An Excerpt from The Merlin of St. Gilles' Well:

Chapter One

Crimson Tangled with the Call of the Green

Fire girdles the wicker bars of the cage, wind-whipped ribbons of crimson and coquelicot twining in a woman's hair.

And pain like fire twines up my right arm from the fragile, broken framework of my three-year-old hand.

A mangy dog--or perhaps it is a misbegotten wolf--and a couple of cats are tethered within the burning frame.

The smell of burning fur and flesh clogs my lungs.

Pain writhes in my arm like the terrified animals in the cage.

And like their howls of agony, my arm screams to the night, the night thick with smoke and sparks and stars.

* * * * *

That is my first memory of this world, a swirling jumble of fire and heat and pain and choking smoke. For a very long time, I thought it must have been a nightmare, one of my "spells" that so worried my mother. Spells run in the males of her family.

When the fit is on me, I do have a hard time telling dream from reality, the edges of my own being from the vastness of creation. Things other men take as given seem not so straightforward--so black and white, good and evil--to me.

Fire is a friend to men, nestled cozily in the ashes of the hearth on a grey winter's day.

But fire can also be a terror, the wrath of God in the Judgement Day.

The hungry tongue of God lapping at sacrifice.

And what man would not avoid pain if he could?

Or what woman?

Yet even the Christians worship the way their Lord took on the pain of the world.

So pain is divine. Even the pain of a three-year-old boy given to fits.

* * * * *

I will wear those images to the grave with me in the red, puckered skin and shapeless, frozen twist of my right hand. But in fact, most of the events surrounding my memory of wicker in flames I know because they were told to my childhood ears, over and over. They were the whole explanation of the current circumstances of my life, a Genesis in which others--my mother, in particular--found cause for our present estate.

Although in our case, our state had actually been improved by the events. Improved in most aspects. At least, Mother always thought so.

Of course, as I have said, in fits I have the ability to turn the world on its head and see a rise as a fall.

For all the tale, no one ever spoke to me of anything resembling the swirling flames that were etched so starkly against the black night of my memory.

* * * * *