Fierce Happening

Trent Jamieson’s spectacular story this week brings us weathers and monsters, alongside talented callers and the houses they protect ~ Julian and Fran, May 28, 2023

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Fierce Happening

By Trent Jamieson

The houses were restless again.

Three storms had rolled in, one after the other.

Oh, such storms they had been!

Dark and dreadful. Rain furious. Light to crease the sky. Thunder to shake you in your deepest meat and bones.

“This is not good,” Whisp said, but Whisp said that most times. He was a ball of light, a Whispering that darted about my head, a mumbler of negatives. It was Whisp’s job. I’d grown up with him flitting and worrying about me. Whisp chose you and then you were stuck with him.

Listen to him, Sister had said when I was smaller than I was now, watch him close so you’ll know when the worries are considered ones.

Sister knew the world, taught me my place in it. She’d taught me calling, too, and the deep listening demanded of soundings. All I knew of the great outside, of the curves and flats of the earth, of the houses, and their motions, and (not least of all) their predators, I’d learned from her. Her voice was my first sounding. Her stories the shaping of my world. I could still feel her steady gaze, her smiles, and admonishments. But she was gone.

I’d been a misery since Sister died on the rooftop, two months back, struck by fire while she’d been calling the distances.

Those lightnings found you out, sentient, godly, cruel, but you never expected it. They said it was a good death, a holy one, but far as I saw it, death was death. Only good in it was that it was sudden.

Sister had been the best of this household’s callers. Now there was just me, until someone in the family came up with the true and great knack for it. The other houses had their callers of course, but they weren’t Sister: they had no generosity for me, they feared my ill luck.

Every rumble set the houses bunching together, long legs jostling for the center, as though a swallow might be coming over the rise eastward, or a beater had been sighted rolling along the flats.

But these were just storms. No predators about.

We had buckets catching drips everywhere, and that thunder wasn’t just panicking the house.

“Calm, Pet, calm,” Mama Bel said, laying a hand on my shoulder.

“Not my name,” I bristled. “Not a child anymore.”

Mama Bel smiled her leaderly smile. “Everyone’s a child in this black-sky-rage. World’s set on reminding us that.”

Just like it had reminded Sister with sudden deadly force.

There was more thunder, and I jumped, so did Mama Bel. We both laughed as Whisp flittered, incandescent, around us shrill-shouting, “This is not good.”

The house moaned and there was more than fear in that sound; enough distress that even Mama Bel tipped her head, eyes widening.

“See to the distances,” Mama Bel said, jabbing a thumb ceilingward.

Whisp corkscrewed around me, muttering, muttering, “This is not good. This is not good.”

We clambered into the roof and the fulsome stinking warmth of the house, Whisp shining light so I could see. I pushed myself through the narrow ways, studying the two types of rumination as I passed: thinking and digesting. Guts and brain. It was a frenzied sort of locomotion that went on here in the mind and belly of the house.

Laid a hand on the rungs to the rooftop just as the house shook. A shudder big enough that I lost my grip. Things crashed in the rooms below. Children cried. I landed hard, pulled myself up.

“Patient,” Whisp said. When the shuddering had stopped, I belted up the ladder, Whisp at my shoulder.

The roof opened for me, slick with rust and mucal crust. All at once I was in the storm entire.