Light Boxes by Shane Jones

looked at the letters, the name, then at me. He kept doing this.
    Eventually I think he smiled.

Thaddeus
    Something is wrong with me.

The Girl Who Smells of Honey and Smoke
    I will help you and the town.
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    FEBRUARY GOES HOME. FEBRUARY waited in the woods before heading home to the girl who smelled of honey and smoke. He opened the door and handed her a sculpture of an owl with a cracked skull. He bought it cheap from a depressed sculptor. The girl who smelled of honey and smoke cried and hugged February. She whispered in his ear that Thaddeus Lowe now believes in spring and that given time it will infect the entire town.
    Maybe we can live in peace, she said.
    It was a solution to the war against him. February had suffered through their fake smiling faces, water-trough attacks, sticks thrown at the sky, prayers and War Hymns. He had seen them covered with moss and endless layers of gray. He had seen them saddened with over nine hundred days of February, and he had been blamed for it.
    Very well, then, said February. And he sat down in a wooden rocking chair and folded his hands on his lap.
    I love you, said the girl who smelled of honey and smoke. And I love you, said February, feeling a little sad.

Note Written by February
    There is a house builder and his wife. Name the house builder February and refer to the wife as the girl who smells of honey and smoke.
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    After Thaddeus called off all
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    wars against February, the town’s sadness reached a new depth. Two members of the War Effort flung themselves from the blacksmith’s ship. Another cut his wrists open in the middle of the street, and dead vines poured from his body, grew through the street and covered a cottage. Shopkeepers wept through the night. The beekeepers had their bees sting their necks in order to stop their crying. Snow mixed with ice and a sheet of lightning fell from the sky. And Thaddeus Lowe could be seen walking through town wearing nothing but cutoff burlap pants, commenting to his neighbors about the beautiful weather.
    Remember to trim those hedges, he yelled to a shopkeeper who was sitting on a pile of dirty snow, his knees pulled up to his face as he rocked back and forth.
    The underground children came up occasionally to watch the town fall apart. They thought of rebelling against Thaddeus on account of his madness. They held meetings and argued into the late night. They discussed the War Plan given to them by a girl who smelled of honey and smoke, seeing now the consequences of proceeding without the support of the War Effort and townsfolk. Their confusion swept through the underground tunnels.
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    Thaddeus dreamed and ignored everyone
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    in town telling him that February was still occurring. Squares of parchment tied with blue ribbon had been placed throughout his home. Each one had a different style of writing, each from a different person from town or the War Effort. They said things like how February had been the cause of his wife’s death, his daughter’s and Caldor Clemens’s. They pleaded with Thaddeus to remember the days of flight, and one parchment had strands of balloon fabric sewn to the fibers. Thaddeus didn’t touch any of these. It was Bianca who began sneaking into the home each evening, placing the squares of parchment around the house as her father drove a tractor through the imaginary fields. When he ignored them, she began unfolding the parchments and placing them in the bathtub, on his bed, sticking them inside cabinet doors with candle wax. Thaddeus started to read them and nailed them to the walls of his home until they covered each room. He studied what they said and thought that he should go back to the home of February in the woods and the girl who smells of honey and smoke and ask more questions.
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    The girl who smelled of honey and smoke
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    wanted to be with a man who had the following characteristics: (1) Gets his hair cut. (2) Has a respectable income. (3) Wears