Fire Pendant

Day 1 searching the burnt carcass of my home in the woods and I find nothing because my mind’s a fire tornado and I can’t pick up the shovel without shaking although my neighbors try to help, stepping away from their own burnt wreckage and really, it’s not even a search but a witnessing. Day 2 I unearth a ceramic fragment from my favorite mug, one wing of a malachite butterfly. Day 3 I’m on my hands and knees, drenched in ashes and soot when I find my gold pendant necklace. I weep and put it on. I call my sister who says she wishes I hadn’t found it. She immediately apologizes. I do not take it off again, except when I sleep. Which I don’t do much.

On my 16th birthday my mother gave me that necklace: a 14-karat gold bar link chain, a cameo hanging from it. It belonged to her mother. I’d loved it as a kid, but it turned creepy. In her profile, the woman’s hair was probably supposed to look like lovely, long curls, but we’d been reading Andromeda and my teacher was obsessed with Medusa and my uncle had just been bitten by a cottonmouth in Florida, his fingers turning swollen and black. These cameo curls, well, they looked just like snakes coiling and uncoiling. Later I wore the necklace without the cameo pendant.

I let the months slide by, unsure if I should rebuild. I visit the ruins of my home on my son’s birthday. He would have been thirteen. He died five years ago waiting for the school bus. A speeding car. I rub my pendant. The debris is mostly cleared, but this land is a black ulcer. I walk around my acres, dark skeletons of madrones, pines. I walk to the fairy ring of redwoods where my son and I made elf houses and at night cuddled in blankets drinking hot chocolate. How bored he must be, hanging around my neck! My sister thinks cremation urn pendants are sick. But I remember pouring a bit of him into the tiny funnel, the comfort of having him near my heart. I kneel at the base of a redwood’s charred trunk. So many tiny buds sprouting. And I sprinkle my son into the green.