Julith Jedamus
The Girl with No Hands
Fire, the Adamant
To all who met him, Ren seemed unremarkable. He lived in a ramshackle hut with his thoughts for company, and survived by hunting and fishing. Few spoke to him or knew his name. Slight and lithe, he evaded other people’s lives.
Yet he had one extraordinary trait. He could pass without injury through stone, wood, or iron. Only one thing resisted him: fire, which sliced through him sharp as knives. Forced to run through a blaze, he would not burn – he would be cut to pieces.
Years after his death, when his life became song and legend, people called him Flammen, for the thing he most feared.
* * *
For many years, Ren didn’t realise the power of his gift. No one knew of his strange ability, for only when he thought himself alone could he summon the strength to pierce through walls and doors.
Nor did he realise straightaway that fire was for him a mesmerising danger. Like many children, he was attracted to flames. But the first time he passed his hand through a candle flame, he was cut by its whetted edge. When he ran to the next room, blood streaming from his fingers, his mother assumed he had cut himself on a knife – and struck him for his carelessness.
When he was fourteen, he ran away from home. The forest was more forgiving.
In winter, when he was half-frozen and close to starvation, Ren was forced to steal. Approaching a farmhouse on a moonless night, he would slip through a wall and take a woollen shirt or sack of grain.
Glad for the company of crows, foxes, and pine martens, Ren seldom felt lonely. When he did, he would stand by a cottage window in the dark and watch a family sharing a pot of stew or telling stories by the fire.
Once as he was lying on his bed of pine boughs, he smelled smoke. He ran through the woods to the nearest village, where a barn and two houses were burning fiercely.
Taking advantage of the turmoil of men and animals, Ren slipped through a wall and found a boy hiding by the tiled stove, his hands over his head to protect himself from falling beams. Ren picked up the boy, carried him outside and set him on the ground where others could find him.
Only when Ren returned to his hut did he see that his arms and legs were bloodied by the sharp talons of the fire.
As Ren grew taller and stronger, his rescues became more daring. Villagers marvelled at the fluent shape that seemed to glide through walls and windows as easily as water runs through a sieve. Yet no one knew that despite his bravery Ren suffered from unquenchable fear.
How could he overcome it?
“Be calm,” the wind in the firs told him.
“Be patient,” said the stream as it fell from pool to pool.
* * *
The winter that followed was the coldest Ren could remember. He shivered in his rabbit-fur cloak. His hands grew so numb that he struggled to set his traps. Ice grew so thick that he could walk across ponds and lakes. He spent hours sitting by a jagged hole in the ice, hoping to catch a fish with his hook and bait.
Finally he grew so hungry that he took up his pack and walked south, hoping to come across a house or village where he could slip through a wall and steal a loaf of bread or flitch of bacon.
Late that night, as snow fine as flour fell all around him, he saw a light through a screen of pines. As he came closer, he saw that it came through the window of a low house made of rough logs. Smoke rose from the chimney and frost stencilled the windows.
If he walked through a wall he would startle the person inside. It was safer to knock, yet his hand shook as he pulled off his glove.
The door opened and a young woman answered it. Her red hair was long and her dress was scarlet. Coral beads hung from her neck.
“Come in,” she said smiling, as if she were expecting him.
The room smelled of roasting meat and spiced wine. A haunch of venison turned on the spit. Spread with a linen cloth, the table was laid for two.
“You must be cold,” said the woman, gesturing to a chair by the hearth. Ren left his boots by the door and took off his cap and gloves. When she offered him a cup of mulled wine, he didn’t refuse.
They spoke of the bitter cold and she evaded his questions. After he had drunk two glasses of wine he knew no more about her than he did when he came in. She questioned him persistently but his answers were as brief as hers.
Something scratched at the door, and she let in a hound with fierce green eyes. The dog lay by her place as she carved the meat and put three slices on Ren’s plate.
When they had eaten and drunk she picked up a candle and led him to a room with a narrow brass bed. She caught him watching the candle flame before she pinched it out.
That night he dreamed of a woman with sparks in her hair and a bonfire for a dress.
In the morning he couldn’t speak for happiness.
* * *
She was all he loved and feared. At night, wrapped in her red hair, he dreamed that she ringed the house with fire so he couldn’t escape.
They had a son with dark eyes and auburn hair. Urs was wild and cunning. He caught and tamed a pine marten who filled the house with its feral smell. He robbed bird’s nests and sucked the yolks from the eggs. And he lied compulsively, story destroying story.
“Father!” Urs would cry. “A bear has treed me!” But when Ren reached the tree, no bear was in sight.
“Father!” Urs would shout. “My leg is jammed between two boulders!” But when Ren ran to free him, his son sprang up and ran off.
Each time Ren raised a stick to beat the boy his mother would stand between them. “Beat me,” she would say – and Ren would relent.
Urs and his mother shared a bond: they loved anything that produced a flame. Sometimes Ren would see them by the stream at twilight, lighting a bonfire with embers from the hearth. His mother dressed her son in crimson and scarlet; he wore a carnelian stone around his neck.
Once, soon after the boy’s twelfth birthday, Ren came back early from a hunting trip to find Urs and his mother kneeling by the hearth, throwing paper figures into the flames.
Another time he caught them in the boy’s room as his mother was saying goodnight. “Soon,” she whispered to her son. “Soon.” Then she kissed him on the lips.
As Ren walked through the woods alone, setting his traps or filling his game bag with hares and squirrels, he would ask himself: are they plotting against me?
When the three of them sat by the hearth after supper, Ren stroked the hound and looked into his green eyes. “Tell me,” Ren would say wordlessly. “Can I trust them as I trust you?”
* * *
On the last day of his life – it was early spring, the day before his son’s thirteenth birthday – Ren rose early and stood in the doorway. The air smelled of young grass and snowmelt. Clouds reddened in the east.
His wife crept up behind him and clasped him by the waist. “My love,” he said, reaching for a strand of her hair and brushing it against his lips.
She was going that morning to a neighbour’s to help with a newborn child. As soon as she left, Ren and his son went hunting.
They returned an hour before dusk with the carcass of a deer. Ren hung it on a hook on the side of the house and skinned and gutted it.
As he was cleaning his knives in the kitchen he heard a shout. “Father!” Urs cried. Ren ran outside. The shed was burning. Flames shattered the windows and climbed up the roof.
“Father!” Ren heard the panic in the boy’s voice. Without hesitation he threw himself into the flames. Again and again he battered against them, but every time the fire repelled him.
“Father!” Urs shouted once more from his hiding-place behind the barn.
Hearing no reply, the boy ventured around the corner and saw his father, torn and bloodied, lying lifeless on the ground.
Late that night a boy and a woman were seen on the high road, laughing and singing as they dragged a cart piled high with their possessions.Julith Jedamus
Flour for Snow
Myles Zavelo
WINTER HEAT
Yuxin Zhao
towards a science of haunting
T.C. Hell
Ritual poses
Colton Karpman (Founding Editor)
Editor’s Note
Dilara Koz (Art Director)
Em Bauer (Illustrator)
Isaac Zamet (Poetry Editor)
William McGuire (Prose Editor)