The Girls They Burned

Abstract

The Girls They Burned Adrienne Celt (bio) The first girl they tried to burn turned into a doe and leapt away from her pile of sticks, feet wobbling beneath her as she landed. After catching her balance, the doe slipped through the crowd and disappeared around a corner, her tail a white flick. The crowd could hear her hoofs clicking down the street long after she was out of sight. The second girl they tried to burn sighed and then collapsed into her clothing. Three watchers ran up and snatched the garments from the fire. They shook out the flames, and looked into their hands—the fabric lay supple, though singed at cuffs and hems. As the shirt swooned down, a single gold coin rolled out of its pocket and hit the stone ground with a bright noise, spinning until it fell through a drain grate and splashed into the unseen water below. The third girl they tried to burn kept her face hidden behind her hair. A man snuck around the crowd taking bets on the color of her eyes, but it was hard to make good, settle up, without a definitive answer. More people joined in on the betting, thinking that one of them would surely find the right angle to steal a look. But there was always some obstruction—the fringe of her bangs, the tilt of her chin, a sudden inopportune glint of sunlight. The watchers knew that by the time she burned it would be too late to content their curiosity. So they looked harder. They leaned in as the fire grew high. Each person felt that the distance between themselves and their satisfaction was a straight, clear line. A pocket of sap cracked and popped in the woodpile. The girl was gone. And the square was empty but for a bonfire. [End Page 101] The fourth girl they tried to burn turned into a handful of crickets that sprang out as random as hot buckshot and caught in hair and bags and clothes. The fifth girl they tried to burn turned to stone and had to be dragged out of town on a cart and sunk in a lake. Until the stone cooled, though, they couldn’t move her at all. She stood, surrounded by sticks and char, for the better part of two days, spine straight as a knife and chin upturned toward the sky. The sixth girl they tried to burn turned into water and fell, a hard-breaking wave. She streamed out through cracks and gullies in the road, pooling up around the nearest shoes so that some watchers spent the rest of the afternoon shifting their toes around in wet socks, feeling the cold of saturated wool and leather. The seventh girl they tried to burn caught fire and burned, and this heartened everyone. Her hair gave up with a gasp, and her clothes flamed and turned to cinder. Her skin bubbled—first on the smooth expanse of her calves, her thin arms. But then, too, in the places that held more moisture, little blisters in the corners of her lips, circling her eyes like dots of henna. The layers of her peeled with exquisite slowness, revealing the red rope of her muscles, then the arch of her cheekbones, the cup of her pelvis. The heat was so high that even her bones steamed and then succumbed, crumbling into a black ash that caught the wind and hung in the air. The next morning when the town awoke, every household was forced to wash black grime off their windows, and they found more of it in the crevices in their walls. The ash caught in hems and was ironed into clothing; it was braided into the hair of workhorses and cooked into meat and grain and mash. Men found themselves baring and licking their teeth, trying to shine them clean. But despite every industry the black ash stayed. For some days after, they lit no fires and used the square for a marketplace. It was, some said, long due anyway. Booths were stocked with root vegetables and knit caps and iron nails from the forgery. There was a bustle of...