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dimension of the sickness of despair.
    Somewhere in crossing the yard she opened herself to guidance and knew again what she had tried not to know since the highway. She headed for the pillar of smoke that somehow pointed to the ground even as it pointed skyward. When she came around the barn she did so without fear or with fear secured by her conviction and watching her so that Shoad would be equally there and not there regardless of what or whom she found, and she felt every living thing for miles, every leaf on every tree felt distinctly without falling to senselessness or the lie of words like
green.
And so she approached the forge as the lone human but not the lone soul and saw it in all its terrible design. The two propane tanks, the petroleum pipes, and the huge brick oven. When she was little she’d asked her father who made the forge and he saidGod made the forge in which He fashioned all things, but he himself made the forge beside the shed. He said you need a sheet of paper and five hundred pounds of brick. Shoad’s forge was bigger, a stack chimney on top, so that it looked like a small house, and she pictured herself and her father in their house placed in sight of the town and the church, a scene she’d painted once, sitting with their ball-peened copper bowls and spoons. You light the paper, throw it in, he said. Turn the valve. In time you’ll have three thousand degrees standing there staring at you like something pulled up from hell on a chain. He had made her scared of the furnace, scared for her own good, but now she knew the early lesson was only so she’d remember it in this moment as she approached the forge and thought of Daniel’s friends who were thrown into the furnace on Nebuchadnezzar’s order but kept their faith and were saved by the archangel Michael.
    There was a steel door the size and shape of a knight’s shield. When she took hold of the lever handle she felt the heat on the back of her hand and she pushed the lever down and swung the door and let go of it so that the furnace yawned open and then seemed to wake upon the new air and the heat bolted and caught her and she felt it on the skin and the hairs of her arms and face and she stepped back.
    In the mouth of the furnace something moved or seemed to in the heat-furled light. She narrowed her eyes against the burning and tried to make sense of the mouth and saw forms there or imagined them, a metal skid like a small bed frame, a torso of fire and ash, a wooden dummy dying in a garment factory blaze, and she saw stars and planets there, the low wetmoon of autumn in transit, the stars now high-shouldered animals lifted from the disturbed breathing of the coals. And then it was only flame and ash and the smoke called up, and no more sense could be made of it. She looked at the pillar, open to revelation, but saw only the column of smoke rising inside itself and she thought of the visions that had come to her, in the fireplace, in the field, and she looked back down and there it was. Not in the forge but on the door. Melted to the bottom hinge, a blackened raised spot catching pins of light that she knew, was given to know, were cast by the quartz in the small tin setting of Irina’s wedding ring.
    She knew it but the light didn’t hold. The pins of light were there for Denise but not for Stefan later when he went to the yard, still empty, the forge spilled out. His only evidence, her hands, burned and bandaged, the blood on the steering wheel of the car, and her report from the hospital bed. There was no ring, no rock on the hinge, no sign that anything had been chipped off. Whatever she had seen had disappeared, maybe when she’d taken hold of the door. He’d found nothing at the base but a spade with a charred handle. And though Denise knew he would lie to her, for her sake or for his, she believed him, and so came to understand that it was Irina who had shown her the melted ring, as if to communicate the end of her story. She