesn’t voice any of what first bubbles into his head. Instead, he keeps his voice low. “She’s…it seems like she’s barely hanging on.”
Guardian shrugs. “We’re hanging on fine. She’s not incompetent, Ben.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?”
Ben sighs. “How many of you are there?”
Guardian doesn’t say anything, not even a shrug.
“More?”
For a single, panicked moment, Ben sees his wife as an infinite regression, one within the other, like smaller and smaller matryoshkas. He wants, instinctively, to know how many there are, and which ones are actually her.
“It’s crazy,” Ben says.
“No,” Guardian’s voice is immediate, sharp. “It’s not.”
“I’m just…”
“It’s not crazy. It’s the opposite of that. It’s what kept her not crazy.”
All of a sudden, a memory goes through Ben’s head. A time they’d been arguing, and later that night Ben leaned in and tried to kiss her, tried to maybe start something.
“You’re joking,” she said, pulling back.
“Come on.”
He moved in again, a little pushy this time, and she froze. She didn’t move or speak or even blink. After a minute of this he backed up to his side of the bed and she flinched, shook her head, and glared like she could bore holes through him.
That probably wasn’t Maranda at all, was it? When she finally “came back” she was as docile as ever, just rolled over and went to sleep. They never talked about it afterward.
Ben watches Guardian’s face and clears his throat. “Yeah, I just mean, it’s…it’s complicated. It’s tough.”
“Look,” Guardian says, hands opening and closing. The leather makes a flexing, releasing sound. “However tough you think this is, we’re the ones who went through it.”
Ben holds eye contact with Guardian until he can’t anymore. Outside, the blasted trees are a mutable blur beyond the glass.
Tyler James Russell is the author of To Drown a Man (2020), a poetry collection, and When Fire Splits the Sky (2022), a novel, both from Unsolicited Press. He works as an educator and lives in Pennsylvania with his wife Cat and their children. His writing has been nominated for the Rhysling and Best of the Net, and has appeared or is forthcoming in F(r)iction, Janus Literary, the NonBinary Review, and Sepia, among others. You can find him at Tylerjamesrussell.com, or on Twitter at @TJamesRussell.